Stories from Tampa Workday 2

Sorry you haven't seen any blog entries today. I left my cell phone on the bus last night and had to retrieve and charge it this morning - so I didn't have it with me to blog throughout the day like I did yesterday. I do have a few stories to tell you:

Room Keys - We were given two keys for each dorm room and told that there is a $45 charge for each lost key (I guess to rekey the locks). We gave each student room one of their keys so we'd have an extra to open a locked door in case they leave a key inside - as students will do. But, we gave the adults both keys to their rooms since they are more responsible.

At 3:15 this morning, Molly and Barbara (adults) made a joint trip to the communal restroom and returned to find their door locked closed and neither with a key. They woke up another adult in order to try their key but it didn't work (different room). They eventually made a call to campus security to get their door unlocked so they could go back to bed.

Samstrument - Sam created a new instrument with discarded worksite scraps during a down time and became the world's best player of that instrument. We videoed his performance of "Mary Had a Little Lamb" and plan to post it when we return. As Sam explains:

It all started with just hammering nails into wood because I was bored, but somehow I decided to drive the nails in at different lengths so that they made different sounds.

Daycare - The Mission where we are working has a day care ministry. Kaitlyn and Amy spent this morning helping in the day care. Amy said she started helping kids across the monkey bars. Such a long line formed that Kaitlyn had to come help.

Food Bank - Tuesdays are one of the days that the mission's food bank is open. A continuous stream of people flowed in all morning to pick up food and get other help. Some of our servants helped with the Food Bank during this time. Others (Molly, Stephanie, Lauren, Kate and Allison) then worked in the Food Bank in the afternoon after it was closed to help organize things to make it easier to manage.

Worksite Teams - You can download a list of who is on what worksite team from:

http://www.4shared.com/file/113784789/28816657/TampaWorkTeams.html

Painting Teams - Two of the three teams who had cleaned mildew off of buildings yesterday (Andrew's and Matthew's) worked to prime four buildings in preparation for painting. It was very hot, the brushes were stiff and the primer got thick - all making for tough work. These crews are ready to shift to construction tomorrow.

The other painting team (Cary's) got divided between various tasks, with some starting on a porch extension project. That team will continue with that project tomorrow.

Construction Teams - The other three teams continued their construction projects for a second day. Ryan's team continued to strip the old roof off of a lean-to shade. After cutting the rafters, the roof eventually came down and they were able to start putting up new rafters. Ryan's team will paint tomorrow while Matthew's team will complete the roof rebuild.

Casey's team finished adding spindles to the porch railing they've been working on and made great progress laying out and concreting in some of the posts for a wheelchair ramp. Casey's team will paint tomorrow while Andrew's team continues building the wheelchair ramp.

Stephen's team ripped off siding around the crawl space under the mission director's home and worked to prepare lattice that will replace that siding to permit airflow to cool under the home. This lattice preparation included priming, painting and cutting to size. Since this team is already doing both construction and painting, they will continue with this project.

Lunch - It has become clear that we shouldn't expect lunch to arrive before 1:00-1:30. That's been tough since the heat pretty well de-energizes people by 11:30-12:00. We lose about an hour of productivity until we can get lunches into people and they are re-energized to dive back into work. Tomorrow we're bringing lots of snacks and plan to have everyone eat something at 11:30 to keep them energized until lunch arrives later.

Bus Rides - Now that we understand our schedule, we start our morning bus ride with a devotion led by one of our student work-site leaders. We then take some time to write some affirmation cards for others on the trip that they will get on the way home.

On the way back from the work-site, we stopped at a Walmart to get some essentials - as well as plenty of non-essentials. These non-essentials somehow charged up those on Bus 2 so that we had all sorts of singing and dancing in the aisle - led by Ryan and Casey. All the boys got involved, plus a few girls. There were many crazy songs about being the chicken and blind jellyfish falling off a rock and ....

Free Time - When we got back to the dorms, a bunch of us ran in, changed into our swimsuits and walked to the campus pool (a very long way according to Lauren). The water wasn't as hot as yesterday's beach water, but it wasn't anything near what one might call cool or refreshing. But, it was better than no water and it helped paint come off of many bodies.

Another group played Ultimate Frisbee in the field behind our dorms. This became so intense that they kept playing a good 20-30 minutes after our pizza dinner started being served.

Worship - As we walked into worship we each grabbed a random shell and read the name of an animal (monkey, seal, rooster, bear, donkey). When everyone was in, we were all to group together with the rest of our herd by only making the animal noises. And noises there were.

After worship we gathered into our worksite teams and discussed how the day went. We each identified the day's highlight, lowlight, team superstar and how we saw God at work. We returned to the dorm and got ice cream sandwiches before heading off to bed.

Noisy Tonight - There is a very strange sound outside our window as I write this blog tonight (it's 12:00). I think it's called rain and thunder, but I'm not sure because I haven't seen or heard that in a very long time. Here's praying that this rain dries up before tomorrow morning so we don't have a mud mess awaiting us.

I'm sure I've missed lots of stories, but it was a productive day and no one got hurt or dehydrated. Tomorrow will be another great day for God's servants in Tampa.