You Light Up My Life

1.24.19

Special Note: Hope, Kresha, and Angel each put in some time today to backfill pictures.  We still have a few missing ones and no doubt have a few misplaced captions, but we hope you will click back through the days to discover images that you might not have seen yet.  We will keep trying to get them right day by day, but today there was a big push to get things where they belonged.  Thanks, Hope, Kresha, and Angel!

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Oh, the rains!  The sound in the night of the rain falling from the sky was incredible. The tent people were obviously aware of it, but even those sleeping in the house were very clear that it was raining hard.  We slept in an extra half hour and asked Luis to pick us up a bit later due to the sleep we lost from the sounds of the rain. 

We arrived to find Jossie in a particularly festive mood, apparently fueled by 70s music, including “Loving You” by Minnie Riperton and “You Light Up My Life” by Debby Boone. Shawny joined Jossie in singing this last song, which was a quite fitting representation of our partnership with San Isidro.  While Jossie was singing and dancing, Luis began to clean some fresh tilapia he had bought on our way to work this morning.  We (almost) all joined in, scaling and gutting the fish under Luis’ instruction. 

We then fanned out into a range of new (and old) worksites.  One bunch went to our new friend Carmen’s house to help reclaim her backyard from the storm.  It had fallen limbs and debris throughout it, along with some unwelcome fill dirt.  As it turned out, it also had a nest of tarantulas, which was quite a surprise, even though once they surfaced, they just scattered away from us and posed no threat. (That result doesn’t mean that we didn’t scream and scramble madly when we saw them, because we most certainly did.) 

Another group gutted a house across from Jossie’s that has not yet been brought back to its prior function following the storm.  Its owner is living diagonally across the street in a rental and has finally decided that it is time to get back to his own house.  So our team cleared it of everything that has accumulated in there since Maria, including piles of lumber, enormous amounts of sand, and lots of random items, including a toilet that probably came from somewhere else. By the time we were finished, we had gotten it to zero, meaning it is ready for its owner to begin reconstruction. 

A big chunk of us returned to Jose’s house and took up the job of digging a trench and bringing pipe water from the street to the house.  Like Tom and Sarah yesterday, this group didn’t realize it could figure out anything about plumbing but suddenly, they had brought water onto the property.  They didn’t do the plumbing for the bathroom-under-construction (yet), but they still had a great victory. We kept working on that bathroom today and got the floor put down by the end of the day.  We also kept painting and got a full coat on most of the walls (interior and exterior).  We filled some holes around the pilings that support the house to make it easier to navigate our way around from the front to the back.  We are sorry to say that the rebar nest is still haunting us; we think that a small excavator may be the solution to that particular problem.  

The afternoon brought two more jobs, which were painting an entire house (a lovely robin’s egg blue color!) and clearing another storm-tossed yard.  The amount of debris still haunting the residents of San Isidro is unbelievable.  We know that we are making barely a dent in this enormous problem, but we also know that we are making a world of difference for these individual families. That’s why we are here, so we’re okay with this work as the labor that fills our days.  

Tonight we faced the fact that our time is winding down and got some plans together for how to maximize our work without entirely foregoing sleep.  We also got plans together to see some of our local friends again before we leave and to be sure we get some souvenir shopping in (for ourselves and for some of you!).  Tomorrow will be our last long work day, so we will hit it pretty early and do as much as we can in our final full day.  We intend to work a half day on Saturday and a half day on Monday, but we have a lot of stuff to deal with as we pack to go home, so we have to reserve some time for those tasks too.  

In the meantime, we got a new purple biker today: Madi M.  Madi has shown incredible strength in many ways.  She is actually physically strong, which is quite evident when she is on the worksite, especially if there are sledgehammers involved.  She is also pretty flexible in moving from site to site and doing the work that needs to be done without question or hesitation. She made one of the greatest dinners we ever had without having all of the ingredients she thought she needed.  She is also the only person who has ever, ever, ever cleaned our bathrooms properly on this entire trip.  She has also taught all of us a lot about personal commitment, especially as she maintains her strong allegiance to her vegan lifestyle.  Many of us piped up to sing Madi’s praises tonight, as we talked about her loyalty, her dependability, her humor, and her ability to be inspiring. We are fortunate to have her with us. Yay, Madi!