Actual Work?!

Yes, today we did some actual work. No playing with kids, no cooking, it was down and dirty time for my group (the groups that were doing work projects Mon. and Tues. got to play with kids today). There were two different jobs for us to do as we built Fetemine's house (the name of the guy who owns it). One was plastering, as you can see Alison doing here. The scary part is Fetemine was better than all of us at this, and could have done a much better job, but he was thankful for our help. Nice guy.

The other part we did was building a roof. Unfortunately, something happened with the group before us and all the beams were put on the roof at the wrong length (they were all different, hard to put a brace beam when only 2 of the 9 are touching), so Taylor, Stephen, Jacob and I were busy measuring beams and cutting them. There's me getting ready to use the skilsaw. Notice the plethora )for Liz and her dictionary fun) of sawdust on my head, the reason Taylor and I were allowed a second shower (ah blessed second shower!). It was during this time we realized just how hard it is to build a house in Juarez. Sure, they're not very big, but when you have really old tools, warped wood, rusty screws, well, you get the picture.

That night we went for ice cream. The Youthworks people said something to the owner about me in Spanish and he laughed. I still have no idea what that was...

Then we ended with club as usual, but the last night with Youthworks is always the foot washing ceremony. For those unfamiliar with this, basically, we reenact Jesus washing the disciples' feet. The Youthworks staff wash the leaders' feet, then the leaders go and wash all the students' feet. Always quite an emotional time, because as we go the leaders pray with the students, then the students start to pray with each other, and so on and so forth and before you know it we have a huge noise of prayer. A beautiful noise by the way. I always like the foot washing, but the one wish I had is that we had more time. I didn't get a chance to pray with everyone, something I like to do. But I don't know how much more time I'd want. We prayed for over 2 and 1/2 hours! It was quarter to midnight when we finally said, "We have to be up at 5, we need to go to bed." And there were some really moving and powerful prayers there too, things the students and adult leaders prayed that really moved me, but I won't discuss them here, that's something between us and God.

But that was the day, hard work then hard prayer. I wouldn't trade it for the world :)

T