Out of the Frying Pan, Into the Fire

or, Welcome Home! It's a Construction Zone!

That was an unintentional rhyme, btw. So, we are out of the hospital! Hooray! 24 hours after we got back, I was missing my mat on the floor of the hospital because the townhouse connected to ours was undergoing major construction. At least at the hospital, they would wake us up and 6am and then leave us be for 3 hours so we could pretend we were getting a full 8 hours of sleep. Not so here! The construction noise is so loud that Sophie had her tv turned up ALL THE WAY and I could not hear it until I sat directly in front of it. This morning at breakfast, we were standing about 2 feet away from each other screaming at the top of our lungs: “WHAT DO YOU WANT TO DRINK?” “WHAT?” “WHAT DO YOU WANT TO DRINK?” “ORANGE JUICE!” “WE DON’T HAVE ANY ORANGE JUICE!” “WHAT?!??” “WE DON’T HAVE ANY….” You get the point. Loud.

At one point Sophie was screaming at the wall WHY ARE YOU SO LOUD????!!!!!  Despite that, it’s nice to be home, OH, wait. I have not told you about what they are doing. So, I go outside to do some laundry and the entire back wall is missing for 3 stories. Like they just jackhammered the crap out of it and now there is no wall. Oh, and no FLOOR on the second level. I have no clue what they are doing, but I guess they really like their ceilings high. Today they built scaffolding out of bamboo and rope. Very interesting. And unsafe. I think. But what do I know? I’m not a builder. 

I also think that the demolition has caused structural damage to our house, because Sophie’s bathroom now is leaking dramatically from the floor and the other day, the plugs holding the pipes into the wall burst and started spraying water everywhere! We didn’t have water for a day because it emptied our water tank. Oy.

Ah, but speaking of construction, we are super excited about a team coming from Canada in February to help fix some of the kids’ homes. We went on a walk through of three of our most needy kids’ homes with an architect friend of Rob and Judy’s, Michael, who was able to give us an idea of what we could do to improve their living situation.

One house is up on stilts because it frequently floods underneath, but the stilts are made of wood, so they have been eroded over the years. We want to replace those beams with cement blocks to make it more stable.

House 2 currently has only one room to sleep in and we are going to divide it into 2 rooms so that the girl of the family has her own room and the boys have their own room.

House 3 is a total reconstruction project. The house has been falling down for months, and will not survive another rainy season. The walls are buckling and the roof has caved in more than once. The plan is to demolish it and rebuild with cement posts in the corners, as well as add a loft for sleeping in so there is space downstairs for the kitchen and a living space.

Hopefully we will have enough builders come to finish all 3 projects and be able to get a lot of the prep work done and supplies purchased before the team arrives in February. Please keep the building project in your prayers, as it is a big one but will give hope to the families involved that their lives can be better than they are. 

Stay tuned for the Christmas program update with pictures.