La Romana - part three...Tuesday

Today we worked hard in the sun mixing concrete and doing a bucket brigade to pass the concrete up the scaffolding. Talk about a primitive way of accomplishing this task. 

There's no big concrete truck rolling in to dump mixed concrete into the forms. A big pile of sand, rock, cement and water is mixed by hand using shovels. 

Then the buckets were filled and passed to Mike who handed them up to John or Charlie who then passed them up to Andrew who then handed them to this guy who was standing fully upright on top of this super high wall. He'd pour the concrete into the form and toss the buckets down. Part of the time I retrieved the buckets and passed them back to be placed for filling. We all did various jobs but I could barely stand to look up at that nice guy on the top. I'm told they call him Papa John and he is from Haiti. 

That's our team leader Charlie DeLuca in the green shirt. He's from Louisiana. His brother, Andrew is the one just above him on the scaffolding. 

This was tough work and tomorrow we'll be at it again. We have to go all the way around the top of the building. The roof is then attached to these headers. The part were doing on the ground is nothing compared to what those guys up top are doing. Those buckets are so heavy and each one has to be lifted overhead. I just pray everyone is safe. Trusting the Lord will keep them and us all in His care. 

La Romana - part two...Monday

Monday we got up, ate a nice breakfast at the hotel and headed for the work site at 830.

 

We had fun peeking in the windows of the classrooms. The children in the school are 4 years to 2nd grade. It was nice to see the sweet faces of school children smiling and happy. 

Here we're having a team meeting before getting started. This is the same area we had the worship service on Sunday. The area we are working on upstairs is the future sanctuary. 

The first thing we did was clean up the site. Us girls and the kids picked up nails and swept the floor. 

Our kids gave out chips for the kids' mid morning snack. 

Later we played ring around the rosy with one of the classes. 

After that we did a chain line up the stairs to haul rocks, cinder blocks and sand up to the top floor. That was really lots of fun. The comraderie was good and we laughed a lot while working. Here are Kathy and her granddaughter Kelsey on the stairs. 

As we were leaving I snapped a pic of this worker on the makeshift scaffolding. We sure take things like decent scaffolding for granted in the States. 

This was dinner last night. There's a nice buffet provided for dinner at 7 each night. Always on the buffet...rice and beans. 

 The food is good. We don't know what some of the food is but you can always find something to eat. That's a wrap on our first work day. 

La Romana...part one

The church was planning another trip to the Dominican Republic to work with the Church of God in La Romana. Paul had been the previous two years and this year had planned to take Mallory along. We began fund raising and getting Mal all set to go. Two weeks ago Michael and I were blessed to jump on board and join the team unexpectedly.

We flew out of Memphis Saturday morning at 6:15. We left East Prairie at 2 in the morning to make the drive down to the airport. We were all geared up and excited albeit tired from little to no sleep for some of the team. 

We flew through Houston and on to Punta Cana. 

The kids worked on some of their school assignments on the plane. 

Duke and Jennifer were back for their second trip together and Duke's third. 

Kathy, Lonnie and John were all returning for a second visit. Once you go on a missions trip generally you want to go back. 

Mike brought his oldest daughter along this time. 

After a long line thru customs we were finally on our way to the hotel. 

Mallory and Michael in front of the hotel pool. 

Michael took some nice pictures of the hotel grounds the next morning before church. 

 

We had a wonderful service at church. Paul preached with the help of an interpreter. He told of the miracle healing of the shingles he came down with the week before the trip. 

We ate lunch at the church after the service. Michael tastes the coffee they served. 

Michael had fun climbing on the rock pile outside the church with a couple of the boys from the church. 

After church we stopped by their version of Wal Mart called Jumbo and picked up a few supplies for the week then headed back to the hotel for a little R and R before beginning our work week. 

The kids had gotten some pickled eggs to use as punishment for a challenge game they were going to play. Yuck. 

Dinner was at 7 and after some more hanging out and visiting time we all hit the sack to be rested for our first work day Monday. 

Oh Say Can You See - Part Deux

Our Children's pastor, Dawn Walters, does such a wonderful job with our kids. She teaches them the things of the Lord and mixes in a lot of fun outings and events with them. 

A couple of summers ago the kids sang the national anthem before a Memphis Redbirds game. This past Saturday they sang it at the Show Me Center in Cape Girardeau before the women's and men's basketball games for Southeast Missouri State University. We didn't have a huge number of the kids turn out but it was a pretty good group and they sang, well, you know, it's a tough song to sing:)

Here they are preparing to take the court. 

They put a mike out for the kids to gather around. Pastor Dawn directed them. She's very musical and is a talented singer herself. 

The kids were up on the jumbo tron. 

Mallory got embarrassed when the singing got a little off key.  You can see her in the back with her head down:)

I got Michael a Southeast tshirt to wear to the game. 2 bucks at Goodwill:) He also wanted me to paint his face. Such a sport. 

The M's...Mallory, Maranda, Michael and Matthew

It was a very enjoyable day. The girls' team won but the men lost. The band, dance cam, indoor blimp that dropped prizes and all the other gimmicky things made the game quite entertaining. So many of our EP friends attended SEMO, as it's more commonly known, so it was nice to visit the campus and cheer on the RedHawks!