Day 7 - On a Day Like This

Today's morning devotional was led by the regular devotional leader (who had been gone most of the week). He gave a message that began with a pair of inspirational videos. The first one was called That's My King, and the second was called Never Been Unloved. The first video inspired me, but I had already seen it on my first day of my first trip. The second video moved me to tears. I needed that.

Later during the devotional, the devotional leader led us in a round of "On a Day Like This" which is a song that I remember from my first trip.

The rest of the team had been to a different house during the time that I visited the clinic. Before we went to our assigned house for today, one of the people from the group drove me to the Walgreen's pharmacy to pick up my prescription. I was worried that I would not be able to go to work, because the pills indicated that they needed to stay at room temperature. But since they had to be taken only two times a day, I could leave the bottle at Camp Rowley after taking one pill. The eye drops were a potential problem, since they couldn't be left in the heat, but I put them into a Ziploc bag and put that into one of our coolers. Finally, since the side-effects of the pills included "nausea, dizziness, and sun-sensitivity," I drank extra water, decided not to transport debris outside the house unless absolutely necessary, and decided to put on a couple of layers of sunblock.

We would be working with a man named Steve today. Chuck was reassigned to work with some of the people who oversee the decision-making for Hilltop Rescue and Relief. Brendan insisted on showing them the work that was being done firsthand, and the best person for that job was Chuck. To me, Steve was just as dedicated, just as motivating, and just as hard-working, even if he was not the same as Chuck.

We met the home owners after stopping to ask for directions. We were in for a special treat today: the home owners had been visiting their house over the past months, spending their weekends removing muck and debris. The house was empty enough and dry enough that I did not need a mask inside until we started working on the drywall. I opened windows in the rooms of the house, and when one wouldn't stay open, Steve suggested: "break off a piece of the baseboard in the house, and wedge the window open with it." That worked perfectly.

We started working on removing woodwork from the house, and I noticed how different I felt, holding a hammer and a pry bar that hadn't been spray painted bright orange. It wasn't that the tools weren't useful, it was that they weren't familiar. They weren't as easily visible against the backdrop of a gutted house.

We broke for lunch, and sat in the van to eat. Steve turned the engine on and used the air-conditioner, which gave us a welcome reprieve from the hot sun outside. There weren't many places for shade, so I was glad to be inside a vehicle where I wouldn't feel the burning of the sun on my sensitized skin. I asked a woman from the group to help me take my eye drops. I am squeamish about anything or anybody touching parts of my eyes (myself included), so eye drops aren't easy for me to take. With no mirror, I could not give them to myself. The woman I asked was finished administering the eye drops before I could tense up.

We went back to work, but time in the afternoon really flew. The drywall removal was almost completed, and we had torn down sections of the ceiling in most of the rooms before we had to stop for the day. We loaded the tools back into the trailer, and then headed back to Camp Rowley.

Dinner was very good tonight--there was ground beef, lettuce, chopped tomato, guacamole, shredded cheese, and all the other things we needed to make some very good tacos or burritos. I piled everything together on my plate, over a layer of blue corn tortilla chips. Some of the people from the group sat together with the ONN crew, and when one of the people working in the kitchen offered us a dessert of chocolate pie, we all accepted.

I found out that one of the ONN crew members had been to the clinic for eye problems similar to my own. He'd even been prescribed the same anti-inflammatory eye drops I'd been given. I warned him that the list of side effects for my eye drops included "hallucinations" (I am not making this up), and pretended to warn him:

"If you start having 'visions' of chocolate pie sitting in front of you, don't believe in everything you see." We talked for a while longer, but then the conversation turned to the trip ahead. We split up to pack, wash laundry, and get ready to leave. The ONN crew asked permission to get some final interviews before we left Louisiana.

I decided to spend the last exposures of film in my second camera, taking pictures of group members. At last, with a single exposure left, I found Chuck.

"Do you mind if I take a picture of you?" I asked him.

"Only if you're in the picture with me," he said.

It was a fitting way to wrap up a long week.

I went to bed with almost all my laundry cleaned and packed. I fell asleep for a while, but got up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom and get a drink. The teens from California had just returned from sightseeing in New Orleans, and I got to speak with their youth leader before we all turned in for the night.

There was a long journey ahead of us, and we would need all the sleep we could get.