Gleanings Day Three

16 Jan 2013

Kaleb surprised us this morning by participating with the worship team (above)!  I guess the leaders asked him yesterday if he would join them, and he agreed.  Then he kept it a secret all night and this morning, so he had a smirky look on his face as he was up there singing.  Too funny.  We were proud of him, just the same, as that’s the first time he’s ever done anything like that.  I think he’d move here, if he could.  He’s lovin’ it.

There were two large church groups here Monday and Tuesday, but they went home after breakfast today, so there wasn’t much production work going on because of lack of hands to do it.  There is a huge homeschool group coming in later tonight, so today was a day for cleaning and prepping for the work they will be doing tomorrow and Friday.  Kaleb and I had to hunt for work all day.  We swept out the huge warehouse we’d been working in, so that took most of the morning.  Then we swept out the loading dock area and Kaleb swept out the soup mix warehouse (photo far below) as they are preparing that to make trail mix in there tomorrow.  While he was in the soup warehouse, he noticed a small bird in there so it took Kaleb and I longer than it should have to get that bird out of the warehouse.  He enjoyed throwing a roll of packing tape at it to get it to fly from one place to another, while I held open the big plastic flap door the forklifts go through.  In the end, the darn bird flew out an open door on the other end of the warehouse, but it provided quite a bit of entertainment for us this morning.

Kory worked all day repairing trays (above and below) that are used to dry the peaches in the summertime.  They are all goopy and pretty gross, but they wait to pressure wash them until they see which ones can be repaired.  He tore off broken supports and replaced them with new wood.  I think he would have rather been building bunk beds, but they weren’t ready for that job yet, either.

After Kaleb and I cleaned as much as we could clean, we helped a lady shell walnuts for a few hours.  It was glorious – sitting outside in the sunshine cracking nuts.  I so needed to feel the sun on my skin and today was the first day we’ve been here that it was warm enough to be outside.  One guy walked by and asked if we needed any music for entertainment and he started humming some song I later realized was a song from The Nutcracker.  I’m a little slow.

Kaleb was anxious to get going on some production work again so we went out to the soup mix warehouse to see if we could help with set up.  They were washing metal lids to huge barrels so I dried them and Kaleb stacked them against many different surfaces to let them further dry.  We must have done a hundred of them and the lids were huge and hard to handle, but it went much quicker with us helping.  We just had to find work wherever we could so we didn’t look like slackers.  Tomorrow will be a full production day so it was kinda nice not going at such a frantic pace today.  My body still aches.  It even hurts to bend my fingers.  Every part of me is getting a work out so I’m sleeping well at night.

We have to set our alarm clock in order to wake up at 6:30 in the morning as they run a pretty tight ship here and we need to get out of bed in shifts because of our small living quarters.  We can’t all get up at once or it would be chaos. The living quarters they provide for the volunteers are pretty luxurious so it silly to stay in our RV, but that’s just the way it worked out this time.

We’re not working as many hours each day as I expected, but it’s still a full day - set up somewhat like a workday.  Breakfast is at 7, chapel is at 8.  They have a coffee break right after chapel and by 9:25 everyone needs to be at their workstations working.  Lunch is at noon, back to work by one.  There’s another snack break at 3, back to work by 3:30 and work is over by five.  Dinner is at 5:30 then it’s free time after that.  Each work group signs up to clean in the dining hall after a meal, so we did that this morning after breakfast.  They have things pretty well under control here and everyone seems to love it– both the volunteers and the staff.  Most of the staff is Canadian and oh so thankful to be out of their winter weather back home.  Everyone sits at different tables and engages the volunteers in conversation so no one feels left out or awkward.  It’s all pretty friendly and people really do come here to work hard, so that’s nice.

Kaleb’s been glued to the ping-pong table and will play anyone that has the energy.  He bangs the ball against the wall if no one is around, so it’s nice to see him doing something other than reading or sitting on his computer.  I’ve been having him journal, by hand, each day, which he hates, but I’m sure this trip is one he will want to recall later.  Besides, he’s not doing any schooling while we are here.

Chris, Dani’s husband, was going to come over tonight to visit and to see this place, but he just called to say he can’t make it because his house was on fire today!  Actually, his water heater caught fire – it must have shorted out and then caught the wooden base it was sitting on, on fire.  It was in his garage, so that was lucky, but he wasn’t home at the time.  He said it was kind of funny because the wood was flaming, but the flames were so hot they melted one of the plastic pipes, so water leaked out and extinguished the fire!  He did have a bit of damage to his garage though, and the fire department had to come out, so he needed to stay home and contact the insurance company and figure out what to do without any hot water.   I guess I’ll do my laundry here before we leave, rather than wait to do it at Dani’s this coming weekend because who knows if they will have hot water by then.

It’s already been one week since we’ve been on the road.  So far, so good.  We feel very blessed.