One Down, Six to Go

The past two days have been action packed! Monday was a national holiday (Garifuna Day), so we had one more day to get work done before the school was packed with children. Kathryn put her technical theater carpenter skills making shelves. I still don’t like to admit that my little sister is proficient with power tools. Just ask her about breaking up concrete with Jack hammers and she’ll be sure to fill you in. Also, ask Kat about her massive (4” in diameter) bruise on her forearm…

Mom got the messy job plastering the inside of a closet. Good thing plaster is water soluble, otherwise she would have needed a lot of turpentine/gasoline to clean herself up. That afternoon she tackled the perpetual job of painting the outside of the school. Even when the rain came, she was still slappin’ paint on the underside of the awnings.

Dad and I spent the morning doing electrical work in the kitchen. To install a new outlet, we had to run an electrical cable down through the floor of the building at one location, under the floor and back up at the new location. Just like in the old days, the apprentice gets stuck with all the dirty, uncomfortable and outright bad jobs. There was no way that Dad was going to climb under the building in the mucky swamp land to run that cable from one side of the kitchen to the other. I didn’t even want to think about what was in those puddles considering sump pumps in the area don’t function well. Let’s just say Dad will forever owe me.

The office building and dental clinic needs lots of finishing touches, so that was the next project Dad and I tackled. All the doors and door frames need to be painted, shelves need to be built, and tile to be grouted. Dad and I spent all of Tuesday in the office building. It turned out to be a really good deal because it got us out of the pouring rain and into the only air-conditioned part of the complex.

Mom spent Tuesday in the kitchen learning how to cook hotdogs Belizean style. Some of the cooks speak English, but for the most part Mom had to beef up on her non-existent Spanish. Tuesday was Children’s Day so the kids didn’t have a traditional school day. They came and played games all day and Kat had a fun time playing with them.

Francis and Vern were heading out to the airport for a trip home to visit family for Thanksgiving, so they were going to stop by Customs at the Belize airport to try to get the seven pieces of luggage released. We were in the office when Vern called to get a description of the one bag that had a mix of our personal and school supplies. The good news was they released the one bag and we picked it up at the airport late Tuesday afternoon; the bad news is that they went through the trouble of stripping out all the material for the children. One bag down, six to go. (but still no school supplies).