Day the Fourth: My First Blog

Hi all -- I'd first like to introduce myself in that very, very special picture of me in the partial team photo. See the person in back with their eyes closed who looks like they're about to fall over? C'est moi, Jennifer, honorary Rhino.

It's hard to believe that the week is already drawing to its close -- Thursday, just tonight and Friday left; I'm leaving on Saturday morning, with kudos to JetBlue. The week has been so incredibly rich and rewarding and life-affirming, and there's so much to write about, but I'm sure that some topics are already called by other blogmeisters (i.e., I think night of the tots belongs to Drue). So I'll just write about yesterday, when Amanda, Lellie, Becky and I all become Hands On Studs.

You are a publicly recognized Stud at evening meal if you do an incredible, out of the ordinary job on your day's assignment, and yesterday we kicked it thoroughly. Sarah, Sergio, Drue, and James had been assigned to a KaBoom! playground building job for most of the week, and they told us how great it was -- and they weren't wrong. However, unlike them, we had to get down and dirty. The four of us spent the day digging holes. Not your ordinary holes either, my friends. No, these holes had to be an exact certain depth and width, dug vertically into the earth, tamped down on the bottom. If we failed in our mission, playground equipment would be crooked.

We couldn't allow such a thing, so we gave it our blood, sweat, tears, and dignity. We moved dirt, bricks, clay, and rubble with postholers, digging sticks, shovels, and the old fashioned way with our bare hands. We bemoaned our lack of upper body strength, but that didn't stop us. We lay down in the mud to put stone pavers in the bottom. We got into the holes head first to make sure those suckers were FLAT. We tamped and measured and used a funky laser thing to make sure that all was well. When we got too exhausted to tell if the laser was half an inch off or not, Playground Planning God Traynor got us back on track (i.e, that hole you just spent an hour digging with giant tweezers is six inches too deep, so put some dirt back in).

About halfway through the day, it started raining. Disaster! We had to protect our holes! We ran around with tarps and bricks and shovels of dirt and pieces of cardboard to protect them from the rain. We didn't bother protecting ourselves; the rain felt great. Living in LA, I'd almost forgotten about rain. It's been years since I got to stand out in a driving, needle-like rain, getting thoroughly drenched while thunder roars and I run around putting tarps over dirt. Good times.

And then, when the holes were dug and protected and we took a deep breath of satisfaction, we learned that, since another thunderstorm was coming, we had to mix concrete really, really fast and get the posts in the ground for the shade structure. The Keystone Kops aspect of the concrete mixing will be long remembered, but we triumphed in the end. Posts await for the final building on Friday, and God willing they're not slowly listing to the left or right as the concrete sets.

As though all that wasn't enough for an incredibly fantastic, dirty day, I finally got to meet some of the neighborhood kids in the evening. We're staying in Central City, a historic part of New Orleans, but also a poor one. Meeting the kids was one of the best parts of my trip to date. Ellie, Kaeyla, Ariana, and four-month-old Shilea joined us at an outdoor party held for a HONO staff member who's moving on, and they were fantastic. We played with hoops and pinatas and ran around and had an utterly wonderful time, and Shilea fell asleep from all the excitement.

Remember to keep checking the blog for more fantastic pictures -- the trip is full of stories waiting to be told, and very amusing pictures waiting to be posted!