New Student Day of Service (8/16/08)

So today, we went to do a service project with the Rebuild The Walls organization (RWO). We left early, 8:30ish and proceeded to the neighborhoods around Marian. The neighborhood we came to was not the most ritzy by any standard, but our project was to strip a house down so that it could be rebuilt as an affordable home for a low income family. When we got there we were wearing our Marian Service Day shirts, which were very white and very clean. About five minutes into our stay, an old jeep pulled up and the man inside asked, "Is this where the free turkey's are at?" We sort of gaped, but he laughed and pulled up to the curb, smiling all the way. His name was Antonio, and he was a plumber by trade, but had been hired full time to serve the RWO as a general construction hand. He reminded me of Xzibit, but that's neither here nor there. He started out telling us about the project and about the history of the organization. When he was done with describing our tasks for the day, he sent us off to do our tasks.

Now the house was a wreck already, a wrecking crew previously had started the demolition, so I guess we had our work cut out for us. A man and his son came in a pickup with various tools of destruction, sledge-hammers, 6 or 7 crowbars, pry bars, hammers, and other such implements. The house was a duplex, or had been at one time. It had "brick" siding that was basically cardboard, and devoid of walls on the interior. To start the process, Antonio removed the plywood boards that covered the windows and doors and set us loose.

I grabbed a crowbar and set in on the task of removing the siding, a task that would prove slightly difficult. The siding was soft enough that the nails would remain in the wood underneath, causing the siding to fragment and not come off cleanly. That little problem made removing the siding off the entire north side a little annoying and problematic, but not too bad, I'm not negative. Anyway, throughout the process the blue/grey under wood was becoming more visible and the pieces of existing siding were slowly beginning to pile up. After we had moved to the far northwest corner, I became slightly frustrated with the unwillingness of the siding to relinquish its position, so I proceeded to bash it with the crowbar until there was enough of an opening that I could force said bar between and pry. In my frustration, I punched a few holes in the wood underneath, oops. After I had enough of the siding, I proceeded into the building proper to offer my services.

Once inside, I saw what I had heard from outside. The workers inside had been working to remove the cross-slat pieces of wood that connected the studs. They were working with sledgehammers, pry-bars, and their own hands to sufficiently remove any trace of any obstruction they came across. I obtained a mask and some goggles and proceeded to work out any frustration that I had left in me on those unfortunate slats. As the bodies, I mean, wood scraps began piling up, I was to be on the cleaning detail, sweeping and bagging of wood and plaster. As I was walking over to get a shovel I noticed that a piece of wood was stuck to my shoe. That was odd, so I bent down to pull it off. To my surprise there was a nail smiling back at me. I was glad I hadn't worn my Pumas today! Lunch time came soon after, but not soon enough to stop us from pulling down the roof of the veranda. That was a very fun, but very sooty experience. 

I guess that there had been a fire in the history of the abode, leaving black soot everywhere. So when one would pull a 2x2 board down whatever soot was on top would find its way into your shirt and basically any other place on your body that it could land on. I was black, and the gloves that had protected my hands, wool gloves, had done a good job of absorbing and distributing all the soot on the inside of the siding onto my palms and fingers. 

The bus arrived and we departed for a spread that was provided by a local caterer. My team was yellow team, and we joined the other groups in a small lot a couple blocks away. I don't know what the other teams were doing but we were certainly the dirtiest and sootiest. My hands were solid black and my arms had tiny chunks of charcoal coating them. We went to the nearest house and proceeded to line up for a hand washing. The line was so long that we had enough people to do the wave! Since our group was taking so long to wash, the other groups got to line up for food before us. That was cruddy. The food was good, probably extra good because of the work effort prior. The hamburger I had was very good. After we had eaten, the founder of RWO began his testimony, a crack addict saved from his addiction with no withdrawals turned community activist for Christ.

He told us about the community and about the fact that the USA is the only country that concentrates its poor in the middle of the city and puts its wealthy in the suburbs. He talked more about the RWO's mission to make home owning a reachable goal and pushing for inner-city communities to join together and help each other.  We thought we were going to go back and work for another hour and a half after lunch, but due to a mix up, we only really had fifteen minutes to re-board back up the house. When we arrived, there was a group effort to round up tools and the like and move the plywood to the appropriate windows and doorways. The boarding up went well in the beginning, but due to the drills battery dying, came to a hard point. That was until another drill arrived, so with the boards back up, the tools safe, and us exhausted, we left for home. On the way home the chatter was better, proof maybe of our getting to know each other better, but when someone started "Bohemian Rhapsody" it really became fun. The whole bus it seemed was screaming "Scaramouch, Scaramouch will you do the fandango?" It only ended because the song was over and we had arrived back at Marian, our shirts no longer clean or white. We were tired but had felt we had really accomplished something, the only problem was the fact that I had to walk all the way back to Clare.