A long Saturday

I mentioned in my last post that we had a busy Saturday ahead of us, and it turned out to be just that. We got up in the morning and headed over to our neighborhood clubhouse to pick up our neighborhood cleanup assignment for the morning. We volunteered to pick up trash along the side of our property that runs next to the main road. It was pretty cold and extremely windy, but we managed to get the entire area done in a little under two hours. We stayed pretty warm, but our poor noses were quite runny by the time we finished. We hung out at home for about two hours, had lunch, then went over to our "Serve and Celebrate" project at one of the elementary schools nearer to the center of the city.

The Serve and Celebrate projects are something our church started doing last fall, and something we hope to keep doing on a semi-annual basis. We missed the first one because we were still working on cleaning up my mother's house back then. I think we had about 1000 people volunteer to do various projects around the city last fall, and we had about 500 people volunteer for projects last Saturday, so these are pretty big events for both our church and for the people around the city that we're helping. Projects range from cleaning up overgrown shrubbery in rundown neighborhoods, to painting fire hydrants, to washing windows at schools, to playing with kids at day camps, to cleaning up graffiti, and whatever the city comes up with for us to do. We contact the police and city management for ideas, and then we get groups assigned to each project. You can opt to work the 4 hour morning shift, the 4 hour afternoon shift, or to work all day. You can also choose labor intensive projects or low impact ones. We all wear this highly visible fluorescent yellow shirts so people can recognize that we're all in a group (or perhaps they just think we've been let out of prison for the day).

Jeff and I volunteered for the afternoon shift, and we didn't care what sort of project we ended up with. We got assigned to "assemble and install three sections of playground equipment at Jefferson Elementary under the supervision of a school employee". That sounded like a fun job, and sure, it would involve some lifting and digging and such, but we didn't think it would be so hard. We were asked to be co-captains of our team of 13 people for the afternoon. There was another team of 15 that worked the morning shift.

It turned out to be a massive endeavour. The three sections of equipment were actually HUGE interconnected playground systems, $40,000 worth (the school's principal got them through a grant), requiring something close to 100 holes in the ground that needed to be at precise locations, and varying depths. There was a supervisor in charge of the project, a man (also a volunteer, who apparently does this sort of work 30-40 weekends a year) who was directing his three sons and all of us volunteers in how to do everything. It was a bit unorganized, but we all figured out what we were doing after a while and got into our stride. Our 4 hour project turned into 8 hours, and we had to call for reinforcements at 5 pm. We worked from 1 pm to 9 pm, when it finally got too dark to work safely anymore (although I have to say that our shirts definitely lit up the night a bit). We managed to finish most of the work, but there were still a couple of park benches that needed installation. The guy in charge said he'd finish it up on Sunday. We are quite sore from all the work today, but it was definitely worth it. Here are some pictures from the day. There were some other volunteers from the school that worked with us (they're the ones in the non-yellow shirts), so you'll see them in the pictures, too. Jeff's wearing tan pants and a tan hat. We hope the kids have a blast playing on their new equipment!

Leveling holes for the second section of equipment

Installing the equipment

Mixing concrete

Our trash compactor

The guy in the white t-shirt is the man in charge

The second section is in!

Starting the work on the third section of equipment

More holes

Jeff surveying

Sorry - no pictures of the completed third section of equipment due to the darkness that set in. It wasn't quite as big as the other one we did, but it was just as impressive. :)