I'll be working at the home of a woman named Thomasina Robinson and her family. And I'll be all by myself with the campers, no other staff around to help me. This freaks me out a little bit, but I'm feeling much more confident about it than I thought I would. I thank God for that. It's much more responsibility than I had last summer, when I had no worksite of my own and just bounced around from site to site throughout the summer, aiding whoever needed the most help that week. Since I was usually only on a worksite temporarily, I was never a part of any of the planning, so my only real function was to make sure the camper stayed happy, hydrated, and unharmed and to know where to locate the staff member who had all the answers. Since this was all the experience I had, I initially felt really intimidated at the thought of managing a worksite alone, but Joe (one of our camp directors) is really great about helping us plan and making sure we have a very good understanding of what we're doing, and that made me feel better. Also, I know that God will be helping me manage this site, so I won't be alone, and that's the best comfort of all.
Today we went around to each person's job site, meeting the home owners and looking at the homes to see what jobs needed to be done. I don't think it would be unsafe to say that the Robinson's home is the worst. The live in a trailer onto which someone added another room a few years ago, but whoever built it made a serious mistake, because the roof of this extension slants inwards towards the rest of the house, meaning that when it rains water cannot run off the roof and instead pools in the middle of their roof and stays there until it evaporates, resulting in a rapidly rotting roof so leaky there's no point trying to patch any of them, because more will just spring up to replace them. I was on their roof today, and from the look of it I'm surprised it even functions as well as it does. I'll try to post a picture at some point. The thing is, Joe and Glenn (a local contractor who will be helping us out this summer) aren't sure there's anything we can do about it. First of all, we certainly cannot put campers on this roof. It's just too weak; we can't take the risk, so any work on it we'd have to do ourselves on the weekends or something. Also, the rest of the house is so weak that if we put much more weight onto the roof it might not be able to hold it, and the city codes restricting roofing work like this are very limiting. They're going to keep thinking about it, but at the moment they say it's likely there's nothing we can do about their roof and that we should just do what we can for them, because there are some things we just can't do anything about. I refuse to accept this. I absolutely refuse to accept that there is not a single thing we can do for this family to help the fact that their roof is about to cave in. God is smarter than all of us, and he is creative, and he is the authority over the authorities and is bigger than all the city ordinances and the people that make them, and I believe whole heartedly that he can give us a solution to this problem and a way to help this poor family. Please pray with me that he will provide us with an answer.
Oh, and I forgot to mention that they have pitbulls. Oh yeah. Two of them, and puppies, which are cute, but the big ones like to bark. A lot. Those of you who know me well know my fear of big dogs, and while these ones are in cages they still really freak me out. But I will be working at the Robinson home for three weeks at least. This is a good opportunity for me. I will be brave by the end of my time there.
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