Saturday, April 19, 2014

Our hotel made us a great breakfast this morning.  It put us in a happy mood and made us ready for the day.  We headed off to church in downtown Montego Bay.  The taxi drove by the location where we thought the church was located.  But we were told that the church building was for sale and the congregation was building a new church.  While only the second floor of what will be a three story building was poured, about 600 members were meeting in the daylight basement area of the church!  This would not happen in Redding!  But, there was a sea of folding chairs, and nicely dressed Sabbath keepers seated throughout this unfinished area.

There were four or five people who were to be baptised who stood in front of the church and answered affirmatively to keeping and believing in each of the fundamental beliefs of the church before  they could be accepted to for baptism.  Several in our group noted that there were a lot fewer conditions to being baptised in Jesus' time than now. (We have some sharp people on this trip!)

They had me get up and tell a little bit about our group, and to bring greetings from Redding, CA, which seems to be a Jamaican tradition, as I was invited to do the same thing in the Christian Fellowship Church the Sunday before!  If I had to take a vote, I think most everyone felt a little closer to God in the little church in the mountains as opposed to the big church in the city.  Good things to spend some thought time trying to figure out why.

We had lunch and then spent the afternoon seeing some of the remarkable sea life that calls Jamaica home.  The prize find was a sand stingray.  The eel was a close second!  It rained most of the afternoon, so we headed up to the hotel where the students voted to eat pizza for the second night in a row, and the adults had choices from the hotel restaurant.

For worship, each person took a turn talking about what the trip meant to them.  There have been great lessons learned, and we are all closer for the experience.  Some of the ideas that were expressed were:

• Hard work builds stronger friendships
• There is something very satisfying about accomplishing something as a team
• People are much the same around the world.
• Happiness does not come from stuff, it comes from within.
• Being disconnected from the stress of home for a week can be a good thing
• Working together, we each made a positive impact on each other
• There are many Christians around the world.  Many are not from our church.
• We can have a positive impact wherever we are.

I couldn't be more proud of our kids. They have been nothing short of awesome this entire trip.

Tomorrow we are looking forward to our trip back to America.  But it will be with very fond memories of our new friends we have made in this beautiful country called Jamaica!

Friday, April 18, 2014

This morning, we ate our last breakfast prepared by the breakfast ladies.  One of them gets up at 4 a.m. to walk to our church home so that breakfast can be out by 7:30.  After cleaning up and getting our bus loaded we headed back to our hotel in Montego Bay.  We arrived at 10 a.m.  The hotel was very nice to let us check in that early!  Most people who regularly stay in nice resorts would probably not be to happy with our hotel.  It is not on the beach, it does not have all the modern amenities, but we are sleeping on beds instead of the floor, the rooms are air conditioned, water in the shower is warm, we haven't seen any bugs in the rooms, there is a small pool to swim in, and it has a great view of the ocean!  So, we think it is pretty fine!!

We walked down to the ocean front stores for some lunch and our waiter asked us who we were and what we were doing.  We told him we were working on a project in Catadupa.  He smiled and told us that is where he grew up!  Then he told us he attended the Adventist church in that community!  There was an instant bond when we told him we were Adventists as well.  We had good food, and made a new friend!

Tomorrow, we will attempt to find the closest Adventist church and see how they take to eighteen people, many of which do not own any clean clothes at this point!

Thursday, April 17, 2014

Our work day started out much the same as it has for the past four days.  Up at around 7, breakfast at 7:30, and on the bus by 8:30 to ride to our project in Cambridge, about 20 minutes away.

The bus ride is like it is in so many other countries.  The bus looks pretty nice on the outside, and a little worn on the inside.  We get on the bus with our two supervisors in the morning.  With the driver that would make 21 total passengers on a bus that will seat 24 if you include the seats that fold down into the isles.  For some reason, I think that the bus has been chartered for us, but it is clear that if it is a bus, that is going the right direction, and particularly if one of our supervisors happens to know them, the bus is open to them as well.  And since the charter has been paid for, there is no bus fare required!!  Needless to say, these supervisors know a lot of people!!  This morning I think there were nearly 40 people on the bus!  It was really hard not to get acquainted!

For work today, our supervisors built a horizontal bond beam on the retaining wall that we started yesterday.  Our team build the reinforcing steel cage that goes inside the bond beam.  Of course the bond beam needs to be filled with concrete, which meant a bucket brigade of hauling 24 buckets of sand and 40 buckets of gravel to the mixing pad on the road in front of retaining wall!  We are very experience at this task now and can do it without assistance!

While the concrete was being mixed, a smaller team was working on laying block on the side retaining wall that is stair stepped up the side of the yard.  All hard labor.  There must be something we are paying for.

For the last hour of the day, some foolishly thought that we might just have the afternoon off.  The reality call was from Pastor Gordon as he told us that there was a teacher at the school who had three children of her own.  She was working on an addition for her small house.  She had a perimeter foundation and walls build for the room, but needed to fill in the space between the foundation walls so that a slab could be poured.  She had arranged to have a dump truck load of fill dirt dumped on the abandoned railroad tracks about 150 feet from the room.  She had been carrying the fill dirt in a bucket from the pile to the house for some time . . . a very slow process.  In about 50 minutes, with our now perfected chain gang bucket brigade we were able to move all the dirt back to the room so that she could start preparing for the slab.  She was so grateful!  I think she personally thanked every person on our team.  It was hard work, in the sun for most of the project, but seeing how happy she was made it so worth the little extra effort it took to meet her needs.

We posed for our last photo at the site, said farewells to our new friends, wiped away a few tears and headed back to our temporary home.  We were blessed by a rainstorm that lasted for an hour or so, which helped to cool the evening and set up the perfect conditions for a great meal, a great sunset, and a great end to our work week.

For worship this evening, Spencer and Jake talked about how good it has felt to communicate face to face instead of text to text and how closer we all feel when we don’t depend on technology to connect with each other.  It was a great discussion.

Wednesday April 16, 2014

I’m sitting here in the breezeway of the church that also serves as a classroom and dinner seating.  We watch the sun set each evening over the tropical Jamaican landscape under the cooling grey clouds.  A nice way to reflect on the day.

But, I should start with a little story from last night.  After lights were out a few minutes, there appeared a blinking light in the rafters.  The usual suspects of a laser light or some other student driven prank were quickly dismissed as we determined that it was a fire fly blinking.  These are pretty large fire flies.  The light is about a quarter of an inch across. Quite impressive.  Once it took off, it headed to the girls side of the room.  We knew it was over there because of all the screaming that was occurring over there.  But then, it headed back over the wall and headed straight for Jake!  He was holding his own flashlight.  As the fire fly landed on him and then started flying around him, Jake was quite animated as he jumped around the room trying the ditch the fire fly.  With his own flash light moving frantically around the room as he was trying to redirect the insect, made it look like he was moving to a strobe light.  While we wanted to sincerely identify with Jake’s terrifying situation, laughing was the only thing we could come up with!

Today, we took on a fairly aggressive task.  We moved sand and gravel up hill to a new mixing site, where we made concrete.  Then we used the bucket brigade method to move the concrete up a steep hill to the footing of a retaining wall.  Everyone worked like dogs today, and you just have to know how hard a dog can work!  It was really hot this morning.  I was really proud of how everyone worked together on this phase of the project. It was very tiring work, and everyone jumped in and helped.  The latter part of the day was devoted to laying block on the two retaining walls, which was a learning experience for many.

This afternoon, we quit a half hour early so that we could go to the make shift market that was set up for our shopping convenience!  Most were vendors selling clothes that they would make in the next two days and deliver to the church where we are staying.  It was interesting that all the lady merchants go to the same fabric store and all buy the same patterns of material, which I guess helps to simplify things.  You just have to find the person you like to work with or find the person with the right price!  I was a nice diversion to our regular evenings.

Tomorrow is our last work day.  We will be looking at Thursday with mixed emotions.

Tuesday, April 15, 2014

Last night, the food ladies talked to us about how things were going.  We had been just a little short of food on a couple of meals, so I let them know that just a little more food would be great.  This morning was the first meal after our talk . . . clearly more food than we could eat!  We are being treated quite well in the food department!

At the jobsite, we started off by working on removing dirt from the hillside.  More boulders to uncover, and dirt to haul to the back of the retaining wall in buckets.  We actually got to the point where they said “stop digging!”  We thought that signaled a move to an easier job – which of course turned out to be a foolish assumption!

We packed sand and gravel about 150 feet to the mixing location in the middle of the driveway.  There we mixed concrete by hand to fill the footing of the retaining wall that is being built.  Two and a half hours later we had it complete!  It was very satisfying to complete the project, but once again, we are pretty tired.  Our only issue was dealing with a neighbor who had partaken of way too much rum in the morning.  Our sponsors let him stick around and work.  They said the more he worked with us, the faster the alcohol would wear off.  He wasn’t a particular problem to us.  He was just a problem to himself.  But on the bright side, he gave several of us a big hug before he left for the day!

We were covered in concrete and when we got back to our home at the church, those cold showers still felt pretty good tonight!

The food ladies branched out a little tonight and fed us breadfruit, beans and rice, stir-fried vegetables, fish, chicken, salad and fruit punch.  Life is good!

Monday, April 14, 2014

Well, today was the day of reckoning!  We were put to work at a church and school in a neighboring town.  Today, we dug footings for two retaining walls, and excavated dirt by hand from an upward sloping hill adjacent to the church. Late in the day, four students tied steel to be put in the footing of the wall.  We learned many things today. Jamaicans can work harder and tolerate the heat a lot better than we can (although Darren Smith gave them a run for their money!  He was nick named “Dynamite” for his ability to dig out large rocks!).  We learned that we can drink a lot more water in a day than we originally thought.  We learned that a personal week’s worth of Gatorade can be consumed by the group in a single day.  And we learned that a cold shower can be one of the most wonderful feelings at the end of the day.

We were led by “Mr. T” and “Mr. Rose” who are awesome workers and made our long hot day a lot of fun as they are both real jokers.  Phyllis is another person assigned to our group.  She shoveled dirt, moved rocks, and hauled buckets of dirt with the rest of us.

We are all showered and fed, and while we feel good about what we accomplished today, we are also very tired.  It will be early to bed tonight.

They are starting to introduce some local delicacies to us.  Tonight, we had breadfruit, which tasted very similar to a potato.  It was very tasty.  We have had some papaya for breakfast as well as some great pineapple.

The “Ladies Department” of the church sells soda and ice cream for a dollar each.  We have been trying to be supportive of their ministry!!!

I think Kara and Jacob E have worship to night.  I’m looking forward to hearing their perspective on the day, the things they are seeing and experiencing.

The entire group was awesome today.  Hard work. Team effort.  Fun spirit!

Sunday, April 13, 2014 Today, we originally thought we would be working, but it doesn’t look like most people work on Sunday – so no work today.  Instead, we had the privilege of attending Pastor Gordon’s church.  The church service went from about 11:00 to 1:30.  These people really know how to worship.  It was both lively and sincere.  The choir ladies are all dressed in matching outfits, and they sound pretty good.  We were really blessed by this service.

After lunch, we took a little walk around the neighborhood. 

There are some fairly primitive homes, and some that are a little more sophisticated.   In the photo above, the little structure to the side of the house with the miniature house on top is the grave of the builders grandmother.  Here it is quite acceptable to bury your relative on your own property. . . . . not sure what happens when the property sells!  But all are located in a very beautiful setting.  People are very gracious and have treated us very well.

Saturday, April 12

Left Houston at 9:30 a.m. and headed for Montego Bay.  When we got off the plane, we found a whole new meaning to the word “humidity!”  All of a sudden we knew that there were going to b some hot days in our future.  We had a little trouble with immigration.  There was some information that was not quite listed the way they wanted it.  Most of our team was scattered among five or six immigration employees.  I found myself running from station to station trying to explain to the immigration staff where we were staying and who we were staying with!  We all made it through and we learned a little bit about international diplomacy!

We told our host, Pastor Gordon, that we wanted to get some lunch and figure out a cell phone solution.  He picked the perfect restaurant for our group  . .  . . . .  “The Pork Pit!” 

Fortunately, their menu selection was wider than the name implied, and we all got something that worked for each of us.

After getting our phone solution, we headed for Catadupa.  This is the most luscious green piece of earth that I have ever been.  We are staying in the top floor of the Christian Fellowship Church. 

Though we knew we would be sleeping on the floor, we were pleasantly surprised with the 4” foam pads that were there to help soften the plywood floor.  That being said, the Dunbar’s had no intention of being uncomfortable . . . I will include a photo!

Arrived in Houston at 3 a.m. California time.  Some have decided to try to take a nap and recover some of the lost zzzzzz's from the flight.  Others have headed off to breakfast, determined to forget the short night and move on to a producive day.  Our flight to Montego Bay is still on time, so things are looking good for heading to Jamaica at 9:30.

 




And one other thing I forgot to mention about checking in at SFO.  Jake was near the end of the line to check in.  He put his bag on the scale and it read 63 pounds . . . 13 pounds over the limit - clearly the heaviest bag of the group.  He was stunned, and said "How can that be?"  The United Airlines guy on the other side of the counter started laughing . . . he had his foot on the scale just to get Jakes reaction!!!!!  Who says you can't have fun at the airport!!

Well, this is our group!  We left Redding about 4:00 p.m. and have made significant progress.  We have unloaded the vehicles and parked them in long term parking, got everyone checked in, and most everyone made it through security!  It turns out that they were a little curious about the contents of Robs carry on . . . . pliers, paint brushes, various hand tools.  Hummmm.  After a few quiz questions, he passed the test and they sent him on through!

For some of the kids, this is the first passport they have owned, the first time through security, and for a couple of kids, the first time to fly!

Spirits are high as we patiently wait for our boarding time in about 45 minutes.  No one has a clue as to how sleepy and tired we will be by the time we get there!  Thanks for all your prayers.  Everyone is doing fine!

Will post again in Houston!

It is with these 10 students that we will soon begin a trip that will widen our world view, help us to understand our relative position on the earth in terms of wealth, privilege, and responsibility.  This is not an effort of a few, but the result of a wide community of support who believe in the value of experiential education and the importance of service in each of our lives.  Thanks to all who have made the adventure a reality.  It is only happening because of you.