Thursday, December 3, 2009

DAY 3 (final day) - Home for Christmas

AMAZING day!!!  Today it was overcast, so not so blisteringly hot-like-you're-in-an-oven, which was beautiful.  It even rained once or twice!

Lots more shoveling, lots more sand.  I even got to do the wheelbarrow on the precarious wooden plank ramps!

But my special story of the day is about a little boy.  I say little because he was extremely small for his age and very skinny.  Dark skinned, looking Indian/African origin... you can never quite tell the mix - that's Guyana.  As well as I could understand, his name was Paw-Paw and he said he was eleven years old.  He was watching us at the building site with no shoes and no shirt; all alone from wherever he had come from.  He said his house was "just over there" and pointed in a very vague direction.  When it started to rain, he scurried under the nearest house on stilts for shelter.  I think God made that rain just for me because then I had an extra 10 min. break to go and sit with him and share some of my lunch (well before lunchtime) - a tactful way of making sure he got something to eat today.  I wonder if he gets even one good meal a day...  The rain stopped and I went back to work and he soon started down the now-muddy dirt road.  The wide sky above was the only other one who saw the empty, open space, a few shanties on stilts dotting the grassy overgrown landscape and one lone boy walking away; no shirt, no shoes and a smile.  He looked back and waved.   

We finished early, at noon, because the Habitat guys wanted to take us around to see a bit of the city.  We drove through the squatters' "houses" made of corrugated steel, tarps, wood scraps, and whatever else was at hand at the time.  They were packed together so tightly... our driver and guides were discussing whether the whole area would flood again this year...  We saw the statue dedicated to the slaves, another mark of their pain and the long road it's taken to get to the place of having a free nation.  And finally we went to "the end of Guyana," the Atlantic ocean (as if we'd never seen the Atlantic before - only 14 days crossing it! :P) and watched as the tide came in. 

So that was my my first Help Challenge Team.

...Dear Mommy, I might not be home for Christmas, but I helped build a house so that someone else will HAVE a home for Christmas.

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