Talent

It doesn’t take long to figure out where each person’s talent lies.  Especially by week 3, if there’s a task to do that fits with someone’s interest or talent, that person will probably doing that job.

Take Denny.  He was a mechanic for many years.  He was working with me for the first few days, sometimes being the ground crew for the lift that wants to leave its operator stranded high in the air at inopportune times, and sometimes being the one in the lift while I served as the ground crew.  He is just as comfortable handling a chainsaw as he is wielding a wire cutter or a paintbrush, so he has worked on a number of things, the most recent being the fence surrounding the dumpster that needed painting.  However, halfway through the paint job, Bo decided that some small engines in the shop that needed repair were of higher priority, so Denny spent most of the day working on a couple of pressure washers that weren’t running.

Or Debi.  She is very comfortable with a paintbrush.  She started out right away painting a mural on a block wall by one of the buildings and has been doing that for nearly all of the time here, sometimes enlisting the help of other women to help paint the larger areas of the mural.

Sometimes the talent isn’t actually doing something, it’s dealing with people.  Margie was a nurse who has had to deal with a lot of patients and a lot of situations in her time.  She was working with Marsha on the lettering for Debi’s mural. Marsha spent nearly the entire weekend designing the lettering for the Bible verse that will go on the wall, even taking a couple trips to town for supplies.  The problem came in transferring all this lettering onto the wall so that it could be painted.  Not a straightforward task by any means. So, in the frustrations of figuring that all out, Margie patiently worked with Marsha, who is more of a type-A personality.  The lettering is now stenciled on the wall, ready to paint.

I would imagine that some of this talent comes from experience.  Several people here have been on quite a few projects, so they have worked up a bunch of experience that comes in handy.  Jim and Rich replaced a door on the chapel that had been damaged by a hurricane.  It took a while, as the replacement door was a donation from a church that was upgrading its doors and had to be fit into place.  The frame had to be rebuilt to fix the damage from the hurricane.  Today they finished that project by putting a final coat of paint on the door and by painting the concrete apron in front of the door.  Looks like brand new.

The other Jim, a former air traffic controller, poured a concrete apron for the storage room behind the kitchen.  I think all of us have worked on that storage room to some extent.  I re-did the wiring and put new lights in the room.  Denny and I replaced the outside door.  Jim and Bob insulated the walls.  Rich and Jim built shelves in the room and painted inside.  Jim poured the concrete apron.  It was a community effort.

And then there’s me.  I string wires and hang light fixtures.  And there’s probably enough of that to do for the remainder of our time here. Today it was a large area light on the shop to illuminate one of the hammocks.  I was supposed to put another light above the volleyball court, but Ace Hardware delivered the wrong wire, so we have to wait for the correct wire.  In the mean time, Bo wanted the light next to the fire pit raised.  At only 7 feet off the ground, a tall person can simply reach up into it and remove the light bulb.  Bo wanted it higher to help spread the light.  So I attached a piece of pipe to the pole and placed the light on top of the pipe.  Not to hard of a job, but the lift stopped working just before I put the last bolt in.  Fortunately I wasn’t up in the air this time, but the last bolt will have to wait for when the lift is working.  We no longer have a ground crew for the lift, we just make sure that the person in the basket has a cell phone to call for help if they get stuck like I did last Thursday.

When work was done, we chatted with another couple for a while in their RV.  When we came out, we could hear a beeping noise and soon figured out that it was the smoke alarm in our RV.  No fire, but the potatoes that were boiling on the stove had boiled dry, setting off the alarm.  We managed to rescue the potatoes but cutting off the burned side and had grilled salmon, potatoes, and grilled zucchini for dinner.  It was delicious.