Noah's Ark

Danilo and Jim building the stairwell.

So if you remember the Disney movie "Fantasia," you must recall the scene famously called the "Sorcerer's Apprentice." Remember the brooms, all the brooms dancing wildly around the room, spilling water until finally the whole house is floating away. Well, that's exactly what the work site was like first thing this morning. We were trying to put flexible plumbing pipe together to get water from the street onto the roof to make concrete when chaos struck! Pipes falling apart, water flying all over the place, people running around (me included) trying to fit the pipe back together again, or turn the water off at the street, or just get out of the way before getting drenched (I did), which didn't feel so bad in the heat. Finally, we got the pipe pieced back together, then... no water, a water main break a block away shut all the water on the street down. Not to be dissuaded, we set up a bucket brigade and brought water from the church's cistern across the street. Mission accomplished, although by that time it was too late to do the roof, so we helped pour stairs instead.

Smoothing out newly poured stairs.

So goes a day like other days on a construction site on a mission trip in the Dominican Republic, humor and flexibility essential attributes. Yet the work gets done, and wonderful functional schools and churches get built. We have worked with Chencho, the master builder on other projects, San Lucas Church, and a house in the poorest section of the barrio. There is a lot of mutual affection and respect and he is just a delight. Yesterday afternoon during vacation bible school I spied him in a back pew watching the kids sing, having a great time.

That there is poverty, abuse and deprivation in this neighborhood is simply a fact, and an obvious one at that. But what is not so obvious is the strong sense of community. People genuinely care for each other here. For the second time I have witnessed Padre Hipólito

build a congregation that became a family, and now he is fulfilling a dream in this place by adding a school for the children. It is, if anything ever was, the work of the Holy Spirit.

Tomorrow, hopefully, we'll get to the roof, but tonight, in my tiredness, and in my missing you all, I give thanks to God that those of us here, because of your commitment and love, can be part of this holy thing. We are, after all, representing you.