Today marks our third day of our trip, and our second day on the jobsite! After arriving at the job site, we were given coffee and donuts from Mark, a kind and helpful man working with us on the jobsite. Eventually, the crew put us to work. I used my first drill today as Mark showed me how, and Kaitlyn used a 22-caliber nail gun to connect a piece of board to the concrete. She felt very powerful after that! Lindsay helped Damion make sure that all the walls were level with a long leveling stick, and Taylor anchored the house to the foundation. Once the walls were ready to go, we took out the ladders and began nailing another layer of boards to the top of the walls. The sun soon began to shine, and we were all grateful! For lunch, a kind man named, Jean, brought us delicious pizza, and another lady brought us delicious banana bread with butter cream cheese frosting. We have been well fed (to say the least).
Soon after, members of our group carried about a twenty-foot beam weighing about 500 pounds to support the second floor, and it was successfully put on top of the walls. Later, Jarrett used a saw to cut out the windows and doors, and so it’s looking more and more like a house. After the two final beams were lifted up and put in their proper places, we cleaned up the site, took some pictures, and left to go back to the house.
On our way back, Lindie thought it would be a good idea for us to stop our car in front of a playground, we all jumped out of our car, and ran to the merry-go-round to confuse Shannon’s car behind us. They eventually joined us after the confusion, and we enjoyed being kids again. Later in the afternoon, we drove to Driftwood Beach, a cold and windy, but beautiful place. After staying there for a little while, we drove up to Fort Casey and walked through the fort, filled with dark rooms, barracks, climbing up ladders into bunkers, and disappearing guns. We learned that it was a place during World War I in which none of the canons were ever used because no one ever attacked that site. The forts were placed eerily on beautiful fields of green grass against snow-capped mountains with the flowing ocean in the background. It’s shocking to think that such a magnificent, peaceful place can be the placeholder of cannons set to shoot any ship coming in the river valley. Fort Casey made all of us think a lot about war – making the act of death and war a reality. We sometimes live in a sheltered world, where we forget that war is a very real experience in many different parts of the world as well as in the past. It was an overall great experience – of reflection, humility, learning, awareness, and beauty.
Today has been filled with many adventures that I am grateful to be a part of.
-Allie Labrousse
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