Summer Work – 2008
Each summer we give our older children an option to work at the Home of Hope for a fair wage. We do this for several reasons including their learning new skills, learning about personal finance…. learning to manage their own money, developing a strong work ethic (Ye Ye is a hard task master) and to develop a greater sense that this is their home and they need to participate in it’s upkeep.
Most of he boys elect the more manual work, wishing to learn various skills like maintenance, carpentry, lawn care and the various things we do as Summer up-keep and improvement at our facility. The girls generally ask for jobs in the kitchen, nursery and office.
Wind Storm Damage
On May 15th, just three days after the great earthquake which hit Southern China, we experienced several days of storms with very strong winds and heavy rains.
Several large limbs from our many Weeping Willow trees broke off and also 75% of the Cyclone Fencing enclosure around our combination Basketball, Volleyball and Tennis court blew down. Knowing the children would start to be released from school for the summer months we cleaned up and then prepared for the repair work.
On Monday, June 17, we started the work to replace the cyclone fencing. Rather than call a fencing company back out we salvaged as much of the cyclone fencing as we could and bought galvanized pipe locally and started the re-installation. David on the ladder, Joey sitting on the wall, Bryan on the saw horse with his back to us, Paul handing something to Jim who is hiding behind the tree.
First we had to cut back some trees that had grown up outside our walls, then remove all the damaged support pieces from the original installation. The picture on the right is Jim looking up from the ‘jungle’ he created while cutting down the trees.
The boys did a great job of getting everything ready for the re-installation of the enclosure fencing. On the left is Joey, also in his jungle and on the right David is showing his elation of ‘conquering’ the forest!
Site Maintenance
Every year, due to the quality of the paint we can obtain locally, we need to re-paint the lines on our multi purpose court. The children use the multi purpose court as often as they can and throughout the year.
The primary use is basketball but there is also a fair share of volleyball and tennis as well as sometime they play soccer and ride bikes on the court…. consequently the lines only make it one year.
First, the old paint from last year needs to be scrapped and wire brushed so all loose material is removed. Then we paint black lines for tennis, red lines for basketball and yellow lines for volleyball.
The boys working on this project were the same ones doing the netting repair. Paul, Jim, David, Dennis and Joey. Later, a few more will get out of school and they too will work on the many projects we have for this summer. We will add more information and pictures as the work begins and continues. In the above pictures the boys are scraping and putting tape down to paint the lines very straight. The man in the light green shirt is Ma Hai Tao our assistant manager and maintenance supervisor… leading the way and teaching the boys.
Un-Scheduled Work
As things often happen here, just as we were finishing up the painting of the court lines, we were given a new challenge.
If you follow the wall behind where the boys are working to the area beside our yellow bus you will see our small maintenance building. We never knew why, but that little building had it’s own electric meter. About once every six months the electric company would come out and read that meter and give us a bill, complaining that the electric bill for that small building was too high… (yes… they were complaining… not us…
We had two choices. Either take a complaint to the local government which may or may not ever be resolved or take care of the problem our self. We elected to go with the second choice, so the boys started digging. We had to bury sixty meters of electric cable (approximately 185 feet) inside electric conduit from our main switch/meter panel to the maintenance shed which also including tunneling under an eight foot wide sidewalk.
Jim and Joey worked at tunneling on one side of the sidewalk while Paul and Dennis worked on the other. When they met they discovered they had done a slight miscalculation as one side was about twelve inches deeper than the other. But they were happy they finally made it through. Above left, Jim works on the home made “tunnel spade” and above right Dennis works to meet him.
Above left, Dennis takes a breather while Paul works at the tunnel and above right, Jim removes some of the dirt.
David isn’t in the above pictures because at certain times of the day our smaller children are allowed to play in our small pond and he serves as life guard during that time. You can read about that in our next Post.
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Posted: June 21st, 2008 under Special Activities.