All of it, None of it, All of it.

Ahhhh Monday….

Written a couple of days after the fact, Monday at once seems so distant and as well as almost indiscernible from today. As our first day of actual service, we got off the bus raring to go, ready to tear apart (or reconstruct, or both) any house that got in our way. With a rebel yell, we cried More, More, More! even before we had begun. We met David, our foreman for the week. We would be spending our time between his sister Mary’s house and her neighbor Dolores’.
For Mary’s house, we would be following the coattails of Notre Dame (curses) and spackling their sheetrock. Skeet skeet. In addition, we’d be tearing out the floor of the bathroom and all the rotten joists, and giving the other walls of the house some texture. Over the course of the day, Mary would tell us how much the work on the house meant to her. I never really thought much about the qualities of sheetrock, or how having sheetrock’d walls could be such a luxury. Well, when the house starts out with 70 year-old cardboard for interior walls, drafty windows, and failed siding…you have a house that by most people’s standards needs tearing down. This is what I’d taken for granted: of course your room would be sheetrock walls, of course the outlets work, the roof hasn’t gone soft from water damage, and (most of all) of course you can drink/wash with the tap water.
For parts of McDowell County, water treatment is spotty. There is a new sewage treatment plant in Excelsior Bottom (near War), and a water treatment plant in Coalwood, but with the mountainous topography and limited municipal funds, the two ends rarely seem to meet. Many of the homes we visit have one or the other---either the tap water is o.k. but the sewage is mainlined into the stream out back, or perhaps the sewage goes to the plant, but the water coming out of the tap is raw. This is something I’d never had to consider in America before.
Anyhow, we got off to a good start, getting going on various remodeling projects at Mary’s and Dolores’, and already gaining new skills of spackel spreading technique, ceiling painting, and just general group morale upliftment. Our dinnertimes are fun, with Wilson-Proper combinations of coffee, bisquits, and homemade granola; or lasagna with shitakes, or tasty taco buffets. We rock the hell out of some dishes, and have been battling our rivals for kitchen time. All is well.

--christoph