Yesterday, my team, which had a few more people in it today (including Fr. Paschal and Fr. Rich), returned to Miss Olga’s house to put one final row of aluminum roofing sheets on the far side of the house and then start working on the structure and fence behind her house.  Honestly, you’d have to see the structure and fence to believe them.  Miss Olga collects all sorts of junk (metal pieces, glass bottles, PVC pipes, plastic bottles, wood, plastic boxes to keep her chickens in, plastic bottles, etc.), and she has it all piled under a sort-of lean-to behind her house.  

Her stuff

She also had used a lot of metal junk to build a “fence” (or perhaps it could be called a wall) along the side of the space behind her house to keep people from stealing her stuff and to keep her dog and chickens from getting away. 

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The fence was made up primarily of barbed wire, pieces of fence material that she found, pieces of wood, and the metal springs from the inside of mattresses.  We also found the front of a fan and an Intel 486 mother board in there.  The mattresses were the best material.  She would take mattresses, strip them of their fabric and padding, and then use the inside metal frame/springs to build the fence.

 Unfortunately, her lean-to is collapsing, and we had to take down the fence which was partially supporting the lean-to so we could fix it.  She also cooks under the lean-to so it really needed fixing.

 So, most of our team spent the entire day disassembling the fence and the lean-to.  This was incredibly difficult, given all the wire that was holding it together.  We then took a whole pick-up truck of this metal stuff to a place that buys metal, and Miss Olga got approximately $5 for it.  She thought that was fantastic, which surprised us.  The team then mixed cement, dug holes, and put in some metal posts for a more traditional fence that we will install today.

• Ready for the junk yard

While the team was working on that project, I was up on the roof for a couple of hours.  I had to install the last several sheets of aluminum, but I also was tasked with adding two “shy lights” to what we did yesterday.  Miss Olga decided our new roof made her house too dark and asked if we could put in the sky lights, which are really just plastic roofing through which light shines.  Unfortunately, this meant taking apart some of what we did the previous day so I could cut the aluminum sheets to make room for the plastic ones.  It took me a few hours to do this.  It does look great inside now, so I’m glad we did it.  My knees are rather sore, however, from being up there so long yesterday and the day before.  Bruises are starting on both, and one is blistered a bit.  Oh well!  It was definitely worth it to help Miss Olga.

God bless you all!

Matthew