May Day The Day After

As the Dominicans took the day off (a national holiday we were told - we think to celebrate May Day), we took our first full day of work at the church building site.  Pastor Willy Gaspar, who has been spending  his weekdays in Haiti as a liason for The Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod's involvement in providing relief to Haitians suffering from cholera, decided to spend this week with us.

We walked to the site to enjoy a breakfast of empinadas, courtesy of Brian Keller.  It cost Brian $9 for 9 of us, including the two dozen eggs he purchased to be used in the empinadas.  An empinada is a kind of breakfast enchilada which is filled with pollo (chicken), cheese, an egg, and/or ham, and is then deep fried in a kind of turkey fryer.  Delicious! 

From there we finished the walk to the church site.  Pastor Willy and a couple of maestros, including Octavia, were visiting before work began.  As if in mid-conversation with Pastor Willy, Octavia turned to me and said, "Osama bin laden," and then drew his finger across his own neck.  None of us had heard the news.

It was a good day.  It seemed to some of us we were not making much progress, but when the rain came quite generously mid-afternoon and we decided to call it quits, we could tell we had accomplished quite a bit.  David (pronounced, Dah-veed), another maestro, with his helper made great progress with the plastering of the bathrooms.  Duane and Pastor Willy began removing three portions of the cinder block walls at the front of the wall-less sanctuary, to make room for three stained glass windows to be installed.  The rest of us did various other tasks, including "mudding" (plastering with wet cement) around electrical boxes, knocking holes in the cinder block where more electrical boxes will be placed and where PVC conduit for the electric wiring will be inserted, and shoveling sand through screens to refine it as it is mixed to make cemento.

We're all surprised how pleasant the conditions have been - weather-wise.  There's always a breeze, and just when it seems the Dominican sun is about to get the best of us, clouds roll in and at times provide a warm, brief shower.

Make sure you ask any one of the team members when they return to Wisconsin who Monday evening's special guest was...

Among the many blessings is the time we have to sit together and talk and share.  No TVs or phones to isolate us from one another.  No meetings or activities to run off to once we return from the work site.  It makes life simple and relationship focused...as it should be.

The close of this May Day the day after had us looking at Moses, with the help of Aaron and Hur, with hands raised up in the air over a battle which The Lord had said all along would be His for the fighting.  This view left us thinking of prayer, with hands raised high to The One with Whom all things are Possible.  Lifting each other up in prayer, lifting the Dominican people up to YHWH (He Who Makes All Good Things Happen), lifting our hosts up in prayer, and lifting the church militant up in prayer.  It was yet another good day, made better still with the apostle Paul's reminder, "The One Who calls you is Faithful, and He will Do It!"