First day of work

Today was Saturday, our first day of work.  It started out with a time of devotions and orientation, then breakfast.  After that we walked as a group to the farthest areas of the campus and worked our way back to the Dining/Dorm building to take our tools up to the main work areas.  There has been a lot of anticipation here on the part of YWAM staff for the work we are here to do.

One thing we took care of right off was to release a large female rabbit from one of our pole holes.  Apparently she fell into the hole last night and since the hole was too deep fo someone to reach down into it, we decided to do something bold.  We put a sling around Don's feet and lowered him headfirst into the hole.

The rabbit seemed to happy to be freed from its potential grave.

Wayne, the director of YWAM video recorded the entire thing and said it will be in his next Director's Cut video series.  I had given you the address for YWAM's video before that showed their enthusiasm for the I-TEC team to come to do this work.  That same URL will get you to the various "Director's cut" videos and soon enough this might show up there.  Wayne was happy to return the rabbit to its rightful owner.  There are still open pole holes and these will remain open through the weekend, so we are hopeful there will not be any more animals or people getting trapped in them.

The next thing we did was to explain the scope of work to the various team members.

Several poles were set in place and Gene H. operated the backhoe and the ditch across from the main service pole to the building was completed and most of the underground conduits were installed in it by 5pm.  We started out by hanging the panels in the generator building, after repositioning the larger generator to take advana=tage of as much wall ventilation as possible.

Fortunately we have most of the materials we needed to install conduits to the generators and across to the main service pole, but we had to improvise on PVC couplings, which are nonexistent.  We also had PVC conduit 90-degree sweep ells in two different radius bends and we were wondering how this happened.  But the Lord knew we needed the long radius bends, which we were able to cut off and the resulting bends were exactly what we needed to complete the job.  His ways are higher than our ways, aren't they?  This is not the last of His dealings with us this next week or so.  No matter how hard you plan for a trip like this, things seem to change or get added, and so far every thing we needed to have here we were able to bring down with this main team or we have had to improvise.

Some other photos were taken today and we will attempt to get some of these posted tomorrow.  We will be setting our clocks back to Standard Time tonight and will gain an extra hour of sleep.  Our breakfast will be at 8:30am and then we will hold our own church service within our team.  We were hoping to do an outing to a local fort tomorrow, but YWAM has all of their drivers and vehicles committed for the day to others. Tomorrow will be a day of rest for sure, as it should be.