Ok, so back to the workcamp stories. The ASP Jonesville center is really nice. We had air conditioning, which was fab! Better than home for me! :-) Our girl's room was so cold, we actually referred to it as "the meat locker". We went grocery shopping one day, and kept the stuff that needed to be refrigerated in our room overnight. Not kidding. There are just a few things about the center that are very odd. 1. There are crosses everywhere. That's perfectly normal--it's a Christian organization, etc. But everywhere. And guess what is mounted on these crosses. Except the big, central one. There's a cross in every room and it has on it......
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a fire extinguisher.

That's right, a fire extinguisher. There is one mounted on every cross in the place except the really big one. They probably couldn't find a fire extinguisher big enough.

There's nothing else explicitly odd about the center. The staff run a program for the groups every night called "Evening Gathering." Original, eh? We sang cheesy songs, had conversation, etc. One night a man came and sang songs and told stories. Good fun. :-)

The town of Jonesville, Virginia, is very small. There is a dollar store where nothing actually costs a dollar. There are a bazillion baptist churches. There are two places to eat ice cream: Happy Mart (a gas station with a convenience store that happens to sell everything, plus guns, plus 24 flavors of soft serve!! and chicken too.), and Fodi's which is THE place for milkshakes. I have never had a milkshake that good in my entire life. We literally had ice cream twice every day. There is also a federal prison not far away. Supposedly some guys actually escaped while we were in town. Huh. One evening we decided to take a field trip out there. Two vans full of kids/leaders drive out, we drove around the grounds a little, etc...and Josh is in front of course. I'm driving the second van. We start to notice some activity, and lights...and of course I get pulled over by a prison guard who wants to know what we're doing. Thankfully mark was with me--because he told them we were with ASP!!! LOL. "We're a group here with ASP, and we were just looking around..." You totally know that they were following us with sniper rifles until we were on the other side of the hill. Crazy. It was kind of scary, but all in all an adventure. ha!

So, you must be wondering, did you guys do any work down there?

Yes, of course. We split the 19 of us into four work crews. We worked on four sites, for four families, on four very different jobs. One group was building a wheelchair deck/ramp. One was digging a 9x4 x5(feet deep) hole for a "gray water" overflow septic pit...plus a trench to put an overflow pipe in--and when they finished that they were supposed to put up siding on one side of the house and do some drywalling in the kitchen. The third group had the job of filling in the back of a retaining wall, so the hill didn't slide into the woman's house. They essentially had to fill in a hole that was 68 feet long, 15 feet deep...and they had to push the dirt up the hill in wheelbarrows to dump it into these holes behind the wall. The fourth group (my group) had the job of demolishing a house so a new house could be built the following week.

I am sleepy now so I'll write about the actual work (at least, the work of my crew) tomorrow. goodnight