After weeks of anxious waiting, I finally got the e-mail with the news - I've been accepted as a volunteer on the 2011 Carter Work Project (formerly the Jimmy Carter Work Project, but after working by his side on the builds for 24 years, Rosalynn finally got equal billing). Acceptance isn't automatic - I wasn't accepted in 2008, even though I'd worked on the 2006 and 2007 builds. This year only 400 volunteers can go, and 150 of those are affiliated with the corporate sponsors of the build. That leaves 250 of us, several hundred fewer than usually get accepted.
The odds were already against me, number-wise. Add to that my past performance on builds, and, well... See, my first build was in India in 2006. I arrived in India a week early to acclimate to the heat, which never happened. It was over 100° and I was 40 pounds overweight. By the time I got to the build site, I was aware that I was not going to be able to toil in the hot sun oblivious to the heat as I had hoped. I was going to melt and whine about it. I fortuitously ran into my House Leader, Dave Bullen, at the Opening Ceremonies and presented my idea… “I have low blood pressure and can’t go up ladders, I’m wilting in the heat, and I have no particular building skills. I am going to be your Safety Monitor.”
At the Houston build they lost 20% of the volunteers by noon every day because of the heat – we weren’t going to lose anybody. I promised to make everyone drink their water and electrolytes and take breaks, keep the work site clean and hazard-free, and make sure the scaffolding and ladders were safe. In a country where most scaffolding is several stories of bamboo lashed together. And life is cheap.
Everyone drank a bottle of water every 45 minutes, reapplied sunblock every two hours, drank electrolytes every three hours (I had a thing going with the first aid tent to get them to mix and chill the electrolytes for us so they tasted less like sweat). I was known by the local labourers on the site as Pani Ghodi – the Water Nag. But we didn’t lose a single person to heat. One person went to first aid at the end of the day, and they told him he was dehydrated. “No way – there’s this woman on our site who makes us drink water…” We did lose someone to some dodgy eggs, but hell, it’s India!
Despite the fact that I had completely invented the position of Safety Monitor, I took the responsibilities quite seriously. I got to the build site early every day and crashed the Block Leaders’ meeting to find out what the safety concerns of the day were. When Indian film star John Abraham (“Water”) was working two doors down, I kept the lookie-loos from trampling the stacks of roof tiles on our site to get a look by heavily enforcing Hard Hat Thursday. I was so into spreading the electrolyte love that I accidentally offered electrolytes to President Carter outside the first aid tent. Secret Service did not look amused, despite the fact that I have since learned they have quite the sense of humour.
Here’s how good a job I did. The following year I visited one of my crew members on a cross-country drive, and he told me that they were jealous that I “called” Safety Monitor before anyone else. They didn’t realize I had fabricated the position as a coping mechanism. Because of my fine work in India, the next year on the Los Angeles build, there was actually a position called “Safety Monitor” at every site. You had to wear a red hard hat and fill out paperwork on OSHA regs, so I kept my monitoring informal and remained supervisory (and the Home Depot gopher) on that build. In Thailand, because of my connections with the Lovely Lane Methodist Church of Cedar Rapids (which I may or may not explain later), I “Safety Monitored” two houses, which included plenty of ice-, sun-, and cotter pin-management.
Safety Monitoring works on a large scale, when you have enough other workers to go up ladders and work on the roof, and especially when they’re hard workers who wouldn’t come down off the roof to get water so someone has to hand water up to them or catch them when they pass out and fall off. But when there are only 250 volunteers to be chosen? Well, they gave me the benefit of the doubt here. Or they don’t keep careful notes on the volunteers…
Stay tuned to find out how I intend to make myself useful in Haiti…
