Day Three

The Coffee Line

Bathroom maze: Women up the middle, Men's toilets to the
left, Men's showers to the right, unexpected nudity everywhere

Ugh. Who'd a thunk I'd get insomnia after working all day in the hot sun? Woke up at 2.30 this morning because someone else in the tent got up, and never got back to sleep. After some attempts and a little time playing on the iPad trying to tire myself out, I gave up. Grabbed my chargers and headed to the meal tent, went online and worked on and posted the Day One blog. Around 5 am, coffee was ready, and I sat outside with another member of my crew, Matt from Boston, who also couldn't sleep. I promised him there was a nap in my future after lunch. Before we knew it we were in line for breakfast, and the day was off and running.

ROGUE BUS

You'd think with my ultra-early start that I'd be the first to the build site. Buuuuuut... I'm trying to be less travel-anxiety-girl and more friendly and patient. So I tooled around all morning with my new friends Lisa and Traci and Jan. We covered a lot of ground, but we didn't quite make the first bus. We didn't quite make the seventh bus. We were on the last bus, which for some reason got separated from all of the other buses (they're quite serious about all of the buses traveling together in a convoy, with police stationed on each bus and at points along the way). We ended up getting stuck in school traffic, as livery services (read: motorcycles fitted to carry 3-4 children in addition to the drivers for 60¢ a ride) dropped children off at the school within the walls of Christianville. Then we seemed to let every truck, pedestrian, chicken and goat cross in front of us, not arriving to the build site until about 20 minutes after everyone else. It's a 20-minute drive.

I was the last one of my crew to our site. I was encouraged when I got there, because they all wanted to do our exercises before we started work, and these are people who like to work. My trainer, Maddie, had worked on some work-out-the-cot exercises with me, not really knowing how we would use them at the build site. I came up with weird names to help me remember them - Grover the Waiter, Up Up and Away, Tear Down That Wall. They're designed to open up our joints and, well, work out the tightness from sleeping on a cot. I think they work, and everyone seems to at least feel better doing them. Score one for the Madster.

GROUND CREW

Well, with no sleep and intense heat, I was grateful for my job on the ground. Of course, I was still part of the roofing crew as we went to finish up the roof, and had to look up all the time to see if they needed anything. Which, pardon my Creole, just makes me dizzy as fuck. Wow. I didn't want to bail on my team, so I tried to justify staying to shut up my inner Safety Monitor. Even though I get dizzy, I never fall down. When I hand things up to them, there is always something I can hang onto. Nothing we can't drop, so won't pull anyone down if I teeter while handing something up. When I'm carrying things like roof panels, I have plenty of time to get them and can carry them slowly, again being in a position to drop them if something goes wrong, but able to move slowly so nothing will. Probably looked ridiculous, but at least I had an exit plan. As long as I wasn't putting anyone in any danger, I saw no reason to back out.

LUNCH SURPRISE

Glad I stayed, because the Carters aren't here. Jimmy and Rosalynn and other HFHI VIPs were in the Dominican Republic for a big HFHI meeting, leaving us un-Secret-Service-chaperoned. Although, there was suddenly a lot of helicopter activity over camp, with the Secret Service elsewhere. Many of my old and new friends working for Habitat got to build on houses, including my Canadian friend Karen. So I got to eat lunch with Karen, which also meant eating lunch with her friends, Garth Brooks and Trisha Yearwood.

Obligatory Sabres photo, taken on the way to lunch.

Now, when I can't sleep, I write things to occupy my mind. Right now it's really 4.30 Thursday morning, so I'm writing my blog from my notes and simultaneously writing a song about our host group, Haven, in my head. This is exactly how I came to write a song about Habitat to the tune of Brooks' "Rodeo" (which I can't get out of my head) a few days ago. Tuesday afternoon, I thought I'd try the theory that you can get a song out of your head if you get it stuck in someone else's, and emailed the song to Karen. At hockey games, I used to play Mental Song Repeat with the locker room guards. Before every game, we'd each sing a part of a song that we thought would stick in the others' heads. I always lost on "Friends in Low Places," actually. Party on, Garth.

Because her charges were serving us dinner on Tuesday, Karen got to eat dinner with us, and we ended up singing the chorus of the "Habitat" song for our friends ("and they call the thing Hab-i-tat..."). There's a video somewhere. Didn't work - still stuck in my head. I was a little surprised on Wednesday when I was talking to a Habitat staffer who said she'd read the song. I was even more surprised when I caught up with Karen for lunch, and she turned around to Garth Brooks and introduced me as the person who'd written the T-shirts Karen and I were both wearing, and rewrote "Rodeo." You know what he told me? I'd missed my calling. When you've had as many careers as I have, you find it hard to believe you missed one... He then asked me what I do, and I said I was a writer. Which was the calling he thought I'd missed, so it was all clearer then.

And that's how I came to have lunch with Garth Brooks and Trisha Yearwood. A bad day to have no social skills, but they were just on break like the rest of us, so there was really no need to be entertaining. They're lovely people.

THE COOLING BUS AND THE NAP HAT

Last pieces, ready to go.

Well, I stuck with the roof until about 2.00. The head-rushes were pretty bad, every time I stood up, or looked up, or turned around. I was trying to tell myself they were kind of fun, but I was starting to think it was time to walk away, in case this was the day I was finally going to faint. I told Nicky, the youngest member of our whole crew and the closest to me on the roof crew, that when we got the last roof panel up, I'd call it quits. I waited until the last roof panel was up to tell Vic, our house leader, in case he had some obligation to take me out right away. I mean, Nicky and Rico and Matt were up in very precarious positions working with hot surfaces for long periods, the least I could do is get them cold water. And come up with great nicknames like Matt on a Hot Tin Roof.

Houses finished by earlier crews: what we're aiming for.

Just as I was getting a little anxious, I handed up the last roof panel. That's when Dr. Bucky, a friend from the Velvett Country resort in India and subsequent builds, came by. He said he was surprised they hadn't seen me. I told him they would in a few minutes, and he just told me where the cooling bus was so I wouldn't have to go to the medical house first. That was the opening of the floodgates. As soon as I knew I was done, I felt horrible. Weak and dizzy and slightly nauseous - there was no turning back once he adrenaline wasn't holding me up any more. I took my great CWP-issue sun hat with the neck protector, turned it around to make it a nap hat, and slept for an hour on the cooling bus before heading home. Just like I'd promised Matt at 5am I would. Because God loves me, He timed it out so that Jan got on the bus and sat with me before anyone else did. Because God loves her, I'd taken an extra juice box before the med team left the bus, which she needed badly.

RUM AND COKE

The night's entertainment was rum. Well, more like Coke. One of my new Habitat friends, Ian McCallister, was seen Tuesday with a bottle of Coca-Cola. While our beautiful bar under the stars is awesome, they serve Pepsi. Apparently it's an Irish thing. When I saw Ian with the Coke, I think I kind of whimpered. After we got back to camp and showered Wednesday, I saw him, and he promised to get me 2 bottles of Coke. In what I described to him as a Family Circus strip (before I found out that Bill Keane had just died - eerie...), he and I circled camp looking for each other, going to all the same places but missing each other. He finally gave the Coke away. I explained to him that I'd bought a bottle of Bacardi Gold at Duty Free and had to drink it before we left. "I'll go get you another one," he said, in immediate understanding.

It wasn't just Coca-Cola, it was Coca-Cola made with real sugar. It was like drinking my childhood. But with really awesome rum in it. Hey, they told me to drink a lot of fluids... I lasted until all of 8.30 before my inner Safety Monitor told me to go to bed, but I got to hang out with Ian, hear some very funny stories about his Dad, and make some rum drinkers very happy. We have another date for Thursday night.