I'm at the hotel already. I get kind of anxious when I get close to the builds, and it helps to immerse myself in it, get some information, and just get started already.

That's actually how I met two of the nicest people on the planet. When I arrived at the earliest possible moment at my build hotel in India, I just wanted information. What does the site look like? What will we be doing? Who am I working with? Anxious to find out what I could from fellow travelers, I was sitting in the hotel check-in area ("lobby" is too grand a word for that room) at 6 in the morning when some Habitat volunteers checked in. And they weren't just any volunteers - they were Sherwood and Marsha Kirk. They've been doing these builds for years and always work on the President's house. Sherwood's brother Dale had even been build director for the prebuild in India. There was a meeting of house leaders at the site that day that they were going to crash - did I want to come along?

God usually works in mysterious ways, but this one was pretty blatant. Good one on ya, God.

We went to the build site - still not sure how we found it - and sat in the back of the meeting. The Kirks knew everyone there: "HE's been to our house, " "SHE's been to our house"... Sherwood even asked me why I had never been to their house: "Because I met you six hours ago, and we're in India?" (I have since been to their house - last time was to bring them a tree six weeks ago.)

I took pictures of a guy who looked exactly like my brother Bruce, so much it was surreal. I also took notes, notes on the different concerns for safety at the build site, of which the primary one was the heat. I found a list and found my House Leader's name. I was informed, and I was already part of the build. I calmed right down and just spent a joyful day laughing with my new friends.

The next day at the Opening Ceremonies, I felt like a pro. I was telling other people about the construction and the hazards, as though I'd been involved all along. I still hadn't found my House Leader, but I was starting to formulate a plan as to how I, who has no building skills and melts when it's 80 degrees out, was going to be useful on a build where the temperature was over 100 every day. I was talking to strangers, which I don't normally do, but mostly taking refuge with the people I'd met at our hotel, Velvett Country. When I started to leave my seat to go take some photos of the ceremony, I excused myself and looked down at the person I was squeezing by. It was the guy who looked exactly like my brother from the day before. Having no social skills at all, I blurted out, "I was taking pictures of you all day yesterday!" at which point he introduced me to his wife sitting next to him. I looked at his name tag: Dave Bullen. It was my House Leader. So, armed with what I'd learned at the House Leader meeting, I told him my plan. I would be his Safety Monitor and make sure he didn't lose any of the real hard workers to injury or heat. And you all know the rest of the story - its in an earlier blog posting. Suffice it to say, it worked and everybody fell for it.

So far, I've found out that the walls will already be halfway built when we get there, greatly increasing the chances that 400 people can finish 100 houses in 5 days. Yes, 400. yes, 100. Yes, 5. The rest of the house above the cinder block walls is prefab, so even I can't screw that up. Plus it's only supposed to get up to 80 degrees, which I find a lot more tolerable now that I've built in 100+ in India and 95+ in Thailand. Now I can relax. In my luxurious king-sized bed watching the Sabres game on NHL Centre Ice. Trying not to think about the next week when I'll be sleeping on a cot, in a tent with 5 other people, under a mosquito net for my own protection. Okay, I might not be totally calm now...

I'm going to Haiti!

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…