Exciting Times: The Floor - Part One

You might be wondering how "floor" and "exciting" can used in the same title, but we are a VERY excited bunch of people these days as we watch a new floor being put into our classroom building.  For years our concrete floor has been chipping away and coming apart in chunks and this last month the Lord finally brought everything together for us to have something done about it.  When Hank (above left) & Marg Demark (parents of  my co-worker, Lesley (husband Pete, above right) Doerksen) found out about the sad and desperate state of our floor, they decided to kill two birds with one stone and come visit their family and also put Hank's years of experience to use re-doing our floors.  We are so grateful to have them here, and it's been amazing to see our classroom slowly transformed. 

The classroom is the building at left (my home sweet home is on the right).  The middle building is another staff home. 

Here's the floor during an Interface program.  Doesn't really look too bad but there wasn't a level spot in just about the entire building. 

Weeks before the Demarks got here the guys had been doing a pretty good job of ripping up the floor.

Buka and Morobe doing some damage.

All that torn up concrete got shoveled into a pile to be used later to help on our roads.

The crew. 

 Hank hasn't been here long and, true to character, already has a great relationship with the guys.  Here he shows off Samson's huge muscles.

Rain water had (unbeknownst to us) been building up in a huge pool behind the classroom, causing huge areas of white mold to grow up inside. 

After all the concrete was lugged out, the guys began laying down plastic and the old wire mesh salvaged from the previous floor, then building the framework for the first section of new concrete.

Here's Lesley, Bobbi and myself working real hard. 

We'd gotten this load of gravel months ago, so by the time we needed it it was overgrown with weeds.  I'm sure that was fun picking it all out. 

Months ago we began looking into purchasing cement, only to find out once we were ready to purchase it that the country's only supplier had shut down.  We knew that this project was in the Lord's hands and that even in a country with no cement God could easily provide.  We decided to all pray about it for two weeks, until our next staff meeting.  Two weeks passed, and at the meeting we discussed how there was still no cement but we would continue to trust the Lord to provide.  We had all just left the meeting and were walking away when Pete came out on the porch and said "We just got a call that there's cement available for us!"  I still get teared up thinking about this and how God provides for His children.  When we pray He doesn't always answer in the way we expect or in a way that we can see, but He does always answer and it's encouraging to experience those moments when He chooses to show you a very obvious answer to a specific prayer.   

 Kino (middle) was spouting off some Tokples (tribal language) to me.  They know we can't understand them (we only talk together in the national language, Melanesian Pidgin) but they get a kick out of trying and seeing our awkward faces.  Heti (left) whispered the answer I should give, which resulted in a round of happy comments from all the men.

 

 

 The first section is poured.  Very exciting!

 

 

The Interface staff - all the ones on campus, anyways.  In two weeks there'll be three returning staff and two new families added. 

Thank you so much to those of you who have prayed for and given towards this project! 

Keep your eye out for more floor updates and the final result!