RVing With a Purpose

Tuesday, June 27, 2017

Today we continued our work on Mary Elizabeth’s house. Suzanne, Karen and Anne continued their caulking and painting while Morris and Max installed the last closet door and Mike began cleaning and reinstalling outlet and switch plates. After the door, Morris worked on the baseboards in the bathroom and Max finished the window trim in the laundry room. After lunch Morris installed door knobs in the new doors while Anne and Max worked on building the steps connecting the front part of the house with the back. It doesn’t look like much when we put it on paper but we worked really hard today. It is our hope to quickly now finish up the bedroom, bath and closet so Elizabeth and her husband can move back into their apartment and allow Mary Elizabeth to have her space back upstairs. The largest project left in their apartment is installing the laminate flooring. We think we will finish up the steps then start that installation in the morning. Should be another busy day and we are hoping to have some pictures of the flooring tomorrow.

 

One nice thing about working on this house is the wonderful front porch where we take our breaks It seems to always have a cool breeze. Another is how hard Mary Elizabeth works right along side us to repair her home.  Her daughter-in-law Elizabeth also works with us when she is there. They are so anxious to have their home and life back. Driving around town you see homes everywhere with volunteers working to help restore peoples lives. The North Carolina Methodist Disaster Relief team has over 100 people in town this week working on homes. The Baptists are also working on several homes but we don’t know how many are here this week. There are probably other organizations here as well but we just haven’t met them yet.

It’s peach shake season at Chick-Fil-A so that’s where we went after work.

Monday, June 26, 2017

As usual for a NOMADS project our day started at 8:00 am with morning devotion. Mike, our team leader for the week, provided our message today from a one of Rick Warren’s “Daily Hope” posts entitled “Laugh, Play, Pray, and Hope.” We then discussed the day’s work and proceeded across the Interstate to Mary Elizabeth’s house. Her house was flooded about 2.5 feet above the floors. This is a multi-family house that has been almost completed by other volunteers and our team plans to finish it. Our first priority is to finish the downstairs living area so that the daughter and her husband can move back out of Mary Elizabeth’s upstairs living area. That will involve some painting, installing doors, trim and some flooring and replacing some wood plank walls that were cut out to remove wet insulation.

Today we painted and caulked in the bedroom, painted and hung several doors and installed some baseboards and case molding. Sorry we didn’t get any pictures of the carpentry work.

We met Jeff and Ann, the North Carolina United Methodist Disaster Recovery Coordinators. They were very nice and helpful. We will be working closely with them when we take over leadership. Jeff had their 8 week old Yorkshire Terrier with him and we got to play with her. Precious. He wouldn’t leave her with us. Oh well, maybe next time.

We also were visited by the security detail of North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper. We understand Governor Cooper has a visit to our job site planned around lunch time Wednesday. It is a followup on the relief efforts for all the people affected by the flooding. We were told it is primarily a press opportunity to encourage more volunteers to come help the people of this area. They have already requested NOMADS return in the fall. Wednesday could be interesting but of course it could also all get canceled. We shall see.

Another beautiful sunset today!

Sunday, June 25, 2017

Today was Sunday so we got to go to church at a new church to us. The team went to Chestnut Street UMC in downtown Lumberton. We all were really impressed with the friendliness and welcoming of the congregation. Chestnut Street is the sponsoring agency for NOMADS so the congregation knew about NOMADS and what we were are doing in town. Many of them thanked us for what we are doing in their community. The pastor is Rev Herbert Lowry who was also very welcoming and presented a wonderful sermon on baptism. We really appreciate the church’s support and encouragement. It was a joy to worship with them today.

After worship we decided to have lunch at Pier 41 Seafood which is a locally, family owned restaurant in Lumberton. It was very good! Would definitely eat there again. We had various entrees such as seafood gumbo, oyster stew, fried shrimp and fried oysters. We are not eating much supper tonight. We spent the afternoon reorganizing the truck and loading the back with tools and painting supplies to be ready for work tomorrow. Then at 6:00 we hosted the team in Fred 2 for our weekly team meeting. Since five of us are new this week we had a time to get acquainted and then Mike, our leader this week, brought us up to speed on the work we will be doing. We currently have two houses assigned to us. The first we will not be returning to until the plumber sets some fixtures then we will install the laminate flooring and that home will be complete. The second one we still have probably two more weeks work. There is painting, trim work to be installed and laminate flooring to install and other miscellaneous tasks to be done. This is going to be another good and fun team. We look forward to a safe and productive week.

Saturday, June 24, 2017

After all the rain earlier in the week, today was a beautiful sunny day. As a matter of fact it was just plain hot and humid. This morning we had a wonderful (Constructors size) breakfast with Randy and Debra and then pulled out mid-morning in route for Lumberton, NC, leaving behind the wonderful 50 amp RV outlet Randy had installed for us. We will certainly enjoy using that on future visits. It took a long time to make the drive. There were four wrecks on I-20 with long traffic delays and then there was another delay due to what appeared to be a felony stop that closed one lane. There were 5 police cars on the scene when we passed a U-Haul truck and someone was in handcuffs.

We were glad to finally pull into the Robeson County Fairgrounds and be greeted by our team leader for the next week. We will be in the Lumberton area for four weeks (leading the last three) working on a Disaster Rebuild project to assist in recovery from Hurricane Matthew. We understand that the area around Lumberton suffered extensive flooding from the storm. When Matthew made landfall in NC it was “only” a Category 1 storm but it was the massive amounts of rain that caused so much devastation. Many homes in Lumberton were over 4 feet under water. We met our other team members this afternoon and then went to Walmart to pick up a few things. A severe thunderstorm came through about the time we got into the store. The rain poured down. The power went off in the store momentarily and was off in the campground when we returned. Fortunately we have 6 large batteries in our new Fred so we really didn’t notice the outage except our air conditioners we not on when we returned. We didn’t really miss the air conditioning because the temperature had dropped over 15 degrees from when we left for Walmart. Power is back on now and everything is back to normal We are looking forward to a productive time here in Lumberton.

By the way, if you are on Facebook and would like to track the progress in the coming weeks of the Rosalie Baptist Church project. Go to Facebook and search for “Constructors for Christ“. You will find many more pictures and videos of the construction and volunteers.