So, you may be wondering, what exactly are the racers doing this month as their work? I have information and a video for you, friends!
Squad Video from Jayce Van Der Linden on Vimeo.
This month we are working for Lightforce International, an awesome ministry that provides care to all sorts of people–kind of like Red Cross, but smaller and a little more personal, I hear. Here in Albania, Lightforce has a summer camp for local kids from poor families to come learn about things we may (or may not) take for granted: good hygiene, working and playing well with others, and being good stewards of the environment.
Later this year two more World Race teams will be here when the summer camp is full of kids and they will work with them. But this May our team is preparing the grounds. Every spring a massive amount of work is needed to get the camp ready and habitable for people, and so we have the honor of providing that labor for free! And so we serve five days a week by weeding, repainting playgrounds, gardening, castrating pigs (yup), clearing brush, scrubbing floors, removing cobwebs, and, my favorite,
lime washing.
If you are unfamiliar with the process of lime washing I can talk about it. Lime washing is another word for whitewashing, Tom Sawyer’s famous punishment. The paint is lime and water mixed together. Every morning, we stir the mixture in a big barrel (because lime settles to the bottom) and scoop the lime wash into buckets. Then each lime washer takes a broom-turned-paintbrush and heads off to paint.
We’ve repainted every single white surface at this camp. The pig farm, the bedrooms, the walls, the roofs, the bathrooms, the kitchen, the dining rooms, and the meeting areas all have fresh coats of white lime wash.
Lime washing feels like painting with water. It drips everywhere if you’re not careful. The lime always needs to get stirred from the bottom of the bucket. A surface with a fresh coat of lime wash looks worse than it did before because it just looks wet and all the wall’s flaws are emphasized. But when you let the coat sit for a day and dry, the lime crystallizes and the wash turns a bright white, giving you your nice white wall.
At least, that’s the idea. The thing about lime washing is that it doesn’t really work. Not well. Not quickly. We expected to put one or two coats on the walls but we probably put at least five on the really bad-looking ones. Slowly, the rooms are brightening and we are closer and closer to being able to put “lime washing” on our resumes.
Anyway, you can watch this video that my awesome, artistic teammate Jayce made to get a feel for the ministry we’re doing here in Lezhe. Check out our lime washing skills and hear what we think of this month’s work!
