We arrived in Romania on February 4th and hiked through the snow to The Seventh Spring Summer Camp. We were told there were 6 springs in the area, and although no one could tell us exactly where they were, we were assured that they were very tranquil and refreshing vacation-type destinations. So, the camp was named The Seventh Spring, another peaceful place to get away and relax. I know what you're thinking, and trust me, I am well aware it isn't summer, but this is where we were placed for the month. Our goal was to give back to an organization that does so much for so many by providing services they need but can't afford – painting, cleaning carpets, fixing roofs, and doing general maintenance. However, it's been an unusually cold and snowy winter here in Arad so everything, EVERYTHING is covered with 3 or more feet of snow which makes it a little difficult to get anywhere or do anything.
Most of our responsibilities include cooking meals for ourselves, loading the furnace with wood to keep ourselves warm, cleaning the furnace out when it gets full, and visiting some elderly people in the area. However, without even looking for it, we found one of the 6 springs on Monday when one of the pipes in the main building burst. Unfortunately it burst overnight, the water went everywhere, throughout the bathrooms, into the hallways, and down the stairs. We went in with our mop and bucket brigade to clean it up but by the time we found it the water was frozen solid. Mops don't do much against ice so we peeled up the carpet that was damaged, chipped some of the ice away and called it a day.
But never fear, because today we found a 2nd spring when a pipe burst in the boys house. A couple of us hiked up the hill to the main building to retrieve the mops and buckets and marched with our brigade over to the "spring" to see what we could do. When I walked in it was raining inside the house. The pink toilet paper Valentine decorations had turned to mush and were falling of the wall. Water was coming from everywhere. It was dripping through the ceiling, flowing down the steps, and streaming from the walls. With all the water still coming into the room, mopping hardly seemed to make a dent. But after a while we were able to get most of the water in the house soaked up. Then we went to the cellar, the furnace room. There was 4 or 5 inches of water on the ground and more was pouring in. We quickly put our bucket brigade to work once again, this time in an assembly line format. We filled and passed buckets of water up the stairs and out the door, dumped the water and started over again. After about an hour we had bailed all the water out of the cellar
After we peeled up all the damaged carpet, cleaned it, and set it out to dry, some of us decided to reward our own hard work by going out and making a snowman . . . a GIANT SNOWMAN. We climbed the hill, started with a little snowball, placed it on the snow and rolled it down the hill. Just like in the cartoons, it grew bigger and bigger and bigger. The only thing that would have made it better would have been if someone was inside the snowball with their arms and legs flailing all the way down the hill. Anyway, our snowman is awesome. We decided to keep rolling the first ball until we simply couldn't move it any more. That required that the second ball be big enough that we had to cut it – yes, we cut it with a saw – into 3 pieces, lift it, and "paste" it together with more snow once it was in place. The headless snowman was already taller than me at this point, so of course we decided to climb him to see what the world looked like from on top. Then we got down and crafted his head. After his first cranium crumbled we fastened his new head, gave him arms, a face, and a scarf. He stands well over 8 feet tall and is the meanest looking snowman I've ever seen.
