Today was the start of the first full week of the two week session. All of the students are arriving today from all over easter Europe and Central Asia. I ate dinner tonight with a couple from Estonia. They drove 3 days through Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Czech Republic, Austria! There are students from Ukraine, Moldova, Romania, and even a student who is trying to get his visa to come from Iran. The prayer at dinner was said in a different language.
Today was also a day of varied work. I'm in the maintenance group and we are all given a particular area that we dedicate our individual attention to during the last hour of our shift between 3:30- 4:30pm. I have the lawn area in front of the pool at the "Big Haus". I will be weeding by hand to remove dandelions and then using a soil/sand/seed mixture similiar to what you use on some golf courses to repair divots in the fairway. In the morning I worked on cleaning leaves and other tree debris from the rock slope that turns in into a cascading waterfall from water pumped from the fish pond to return down the rocky hill to the pond. However, during lunch it started to rain pretty hard. After lunch I repaired holes in the wall of a former storage room that is being turned into another office in the sprawling admistration building which is housed in the former "horse barn". They remove shelving brackets from the wall and I spackled, sanded and repainted the wall. After cleaning up my tools from that job I finished out the maintenance shift back at the waterfall as it finally stopped raining. I got a short break from 4:30 till 5:45pm to clean up and then I report to the dishwashing room to clean all of the pots and pans etc. used for cooking the meal by the kitchen crew. Two of us work with a full-time staffer to get them cleaned and dry during a frantic 15 minute window before dinner starts at 6:00pm. We are talking a dinner cooked for about 100 people every night. (I'm not on the lunch crew). We then have about 25 minutes to eat as I have to be in the dishwashing area before the meal completes as all of the dirty dishes come back in a huge wave of plastic tubs. As clean dishes come out of the dishwasher, students, professors, full-time staff and other part-time workers stand around the drying table and very quickly hand-dry a huge number of dishes and utensils. It is the most amazing organized group effort I have ever had the experience to be a part. By around 7:30 or so I am free to go take a walk or a shower and sit down to write this.
I will certainly sleep well tonight.
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i'm tired just reading this...
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