I started blogging just yesterday expecting to journal special events in my life...guess what?? I just constructed a house today. My team at Microsoft SQL Server decided that we should do something for a cause, we should return service to the community. So today we planned a team day of service at Habitat for Humanity, a non profit organization which builds homes for the low income families. I took the initiative to organize this event for our team. So when I called HH they were more than willing to have us at their volunteer construction site to build...yes build the homes with our hands!
The day started out good, we all met at our office at 8:30 am , but yeah I was late. Reached there running just in time...reason? could not find the car keys!!! My manager was kind enough to say that it happens...Murphy's law. I am glad there is a law so that people like me can get away with excuses like that :D.
All of us car pooled to this HH construction site by 9 in the morning, signed up for the day..of course still wondering what we are going to do there...we hardly know anything about construction. But the Site Supervisor Mike gave us a very nice introduction telling about the vision of the organization and the other site leads briefed us about how the day ahead is going to be.
There were various job depending on the level of risk taken maybe. One of my colleagues signed up for doing the roof top work. I guess that was the most demanding of all, he had to work at the top storey with a harness from the roof top as the building had three floors. Three of us signed up for various wood activities which involved using all the power tools like very powerful electric saws for wood cutting etc. The others signed up for laying the exterior wall of the houses.
To our luck, the weather that is generally gloomy turned out totally bright and cheerful as we started getting the gear on to jump into action!
I spent the morning session with the team taking measurements on a piece of wood with a typical worker style pencil (carpenter pencils are flat in shape to suit their purpose so that they do not roll away and also you can draw thick n thin lines with the same pencil just by rotating it) and then cutting wood for the right measurements. Learnt to use all the heavy equipment which was the best part of the day. I was impressed by how mechanized things were here in the US and how easy it was to use them. Just sighed at our Indian carpenters who use so much muscle power to do the smallest of things.
By noon the food that I ordered came well on time to the pleasure of my hungry and worked team members. We had a nice lunch by the wooden table outside the site and talked about all that we did!
Rest of the day continued with various works. And the time to clear up came soon. We were all quite tired by then. Returned all our gear, thanked HH and site supervisors for giving us an opportunity to do this.
Everybody was still filled with all the excitement about the different things they did thru out the day...some of them just waiting to go home to their children and tell them everything about what they did. So all of us...hesitating to step into our team members car as we were so dirty...just settled down and left for the day with a heart's content of serving the community and above all having so much fun!
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