Bahamas 2015

Another year, another trip! This time it's a little bit different, as I traveled with my church on a Mission Trip.

After years of hearing about my parents' / brothers' trips to Grand Bahama with Karazim Ministries, I finally had the chance to go, and I jumped at it.   The plan was to spend a week on the Island, helping rehabilitate a house in the 8 Mile Rock neighborhood.

Much like Puerto Rico, there are two faces to Grand Bahama. We started the week, after a depressingly early flight, on the public face of the island.  Nice hotels, great beaches, and welcome warm weather. We spent the afternoon on the beach swimming and reading before having a devotion and heading to bed.

Day 1: Lots to do:

We arrived at the house planning to paint and wondering what else we could find to do to fill our time. We quickly answered that question. The state of the house was daunting, and instead of wondering what extra we could finish, we instead asked our selves if we could finish.  After a few minutes of feeling overwhelmed, we got to work.

In what would become our modus operandi, we moved the contents of the house out to the lawn, giving us room to work inside and room to rest outside. With a dozen hands you can move almost anything quite quick. We spent the day repairing drywall, taping seams, and I took over the trimwork, edging the doors and windows, if only so we wouldn't have to repair the drywall edges around them.

The outdoors team started scrubbing and priming, and inside by the end of the day the house was ready for mudding, and the task seemed much more manageable.  We retired to the hotel for dinner, and after recovering, made our way back out to the beach.








Day 2: Dust everywhere
For day 2 our goal was to get the interior ready for paint. That meant sealing all cracks, nails, and gaps in the drywall with drywall mud. Marvin* gave us all a lesson, and we set about sealing up the house. There were a lot of cracks, and it took a lot of mud. And, once the mud dried, even more sanding.  The floor became as slippery as ice, and we were all covered in a thin powdering of gypsum. After the huge progress of day 1, it felt like less was accomplished on day 2.  However, a miter box arrived with our supplies, allowing frames for the windows to start.  I have never appreciated powertools more than after a day of mitering, sanding, and nailing by hand, joint after joint and corner after corner. While the outdoor team finished priming, the indoor team finally got the walls ready for paint.

Our resident taught us how to harvest coconuts, open them, and drink the milk within - something new and amazing for those who had never seen it before.  If I liked the taste of it, I'd probably be amazed too, lets be honest.

The evening held the same dinner-beach-devotion pattern, with notable exceptions being some surprisingly good snorkeling out by the main channel, and a beach bonfire we were all amazed didn't burn down the entire island.



Day 3: Paint!
After all the prep work it was finally time to paint! On the outside, at least. Inside, we still hand to sand... the ceiling. As someone tall and relatively young, I spent the morning on buckets sanding over my head, just to make sure I got as much dust as possible.  I did.  I took a few breaks to trim a few more windows, something I was getting quite good at.

Lunch was spiced up when the residents brought out some local fish that they had fried up. I don't know if it was the best fish I ever tasted, or if hard work and hunger had sharpened my appetite, but it was amazing. I did decline, unlike one of the highschoolers, to eat the heads.

Once we finally got to painting, everything went much quicker. Proper prep work meant the paint went down quickly, and made a huge difference. Those of us with steady hands edged the rooms and the rollers came through behind transforming the rooms behind us. The teamwork was just as impressive as the result, and both only improved from there.

After edging the rooms I got out of the way and spent the rest of the afternoon painting cracks around the outside of the house. After a few hours in the sun I motioned to a ladder and asked "Want to get high and do some crack?" without even realizing.

Afterwards, we had more snorkeling, more devotions, and more reading on the beach.




Day 4: Wrap up
Paint, paint, and more paint. Paint on the ceilings, second coats everywhere, and then came all the odd jobs that had to wait until after paint was (mostly) dry.

My dad spearheaded a project to replace the plywood protecting certain windows with a thick metal screen, and we built spacers. strung, and tensioned the screen exactly as intended, with no surprises - which in itself is almost a surprise, since projects never go so smooth! I also trimmed a few doors, and everything was wrapping up nicely.

Gauging the material left, we (I) decided to add some baseboards. The entryway went quickly enough, but we were running out of time.  As the carpet was cut for the remaining bedroom, it became a race against time.  Rodney and Dad volunteered to assist, and as fast as I could measure and cut the boards, they got them installed! We did the entire room in probably 20 minutes, which is amazing for doing it all by hand - and everything even fit!



After wrapping up and saying our goodbyes we went back to the hotel to clean up before going out for dinner, returning from the true face of the island to the polished face they present to the tourists. It was rather uneventful until we went to catch our water-taxi back to the hotel. As I sat by the light throwing french fries to the fish, they all suddenly disappeared... and in a few seconds we saw why as a 7 foot shark casually swam beneath us before veering back into the bay and vanishing in the darkness.

As I took pictures of the completed house,  our resident Arthur turned to me and said "If you take a picture of the house, you have to take a picture of me."  And like that, I realized that the house was a distraction. We were really there to work on him, his community. The true face of Grand Bahama.