Pick Up Sticks
We got a mysterious text from our Zone Leaders Monday night that pretty much demanded we come to service with them for one of their members, after everyone complied they sent out a mysterious follow up text for further guidance: "Spray your jeans with permethrin tonight."
We did so and the next day we showed up the next morning with our district leader and no one else was there. The lady who we were doing the service for was there at first but had to go drop her kids off somewhere.
We had no idea what we were supposed to do so we just sat there. While we waited, we saw that the Mid-Cities Baptist Church had a "prayer garden" next door.
I knew "prayer garden" wasn't a Biblical term so we set out to see what it was. It was actually really lame, there was a gazebo and a few water features with some bored looking cherub statues attached to them. There were some suits of armor that I assume were for really skinny midgets and then there was an open field that led to a fence about 20 yards away.
I walked back there and found someone's abandoned attempt to make a life-sized lightning McQueen out of wood, they had got the flames painted on but the wood was starting to break apart. I assumed that would be a good place to pray because there was no where else to sit down but after looking inside the place you were supposed to sit and noticing the bench had broken apart and there were like 10 rusty paint cans and hundreds of rusty nails, I rationalized one could get Tetanus from looking at that for too long and promptly left the prayer garden.
That has nothing to do with the rest of the story.
We walked into the lady's backyard and saw what we would be working on. A big pile of sticks. Not your grandma's pile of sticks that you and your cousins can clean up in 2 hours. We're talking about a bigpile of sticks. The original plan was to use a wood chipper but we arent allowed to use those and we had no way of bringing it to her house anyway. The next plan was to use a chainsaw, but we can't use those either. So it all boiled down to hand tools: one pick-axe, one axe, two saws, two rakes, one broken pair of hedge-clippers, and some rope.
We sprayed down with bug spray because it's chigger season apparently (hence the permethrin laced pants) and got to work. At first the only tools we had were the pick-axe and the rakes and the broken pair of hedge-clippers so most of us had to break the sticks down to four feet by hand. It was about 80 degrees when we started. The biggest issue was that most of the branches were still green so they were hard to cut unless you had a pick-axe. Obviously everyone wanted to act Macho and so they started powering through the pile breaking sticks with their bare hands and just littering the broken sticks every which way. It was poorly organized and we were pretty much just relocating the big pile into mini piles. The member returned with the rest of the tools and also breakfast burritos from Taco Bell.
Those burritos separated the men from the boys we each ate 2 except for Elder Tafua who had already given up because he felt sick. After we consumed the burritos it was about 110 degrees outside and the men ( Elder Shiday, Elder Kairo, and yours truly) went back to work, while the boys stayed in the shade. Elder Sherrod threw up.
Things got a little more organized, we actually moved the sticks to the place where they would get picked up and whatnot.
Eventually we all had to leave but that pile of sticks barely got dented after 4 gruelling hours of work.
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