October 14

Today we met up at church and we were bussed over to the Plumpton High School, where we would be doing the clean-up and renovation project. None of the girls in Gentry's house went so when I went I didn't really know anyone (they all had choir later and didn't want to go). When I got on the bus though, I met some Australian guy and talked to him a while, but when we got to the school, we has in the other "team" (there were two teams- one for the school and one did a "suburban blitz" to clean up the area). Everyone on the red "team" (all 1500 of us) packed into the gym. It was total chaos. The age range was 12-35, with the median age probably 15 or 16. I managed to find an area with at least a few over-20-year-olds and set to painting some walls. The whole thing was pretty unorganized (at least for random people like me that didn't have any group to belong to). The first half of the day was especially crazy and I had a hard time finding someone to give me a job to do. When undertaking a big project like that it is important to have leaders who can "cast a vision" for what needs to be done. Then around lunch time all the "silly kids" (most of the youth group) got bored or tired and went outside to chase each other and have paint fights (so not productive, but whatever). So that was when I was able to really do something and I really enjoyed the last half of the day. I was able to meet a lot of great people then and we were able to actually get a lot of stuff done. We repainted all the walls, cleaned off graffiti, and other restoration type things. I did make the HUGE mistake while we were cleaning up at the end of the day of asking why didn't we just throw all the paint brushes, paint buckets, etc away (because cleaning up hundreds of paint supplies was going to take hours and make a disasterous mess in the bathrooms- which would then have to be cleaned) and one of the Aussie guys in charge said "that's just like you American's, just throw away perfectly good resources, because you're big enough just to make more" (or something like that). He really didn't mean it mean, it was just a comment back to my suggestion, but that is true. Australia is so big on the environment and I have not been fully "converted" yet, so my American "wasteful" (yet, easier- I think) way of thinking got the better of me. I don't know, I still think if I was in charge it would just have been easier to throw all that away.
I was really lucky to be on the "inside team" because it was the hottest day on record in October today in Sydney (39 degrees Celsius). So, maybe all this global warming stuff has some merit. I think my way of going "green" when I go home is to use reusable shopping bags (if I can remember to bring them with me to the store).