Happy Saturday!  As always, best wishes and prayers to everybody!  I remember you all, and I pray for you and your intentions every day.

Well, I have had some experiences lately.  Where to start?

This weekend is the Leaders Convention.  Every year, the Schoenstatt Leaders from every branch gather together to pick a new motto for the year.  In the US, the Convention was in Waukesha recently, but right now representatives from all over the Dominican Republic are gathered here in La Victoria. This presents interesting encounters for me because I have even more people asking me questions that I don´t know the answers to.  Then they realize that I am American and they understand.

So because there are 125 or so extra people here, besides the everyday people, I was asked to help prepare for this gathering.  In other words, Thursday and Friday I didn´t go to the Nutrition Center, which kind of made me depressed.  Instead, I started to help in the office at 11am.  

For one of the talks, the participants needed to write down responses.  So I helped design the little piece of paper, and then we printed them out in sheets of about 12 each.  Then I sat in the office and cut out the pieces, one by one.  I guess my craft skills needed a workout.  By the time that was completed, it was 2pm.  No joke, this took awhile.  Afterwards, each piece had to be put in a teeny manilla envelope, tied with a yellow ribbon (which I twirled the ends like Mary taught me), and put on a sticker.

I will spare you the details, but it gets pretty hot inside here without air conditioning and no fan. I took a dinner break at 7 or so, and a couple minutes in the afternoon.  You know when you have that premonition that something isn´t quite right?  I knew from earlier that I needed 125 envelopes, but they didn´t look like enough.  Sure enough, after dinner, my fears were confirmed.  I had made all the envelopes that I had, and there were only 108, and we couldn´t find more anywhere.  I really wanted to finish these at that point.  When you work with something for several hours, it can become a goal. I think I was obsessing a bit at that moment.

So, I learned how to make big manilla envelopes into mini manillas.  Yes.  Cut, examine, cut again, and glue. I finished!  It was a moment of satisfaction when I had 127 little envelopes neatly in a basket for the next day´s talk.

At some point in this mundane day, I realized with some sadness that I had spent the majority of my day working on small props that would have a very short lifespan.  The little ribbons would be torn off, the paper ripped and thrown away.  My whole day´s efforts in the space of a moment. It was funny in a sad, wry sort of way.  

After thinking it over, I had to admit that it didn´t matter that my little projects would be destroyed.  So what if I had spent my whole day working on something so teeny?  If that was what my task was, I completed it well, and that was what counted.  If God wanted little things of me, then little things should be good enough.  

Then Sr. Mareylis came in and talked to me.  I have known her for years, so she understood what was going on.  She reminded me that I had been disappointed at not working with the children, but that the small things that are ¨in secret” as she says, have their own worth.  Apparently I need to learn more than craft skills.

My other thingy is more funny.  I did laundry.  Well, sort of. This is a long story.

Here I feel like a child. Things that I can easily do at home are take much more concentration and time here.  Cooking, for example, is relatively easy at home.  I take a pot or pan, and turn on the stove.  All the ingredients are close by, and can be used without a lot of preparation.  Here, I have to go outside to turn on the gas valve before lighting the stovetop with a electric lighter.  Then every dish or utensil that I use has to be washed and dried before I can use it, although it was washed before it was put away.  You have to use the purified water, the kind that is used in office coolers.  Big blue plastic jug things.  Anyway, you get the idea.  There are more steps involved.

Back to the original story: my laundry.  I started it Wednesday morning, thinking that it would be simple.  The night before, Eliud had explained how to use the washing machine.  It´s pretty small, about the size of a computer desk, with one side a washer and the other side a dryer.

The first task was to fill the washing machine with water.  I filled it up with large tubs of water from a nearby sink, almost spilling it in the process.  Then you put in several different kinds of soap and your laundry.  Theoretically, after you plug it in, the laundry takes about 10 minutes.  Afterwards, the clothes have to be hand rinsed in the sink and wrung out before being placed in the dryer.  Well, nothing happened!  I was kind of confused.  It was plugged in.  Check.  The water level was fine.  Check.  The correct dial was turned.  What was wrong?  No electricity!  I tried a few hours later in the day, but I still didn´t have power, so I left it to soak.

The next day it smelled horrible.  Apparently soaking laundry was a bad idea.  Luckily for me, Eliud was back from her day with her family and could help me.  We drained the washing machine with a little hose out the back door.  Then instead of using the tubs, we used the garden hose to fill it up, which made me happy. All was good.  The laundry then still didn´t wash.  

And again, I was without electricity.  Hours passed by, and it worked!  We had to wash it all again though, because it still had a weird smell from the washing machine.

Because the machine is so small, laundry has to be done in batches.  This was my first batch, so I still had a bunch left to do.  But we were cleaning the house for the upcoming retreat, which mean washing a ton of sheets and curtains, so Eliud explained the whole thing again while we did those.

Day Three: I washed some t shirts, and then it failed me again.  The dryer part refused to work.  It doesn´t exactly dry, but it spins.  It could be compared to those little salad spinner thingys that “dry” lettuce.  After the clothes are finished spinning, they are hung on clotheslines to dry.  That time I kind of skipped the dryer part and went straight to the clothesline.  

At the fourth try, the next day, everything worked perfectly.  The clothes washed, I rinsed them in the sink, put them in the spinner, and hung them on the clothesline.  Of course, I was wondering if clean clothes were really worth all this trouble.  This whole fiasco took about four days or so because I didn´t have either time or electricity.  The day was really hot, about 95 degrees, so I expected the clothes to dry quickly.  I left them in the courtyard and went to  study Spanish, went to Mass, cleaned the kitchen, helped at lunch, and spent my afternoon teaching some girls crafts.  Fun, but very challenging to explain!  However, most of the time they could guess what I was trying to say, and vice versa. I looked out the window after awhile.  It was raining!  I love rain, especially when the weather has been warm.

But….as I was walking home merrily in the rain, I remembered that my laundry was still hanging outside!

The problem is that the laundry is hung in this courtyard of my house.  It is only accessible from one end of the house, because it is surrounded by a wall and locked metal doors., and i was in the Retreat House down the road.  Yes, I ran. Unlocked the front door, dropped my bag by my room, and keys skittered across the floor, but I was halfway down the hallway.  I had some trouble unlocking the courtyard door, but luckily, by the time that I got there, they were slightly wet, but still mostly dry.

I don´t believe I have ever spent so much time dedicated to so little laundry.  

And just wait until you hear about my cleaning!

Many prayers and much love to all!