Tuesday SALS Kids (Americor)

Today we started out finishing our paint job of Lisa's house. Our SALS companions were about 18 years old and were working on the exterior siding of the house. They were clearly mostly thinking about the bottom line. They worked when Gary wasn't looking. That is, the SALS high school dropouts were getting paid.

The legitimacy of the real-life need of our work was again debatable, as was somewhat explained yesterday. Lisa had the physical ability to walk and clean her house, and she could have tried to paint it. She didn't NEED the work which we were doing. Her hobbies seemed to consist of smoking cigarettes and watching TV. Maybe we provided inspiration to her or to someone. Perhaps someone will visit her house and be inspired by our volunteer work.

A lot can be said about the SALS kids who were getting paid. While they appeared to lack motivation, they primarily lacked leadership. They were working on difficult tasks such as applying siding. Not all of the kids had work or direction at all times. At one point, 'buck' decided to arrange his boss, Garry's toolbox. By about 2 PM we were starting to see the end of the painting work. A group of 6, including myself, went off to another site to work with Gary. This was when the work started to get truly questionable. Our group of 6 broke into two groups of 3. One group of 3 went to paint a garage which already had a cote of paint. We didn't come to West Virginia to paint a garage. The other three people, the group which included myself, went to paint the kitchen. The kitchen light was dim and I was unable to see where i was painting. We were applying a non gloss coat to a glossy coat on a stuck type ceiling. It was a trivial task. It didn't make sense because the house was to be sold to one of the SALS group members.

Back as SALS, our host Arty cooked us classic West Virginia food for dinner. It was tasty and reminded me of the Soul Ingredient at FAR. We ate potatoes, ham biscuits and sweet and extremely sweet iced tea. Before this, Sirius and I went on a two mike hike up through a trail on the mountains which surround SALS