Welcome to The Sauna
We’re at a foster home this year, and Velma, the foster mother, saves the worst room for herself. She has no bed, just an old mattress pad on the floor, and the room is exposed plywood with crossbeams, stray nails and holes galore. This week she’s getting an upgrade, as my team is working to drywall, spackle and paint her entire room. It seems like a pretty cut and dry job, almost literally, but when the floor boards are also poorly maintained plywood, it becomes a bit trickier. Then you add in the fact that the roof is sloped and the floor bows, and the measurements get a bit wackier. And then you subtract any cross breeze through two open windows and crank the temperature to, quite literally, over 100 degrees, and it becomes a bit sweatier. This, my friends, is how “The Sauna” came to be.
If you put on clear goggles in a room and they fog up almost immediately, you may be in The Sauna. If your drywall sheets are stained with sweat, you might be in The Sauna. If walking outside into the Bahamian sun feels like a cool & refreshing change of pace, you might be in The Sauna. And if you’re one of the braves souls who decided they wanted to work on my team this week, you are most definitely getting your fare share of The Sauna.
Our team has large goals during this trip, but individual goals and battles pop up quite frequently as well. For me, that battle is this room, this absolutely horridly humid & hot room. But then I take a step back at the end of the day and realize how much we can do when we just forget how hard things might be and just do them. We almost finished all of Velma’s room today by working through lunch, rarely stepping out of The Sauna, and by working as a team. We built up trust in ourselves and our team when it came to measuring, cutting, hammering and other tasks. It was a transformation in a day for many who had never done this kind of work, and I couldn’t be prouder to have been there to witness it.
When Dan asked me to do drywall, I had no idea what I was in for. But now I feel like I’ve lost 30 pounds thanks to a lovely little retreat known as The Sauna, and my team is ready to tackle another massive drywall project tomorrow. It’s the next room over, so maybe it’ll cool off just a little.
