It's really a wall!

Things have been blessedly busy! We are enjoying a work team from Upper Deer Creek Church, Galveston, Indiana. This church holds the record as being the first church to send two work groups to Refuge Ranch in one year! We hosted our first ever work team from Upper Deer Creek this past February. God granted us grace before them and they felt called to come back! Praise God!

Besides the work team, we are all adjusting to Daniel's arrival in our home. The adjustment has gone wonderful and very smooth. Ana, who will be three years old in 10 days, has had the hardest time adjusting. She either wants to hold him, take care of him and play with him, which he doesn't always appreciate, or she is taking away his toys.

This week's work team has been working hard on taking down all the wooden forms that were put up in order to pour the cement of the back wall of the lower level. This is a 100 foot long, twelve foot high wall! Taking down the forms has involved snapping hundreds of wire ties and then taking down the forms.

Once the forms are down, some have been dismantled in order to be reused as forms for the headers (the next item to be poured). All of the wood has to be reoiled, with used car oil, in order to assure that it is not ruined by the sun and rain so that we can reuse the $5000 of wood that we invested in for forming the back wall. This same wood will be used to form the headers and then the roof of the lower level.

The group also helped one of Josiah and Fidel's ideas come to reality. We have a small area of grass between our house and driveway in which Pati has planted a few small flowers and other plants. Fidel and Josiah joined in her enthusiasm, but quickly realized that Beethoven (our Saint Bernard) and our new guard dogs would destroy any attempts at a small garden area. So, over a month ago, Fidel and Josiah gathered scraps of rebar and, while I was at school, made their own fence out of rebar scraps and pieces of string. Needless to say, I was moved at their creativity, their perseverance and their teamwork, but the fence was a bit dangerous (cut rebar has very sharp points) and wasn't exactly what you could call "attractive". So, Dale and the rest of the UDC team came to the rescue and helped Josiah build a picket fence. Refuge Ranch now has a white picket fence. Martita immediately got excited about turning the area into a rose garden! When Pati mentioned planting tomato plants there, Martitia promptly defended her territory and declared the area a flower-only garden - no vegetables allowed. Pati will have to wait for Lucy Marshall to help with the big vegetable garden.

It is wonderful to see the kids get excited about a project, make plans and carry them out. For our kids, that had no future and no thought about the future, making plans, dreaming and then carrying them out is huge!

To see more about this week's work team adventures, check out their blog at: http://udcmissionteam.blogspot.com/

As always, thanks for your prayers that sustain us throughout each day!

With much love and gratitude,

Julie