White-Out Wednesday

North Carolina Trip

Day 5: Hayesville, North Carolina: Hinton

Wednesday, May 28, 2014

Donnita Johnson, Sara Keiser, and Jill Kolbe

Jill’s Group: Today was a very eventful day for multiple reasons. Firstly, my team continued to put up railing on the porch for Ruby, her homeowner. Her chickens started flying around the work area as she worked; it was a crazy tornado of feathers and sawdust! Rudy is a very nice woman. She has lived in Haysville almost her entire life and definitely knows the meaning of “southern hospitality”.  My group, Madison, Jamie, Blake, Alex, Scott, and I, are so happy to have been able to help such a sweet person fix up her porch.

Sara’s Group: My group started working on painting the windows and railings of Dorothy, Wanita and Maxine’s house. They are just as nice as Jill’s homeowner; they even brought our group cookies in the middle of the day! They received many friends and visitors throughout the day and were just a blast to be around! After flying through painting the railings, we cleaned up and headed back to Hinton for an afternoon of fun.

Donnita’s Group: We had a lot to do today. My group, Eli, Conner, Alex M., Drew, Shawn, and I, managed to finish up the flooring in our homeowner Bill’s house. We had to do some crazy math and constantly beg our advisers to cut the boards in wacky shapes. I was in charge of putting down the flooring with Drew, who was better at making sure the floorboards were together correctly. Bill’s son arrived at the end and was so grateful for all the work that we had done. It made all of us feel really accomplished and understand just what the impact of our actions were on the family we were working with.

After all the groups arrived back at Hinton, we all loaded up in the bus and made our way to Walmart for a supply run and to buy gifts for our homeowners and supervisors.

 Walmart was just the first stop in our afternoon off from working with Hinton. The Hermann group then went to the famous Fire’s Creek. Everyone had a great time and although some of the rocks were slippery, nobody fell. We did get soaked, though! Donnita lost a shoe, but it was quickly retrieved by one of her friends. Sara chatted with Mrs. Dann and Ms. Vieth because she thought the water was too cold. Jill watched a group of boys make a bridge out of logs.

When everyone was done splashing around in Fire’s Creek, we loaded back up into the bus and headed to a little ice cream shop in downtown Hayesville named Chinquapins.  Soon the entire shop was filled wall-to-wall with hungry Hermannites craving milkshakes. It was a good thing Chinquapins has a huge variety of milkshake flavors, because everyone wanted to try something different. Donnita got a caramel walnut milkshake with Cookies-n-Cream. Sara bought chocolate ice cream in a waffle cone. Jill purchased a chocolate milkshake and a t-shirt (she’s quite the big spender).

Even though our ice cream stop was done, the day was still far from over. When we arrived back at Hinton, we found that Shawn and Scott had been hard at work preparing dinner for everyone. There was plenty of food to go around, but plates were a different story. We had all forgotten that we needed plates! Sara, Heather and Donnita went on a huge adventure to scrounge up any plates they could find. By the time they got back, plates in tow, they found that everyone else had gotten too impatient and had started eating without them! We didn’t mind though, because there was enough food to feed a small nation, or even a hungry group of teenagers.

After dinner, everyone hung out near the lake, swimming and having water balloon fights. We were having a great time until it started pouring! Everyone hurriedly packed up and ran for shelters, some more reluctantly than others. Being rained out wasn’t so bad, though. It gave everyone an opportunity to personalize the gifts we bought for the supervisors and homeowners. Jill even made her own hat!

We had a great time and are so sad that tomorrow will be our last day. It has been a great week at Hinton. We can’t wait to see what tomorrow has in store for us.

Working on the railing