A Book Fair Sequel

One of the things that was bothering me throughout the Book Fair was that thousands of dollars were spent on our pavilion, only to have it torn down when everything was over.  This is what happens to all of the places.  Then I learned that our materials are all given to a needy family which I think is wonderful.  The family is responsible for taking the building apart and transporting the materials to their home.  Here are some photos of that process!  The family who is getting the home has five children in a little two bedroom home.  The father is a builder, but is unemployed right now.  He carefully supervised the dismantling with a friend and a Haitian helper, and they even took every screw and nail and put them in a bucket to reuse.  I felt a little sad when it came down...

The deck and sidewalk boards are removed. 

 Each board was carefully saved.

 The front door and windows are gone.

 The porch is nearly gone.  It was kind of scary when the helper was sitting on top of the tile porch roof removing the screws with an electric drill - I worried that they would all just come off and he'd go sliding to the ground.  Notice the ladder which was made on the site.

 Back doors and railings all gone.

 Drywall all gone.  At the building next door, the workers just took hammers and smashed the drywall and glass windows - I can't imagine that clean-up mess.  Our guy carefully removed as much drywall as possible, I guess to reuse...

 Sorted into piles of wood, metal roofing, plywood flooring and aluminum sidewalk supports.

 All gone - you can see the surrounding rubble.

 Here's the Monteros' home.

He is building the new home around the outside of the old one and then will remove the inside walls. I don't know if you remember the windows from the front of the Noche de Hogar building, but here's one now in the front wall.

 Here is Brother Montero, his wife and one son.  Can you see that she has a beauty parlor in her front room, but no windows?

Here's a back view of the house.  The wood wall was once the decking from the pavilion. Can you see an old crib-sized mattress propped up as part of the wall?  You can see how much larger the finished house will be. (By the way, they live on a dirt road that appears to be getting curb and gutters before getting paved which will be nice for them, but their lot is still pretty ragged.)

I don't know if we will visit the site later for a further update.  It just made me so thankful for our lovely apartment here and our home back in Atlanta, and a little ungrateful to the Lord for His bounteous blessings.  

Note:  This blog entry is dedicated to Ben and Jaclyn who have purchased an older home in Dallas which will be torn down for a new home to be built on the site. Good luck!

La Feria del Libro

The Book Fair – ah, how to begin to describe this whole experience.  Every year, Santo Domingo has a big book fair held on the grounds of the Ministry of Culture.   The fair runs 18 days, and around 40 different organizations, including our church, build booths.  Last year, ours had around 38,000 visitors.  “Booth” is really not a correct word.  All of the buildings are at least 12 x 18 or so, but most are much larger, including ours.  They are all constructed in less than three weeks.  Here are some other booths:

The theme this year is “Noche de Hogar” or Family Night.  

Under construction - these booths have electricity, air conditioning, etc.  

Our booth under construction

Our booth, as you can see, has been designed to look like a house.  The fair is open every day from 8 am until 10 pm, with two different shifts of families from the congregations here to welcome folks and share the information. It has been a tremendous amount of work, and we are so happy to have it opened. 

Our finished booth

So in less than two months, we have helped design the structure, helped write the script and supervised the filming of an introductory video, sent out invitations, approved and paid the vendors who built the structure, helped film the process and the daily activities, opened it every morning at 7:30 and then trained the day’s volunteers (about 150 have been involved), ran on errands for more materials, designed a website, designed a Facebook and Twitter pages, prepared gifts for the invited guests at the launching ceremony, prepared a press package for local newspapers and television stations, etc. Whew!  It has been mind-boggling.  We still need to prepare gifts for the volunteers and wrap up information for the planning committee.  Tomorrow is the last day (although we learned today that those in charge of the Fair are considering extending it another week which could bring about my demise!) 

Some of the volunteers who help run the booth

 A picture of the sign-in mural where folks sign that they want to have a family night.  We have used up four murals which are just covered with signatures.

 Inside the booth

On the positive side, we have had over 22,000 visitors and our booth has been featured in several TV broadcasts and print information.  We have also had some fun times meeting people and getting to know the Dominicans better. However, we are going to suggest that we start working on this next year in October and not have so much required and done at the last minute…