New chairs

Taco Tuesday ended up being very busy, somewhat unexpectedly. We had a decent crowd for the food, more back to the usual size, with over half of the kids being non-members.

Fortunately, there were a bunch of guys, because we would need their muscle. The church finally came through with an order that Ugo had placed well over a year ago for nice new padded chairs. The chairs we had were wooden, and many were rather worn and even dangerous, with backs about to break off. We had arranged for the new ones to be delivered Tuesday afternoon with the taco crowd available to help. Sure enough, they arrived around 3pm on three wooden pallets. Right before that, we had everyone help stack the old chairs in classroom #1. Unfortunately, the big cardboard boxes, with four new chairs per box, were too big to fit in our tiny elevator, so the guys had to carry 15 boxes of them up two floors (63 steps). There were six men, so they each made five trips up the stairs, with two men per box.

 

Nobody complained, and they just put themselves to doing it, but by the end they were understandably exhausted. Afterwards we immediately broke out the ice cream from the Knieses, since it was quite warm and they were really sweating. 

 

Then Alessio, Adrian, and I tackled taking the chairs out. I had the box cutter and opened each box, and they pulled out the stack of four chairs, and we removed all the packing material and stuffed it into one of the boxes. Dee writes: Alessio usually leaves about 3pm on Tuesdays to go to work, but he was determined to get all the chairs set up. He started double-timing as he yanked out each set of chairs and set up everything. He is a marvelous worker, and never makes a big deal about it. You can tell I'm his fan. We ended up with a bunch of tall stacks of new chairs, plus a ton of boxes and cardboard and packing material. The big classroom was completely full, with barely enough room to get in and out.

 

Some of the other kids helped with the last few boxes. Alkmini used a few pieces of the plastic protective netting as bling:

 After all that, we ended up with a bunch of wonderful new chairs

There are probably too many chairs now, with no place we know of to keep the extras, but we will figure that out as we go along. After all that, I started cutting down boxes into manageable pieces. It took a long time and was very filthy, with dust all over my clothes, but it had to be done. At first it seemed there might not even be time to get it all done before the end of the day, but it worked out. I sent Dee out to get some string to tie up all the cardboard pieces, and she literally had to run to find a hardware store right before it closed at 7:30pm. As you may remember, the only other time I have broken into a run in the last twenty years was on a trip to the refugee center, when I needed to speed up to stay with the young people. This time, the sidewalk was crowded and uneven and it had started to rain. But I was winging along, and nothing hurt then or when we got home. Wonderful. The store employee was standing outside waiting for me, because I got there exactly at their closing time, huffing and puffing a bit but victorious! 

With help from a few people, we got it all packaged up and stacked next to the old chairs in the small classroom, so that the church FM (Facilities Management) folks could pick it up early Wednesday morning -- hence the rush to get it done. The big classroom was stacked with all the new chairs, but at least it was possible to enter the room and walk around again. Dee wanted to keep some of the boxes for some kind of game (TBD), and I finally agreed to let her keep two of them. IMHO, there wasn't really room for anything else 😃. Here is a photo of all the stuff to be taken away, with over 200 pieces of cardboard:

In the middle of all this, we took an hour for choir practice, with only Dee, Jayno, and me. We practiced one hymn a little bit, and then we got the chance to chat with Lorenzo about the Italian hymns, which he translated for the "new" green hymnal in the mid 1990s. Turns out that the Italian hymnal does not include the national anthem (long story), but it does include something akin to it: "Va, pensiero", which is from the Verdi opera Nabucco in 1842. It is also known as the "Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves", based roughly on Psalm 137, which talks about the Jews during the Babylonian captivity. The wording is extremely flowery, with lots of archaic words, so the first time we sang it, nothing made sense. Then he explained the lyrics word by word; when we tried it again, and it meant a lot more to us. Apparently it was adopted to have a hidden meaning about Italian freedom. Very cool. Dee made some chocolate pudding from scratch for our dessert after choir, served with cookies and whipped cream.

A lovely nonmember young woman named Linda came again to visit with me and have a leftover taco. It's a pleasure to be connecting with these young people. She is studying medalion art (like coins) and on weekends works in a shop doing freehand embroidery on a machine. She writes names and sayings without even penciling it in first! 

After English class, we came home, with one big trash bag filled with packing material from the chairs stuffed in our trunk. We don't have a big trash bin available downtown, so we tossed it in the trash bin outside our apartment when we got home. Three Sorelle drove home with us after a lesson and the English class. The third was a young sister from Pisa, leaving in the morning for the Provo MTC to serve in Toronto, Canada. She had a very early flight, so our mission office (i.e., the Balzottis) housed her for the one night and would make the airport run before dawn.  

I was tired and sore after an unusually strenuous day.