The Missionary by Margaret Ferguson

Author:Margaret Ferguson [Ferguson, Margaret]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Margaret Ferguson Books
Published: 2018-09-03T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-Seven

That night I suffered for my stupidity. It being too late to do anything about the hole, I merely put a BAND-AID on the situation, by stuffing my jacket into the crater in the wall. So, not only was cool air seeping in, but I’d just given up half of my blanket for the evening. That was just part of the reason I couldn’t sleep. The other was the memory of the hurt I had seen in Mary Beth’s eyes before walking away. I’d been such a jerk.

The next morning, I was up early and one-crutching it around town, looking for anything I could use to patch a hole the size of a basketball in a mud wall. When I returned for the tenth time, carrying a variety of trash, thin sticks, and discarded wire mesh, dropping it by the exterior of the house, Mary Beth and Denice were standing by the hole, looking down at it. They glanced up as I arrived, expressionless.

“Ladies.” I nodded. I didn’t know what else to say, so I said nothing. Abraham knelt beside me staring at the same hole he had the night before. I leaned over, whispered something to him, and then he hurried away. We had much to do if we were going to rebuild before it started snowing again. But we needed help.

Between tours three and four, Amanda had moved on to greener pastures, and I was left pondering the reality of starting over at thirty-two. I remember my two best friends in the whole world sitting there on the floor of my empty apartment, me in my recliner—the only piece of furniture she didn’t take—contemplating what was next? And then before you knew it, I was building bottle schools in Honduras. Funny what you’ll say yes to when Crown and Seven is involved. And yet, building schools in remote poverty-stricken areas, using only trash, mud, and chicken wire, was one of the most educational, enlightening and rewarding times in my life. So, I kind of got what Denice and Mary Beth and their husbands were doing here, except, that the schools we built weren’t direct neighbors with suicide bombers.

I took an empty plastic bottle and, using the stick, began stuffing it with as much trash as I could. One by one, the children came. They watched me, perplexed by what I was doing. When Abraham returned, I showed him what to do, and then he instructed each of the children to do the same. So, every child began stuffing as much trash as they could into each of the glass and plastic bottles until they were overflowing. Then we sealed them up and set them aside.

After a morning spent deconstructing and reconstructing, albeit rudimentarily, using wire and sticks and bottles stuffed with trash and mud, we had a wall. Now, if the weather and my luck held, it would dry by spring. We all stood back, eyeing our masterpiece proudly. And when we were done, I could feel several sets of eyes on me.

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