This past Saturday, the house went down to Florida City where one of my room mates works at an after school program called "Branches." Branches is in a very poor place where there seems to be lots of crime. The whole town, while built full of big condos, is all government funded housing. They were built to try and attract people to move there, but the opposite occurred. No one moved down, and now these nice houses are all really part of the "hood." It is funny to know you are in the ghetto, yet see all these nice houses!
Their program had a family service day for the kids in the program and their parents. Wanting to see where our room mate worked, the ones available from our house went and helped. They had many events or things planned for the people that showed up, however, it poured rain all day. Therefore, I do not know how much got done that they wanted done and h
ow much improv they did at finding jobs. However, I was assigned to paint murals all day since they knew I was an artist. The first one was to continue or finish a mural of a tree that was already started. It was very hard to do as it was not my style, didn't have the same paint colors (so I had to try and mix to match) and was painting in a small, very busy hallway. Very packed with people at times. Work seemed impossible there. Finally, after that was done, I was put in the outside bathroom, trying to make it look a little nicer. They lets kids loose
in it one day with paint and brushes to make a mural, but they wanted something to almost cover it up. I felt bad covering the work of the children, so I tried to fill in the blank spots with Hibiscus flowers. They always said in painting class that you should paint things that interest you. It makes the work look better and you have more fun doing it. Well duh! Let me
tell you, hibiscus flowers are not my favorite thing in the world. I kind of feel bad because I did not do that good of a job, and it was really hard to go back and try to fix them, as I knew they just weren't me. (The two big flowers are the ones I did, over top of some of the little kids art.)
As the evening came to a close, we ate supper there with the locals and the people of Branches and then came home to reunite with our room mate JJ who had been in Pennsylvania with business the whole week. It was good to finally have my room mate back and get a little bit of testosterone back in the house. All the estrogen was starting to get to me I think. We once again are a big (little) happy family!
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