Preparing a House for Refugees

Several members of my school's National Honor Society did some volunteering with World Relief, the organization through which we distributed Christmas gifts to refugee families in the area. This time, our job was to set up a house for a refugee family from Burma (Myanmar) that will be arriving later this week.

I noticed several things upon entering:

• The kitchen tiles are the dirtiest tiles I had ever seen in my life. Additionally, one of them smack dab in the middle of a doorway (that doesn't have a door) threatens to flip over or break in half if you step on it wrong.
• The stairs down to the basement are wooden and wet (which makes me afraid they're just going to break apart one day) and also really steep. The stairs up to the second floor are much more solid but just as steep. (I almost fell down them once.)
• There are scribbles, dents, and places where the painter missed a spot all over the walls and cabinets.
• There are at least three generations of phone line in the basement.
• The water faucet in the bathtub cannot be turned off.

Let me expand on that last part a bit. As far as I can tell, water had been running in the bathtub for days. The faucet can't turn it all the way off, even what should be the "off" position produces a strong flow. When I arrived, the people already there were trying to figure out how to stop it. I located the main water valve and closed it, solving the constant-waste-of-water problem, but making it hard to do dishes.

World Relief sent two of its staff; they were very helpful, bringing supplies and a checklist of what needed to be done. My first task was setting up beds from frames. Since I actually read the instructions, this wasn't too hard - the trickiest part was getting the mattresses up the very steep and very narrow stairway. After a little bit of furniture rearrangement, the room layout seems to make sense.

I then went on to cleaning the kitchen. I used some wet rags to wipe down the inside and outside of cabinets, drawers, and the refrigerator. This actually took quite a while. I had to take a break because I reached a cabinet that was so dirty the rags needed to be cleaned almost constantly, and the water situation was not such that we could do that. (By then, World Relief had called a plumber and he was working on it.)

So, I went over to the living room and moved a bunch of furniture around until I got a layout that seats everybody in the family and that I think makes sense. This involved moving certain gaudy plastic chairs upstairs where they wouldn't destroy the reasonably nice look of the living room.

We all took a short break to let the plumber finish his job. Apparently, the pipes had frozen and one had burst, resulting in the constant gush of water into the bathtub. I then finished scrubbing the kitchen's storage areas and made an effort to remove the crayon and pencil scribblings from the walls.

The final stage was to wash the dishes. Actually, by the time I got there, they had already been washed with soap - we just needed to rinse, dry, and store them. While I worked on drying them, the kitchen floor was mopped, significantly improving its appearance.

The house could still use a good vacuuming, but we didn't have one. It looks better than when we got there, and I think we did a pretty good job.