I'd wake up four days a week at 7:30, and by wake up I mean turn off my alarm and wait for Louis to come yell at me to actually get up. I'd have until he made his coffee to actually start moving otherwise he'd walk down without me. After I threw on my jeans and t-shirt, we'd take the 6 minute walk down the road to the dining hall. We either met up with Mia outside her building or down at breakfast, but we'd take our time eating. Fresh tomatoes, cucumbers, and peppers that we cut up the day before; cottage cheese; two bowls of cereal; and a cup of tea that was never quite strong enough, but the excessive amount of sugar in it made up for that.
As our friends showed up to eat, the three of us would head into the back and throw on our aprons. During a week one of us would work in the שתיפה (dishwasher) while the other two would start cutting up trays of vegetables for tomorrow morning; 2 trays of diagonally sliced cucumbers, 2 trays of thinly sliced peppers (usually red or yellow), and 2 trays of tomatoes. You really only had to wash the cherry tomatoes and take off the stems, but the large tomatoes had to be cored and sliced. We got pretty good at it, but only after a few close encounters (don't worry, Louis's hand is fine).
After about an hour or two, a sweet old Russian lady would come around asking who wanted tea or coffee? This tea was much better. Louis, Mia, and I would grab a few oranges from the fridge and take our tea out to the back loading dock for a break. We'd try being nice to the cats out back, but (as to be expected) they thought they were too good for us. So we were friendly with the cats until they were mean…then we hated them. O! Except for this one hideous one! We hated it all the time. It's not our fault though, it had this one eye that looked like it was going to pop out and it lived in the dumpster…it was terrifying.
One day we were out on our break and Louis and I decided it would be fun to climb up onto the roof. We had done it a few days earlier and all our scratches from the ledge had healed, so we were ready to go again. I never said it was a smart idea, but we had a good time so shut up.
Once up there, obviously we were going to have fun yelling at our bosses and watch them look around for us only to then realize that, "yup, the dumb American kids are on the roof again." Then, Chaim walked by. Now my Hebrew isn't amazing, but I'd been working with people who spoke no English for 3 months at this point; I clearly recognized when he shouted, "stay up there, I have a job for y'all" in Hebrew.
After a bit of shouting, I pieced together that there was an old air conditioning unit on the roof that Chaim wanted Louis and I to carry over to the edge of the roof. So we did. Then came the fun part. Chaim threw us a rope and said, "now lower it down." Louis and I were volunteers in the kitchen, and neither of us were in scouts…we didn't know jack about tying knots! We had no clue how to lower this 100+ pound unit off the 35(ish) foot roof, but we were willing to make it up.
We tried to wrap up the A/C, but after a while Chaim grabbed a ladder to come up and show us how it was done. Again, after a bit of struggling through the language barrier, Louis and I understood how exactly Chaim expected the three of us to lower down this appliance without dropping it…o ya, or falling off the roof.
We braced, kicked the air conditioner off the edge, and began to lower it down. Everything was going fine until it got stuck on something that stopped it from lowering. Chaim told Louis and I to hold tight while he went to check what happened. We pulled tighter, and waited for Chaim to tell us the problem. He peered over the ledge and just started laughing. It was already on the ground. Louis and I were preventing a stationary, broken air conditioner from falling to the ground.
No comments:
Post a Comment