Broken Scaffolding

In a rare use of analogy, I described our situation to a friend like this:

"You have to put up scaffolding to build a patio. But we feel like we spend the bulk of our time on the scaffolding, and we only put up a board or two on the patio every now and then."

Strictly speaking, this is not the case. We spend a great deal of time in our neighborhood, talking with the kids, meeting with the refugees, shuttling people to local churches, government offices, and grocery stores, and doing the exact things we came down here to do.

However, the mold in our apartment is making an increased impact on our health, so we feel a bit like we're doing maintenance on the scaffolding, trying to figure out how to get apartment management to check it, trying to figure out where to sleep in the meantime1, trying to figure out where we would go if we had to move.

We may need to close the afterschool program for a few days, because we are concerned about the safety of holding it in a mold-infested apartment (although Lord knows how bad the conditions are in the kids' own homes).

We near the end of this post. It is, hopefully, one of those multi-post stories2 that arcs noticeably up after the few miserable early posts. We shall see.

1. Actually, during the writing of this post, a friend called and said we could use his guest bedroom this week. I left the concern in there and decided to footnote it instead because of the influence of David Foster Wallace, whose mammoth novel Infinite Jest has distracted me through the mold-related stress of this day.

2. For another example, see "Flesh and Spirit" series on this very blog.