A Hole

I've mentioned before how incredible Ann Arbor, Michigan is. One of the coolest things about it is the amount of diversity the University of Michigan brings. I met people from what seemed like every foreign country while I was there. One such man was Nic Jain, from India. His basement had flooded because the heavy clay surrounding his house created a pool of water against his house and together cracked the foundation. I was one of the four elders who agreed to help this nice man with this problem.

June 29th - Work began on this project. We dug a little against the wall of the house until we uncovered the crack in the foundation. We patched the crack, so leaking would stop, and made plans to prevent future cracks and leaks. There's typically a layer of pea gravel underground a ways to allow a less dense (that freaking clay) place that water can run off. The plan was to dig a hole down to the gravel, then fill the hole mostly with new gravel so water would never pool against this part of the house again. We dug the first couple feet and called it a day, making plans with Nic to come finish on July 4th, at 10:30 (ie just after studies).

July 3rd - (Note: This part of the story would be much better given in person. Having watching Apu from the Simpsons for 16 of the first 19 years of my life I've developed a pretty okay, Indian accent.) We got in for the night and called the Hill Street elders to confirm our plans. Elder Wade said Nic had left a message saying we should start at 8:00 because, "Elder Ledbetter likes to get an early start!" Considering our daily schedule consisted of two-hours of scripture study from 8 to 10, we could all only laugh at the ridiculousness of him saying this. Nic then called us and said Elder Wade was hoping to get started early. We couldn't believe this dude was lying to us when we were already willing to help.

July 4th - Anyway, he offered to make us breakfast so we decided to move our studies up an hour, and told him we'd be there at 9:00. BIG mistake! It was clearly the first time this man had ever made oatmeal, which I say because it was basically like eating chunky water. It was so bad that midway through my bowl when he announced he'd now be making us toast, his voice sounded like an angelic choir. Bread, a toaster, and jelly and butter packets he'd obviously stolen from IHOP.... can't go wrong there right? WRONG! Minutes later he brought us each a piece. We expected toast, but were blessed with crackers, completely blackened and sprinkled with stale crumbs from previous uses of the toaster. We choked down that round of toast and, before he made more, we taught Nic how to empty the crumbs from the machine which had never been done. With two slices of "toast" and a bowl of "oatmeal" in each of us, we were ready to go to work on the hole.

Really the next few hours (I do not recall how much time we actually spent) were a lot of fun. Clay is super hard to dig, and the deeper we got, the harder it was to lift it out, but it was a great time with three friends and an experience I'll never forget. We dug, and dug, and played the movie game while we dug, and told mission stories while we dug, and it was a blast. However the longer we were there, and the deeper we went, the more ludicrous our task seemed. We kept expecting to hit the pea gravel but it just wouldn't come. Three feet down, nope. Four, five, six, seven feet. Nope. Time passed and finally we stuck the gravel and rejoiced! We had dug a hole in clay wide enough for the four of us to stand in and nine feet deep (on stomachs filled with only the breakfast described earlier).

July 14th - Time between digging the hole and now had been used doing actual missionary work. We had placed a board to keep too much water from going in the hole, but simply didn't have the time until today to fill the hole with gravel. In the meantime, we'd been receiving calls from Nic all the time. He seemed to have all the time in the world to accept our help, while we truly had no time to finish the project until now. We went to his house and filled the hole, put a thin layer of the original ground on the top and the project was finished. Throughout the project, he'd continuously been telling us how much he wants to hear what we have to say about the church when we get done, so we pulled out our planners to see when we could arrange a lesson. Turns out July 14th is the last day he has any time to do anything, so we were unable to set up an appointment. (For the rest of my time in Ann Arbor, he never met with us, nor talked to us again.)

I'll leave interpretation of the title of this blog to you. Does it describe four elders bonding while digging a nine foot deep hole, or does it describe a man who "abused our kindness and fed us the worst oatmeal ever distributed unto man?" Or maybe both?