The school kids work miracles

The new camp bathroom in  the ruins

Sorting out relics from the 2009 fires

Clearing a track for the new fence

March 27 2015

This has been a really big week. With help from Stevo, Edd and I managed to complete the new camp bathroom and toilet. I even had time to paint the walls a very clean looking white so that everything would look ready and nice for the school camp. (Even so, most of the kids took the option of just not washing when they found that they were expected to carry the water they needed from the dairy.)

We had 27 children and three teachers camping, which was the largest group so far. They used the kitchen up at the dairy but mostly cooked with the BBQ in the ruins. Yesterday they lit the pizza oven and made pizzas for supper. Their teachers took them up the hill in the afternoons and they all made temporary art works from found materials. This exercise worked really well and we could relax for a couple of hours before the evening chores began.

The kids all help with looking after the farm work in the mornings and evenings. We had small groups working as herders, dairy workers, arborists, chook keepers, gardeners, dog carers, rubbish men and kitchen hands. The chooks all got cleaned and treated for parasites and the trees got weeded and mulched. We had one day with out power, due to work on the lines, but the dairy workers managed to do the whole milking by hand. Our herdsmen did a terrific job of looking after the sheep and getting goats into the right places.

I planned major tasks that could be supervised from two locations. I was in charge of work done around the ruins and Edd had the area near his tool shed. One group at the ruins painted the pergola and another did some field archaeology collecting all the broken bits of tiles pots and metal left over from the fires and then sorting and cleaning them so that we could have a museum display.

Once the relics were moved the small poly house got demolished. Luckily one of the teachers grew up in a nursery and could tell everyone how to take things down. We now have a large flat area that will be prepared as a camping spot. We will recycle the metal hoops as a framework over  some fruit tree to stop birds pinching all the fruit.

In Edd’s area one group cleared a track by the gulley and then put up an electric fence all the way down. A second group collected all the waste metal material and a truck came and took it away. We thought we had organised for a skip to be delivered on Monday to do this but it never turned up so we needed plan B. The third group put insulation in the back wall of Edd’s shed and then nailed up play wood to line the wall. Today they put up massive metal shelfing so we can get stuff off the shed floor and stored out of the way.

Amazingly all this work was done in just five days. I like it when the kids say that when they first saw the task they did not think it possible but in the end they did it. I think that sort of thing is a very positive experience for them.