Finding the Good in the Bad

Here is a little random story for you. I am at work on a Friday afternoon, eagerly anticipating the weekend, and no one else is here except the janitor, so I can take a little break for a blog. Two weekends ago "Kentuckiana" experienced very heavy rains which caused a lot of flood damage. The basement at the community ministries next door was completely flooded, which was very inconvienent for them because that is where they do most of their services. And it caused this building to smell horrible! Over at Americana, we thought we only experienced some slight flooding in our kitchen and boiler room and we lost some janitorial supplies like all our toilet paper. Not that big a deal. No one thought to check in our basement. I suppose this should have been me since I am the "Facility Manager" but you know, I have a million other things to do. A few days later (this was last week) our pest control guy came to spray and came to me and said "uh, I can't spray under the stage in your gym because it is flooded!" Oops. It looks like the water came up quite high, over two feet. By this time we saw it was just all soaked up into the carpet and smelling quite nauseating. Mainly we used these rooms as "storage" for a lot of junk. One side was fixed up though to hold "soccer" meetings for the kids (it used to be a locker room back in the day when this was a high school). So this caused some extra work for me with calling insurance people, carpet cleaners, construction compaines, making an inventory of what we lost, etc. Luckily the insurance people were actually quite helpful as well as the construction company. When they finally came over here this week they were quite timely. The carpet is ripped up now and it does not smell down there anymore. Today they came back to get rid of all the junk for us that is ruined. They are loading it all up in a big truck as I write. And why does this excite me so much? One of my big projects this past year has been trying to get this building free of clutter and junk, which has been quite a huge job. And now there are people down there doing it for me! Some of this stuff I have been wanting to get rid of for a long time, but was told to keep it "just in case we need it some day." Although I always thought it was a bunch of crap we don't need. And now it is ruined so we have to get rid of it. Hooray!! That space is going to be so much cleaner now! One good thing came out of the flood.

Ok that entry was pretty pointless, but I am excited. However you can't always find the good in the bad. This morning I opened the building to be greeted by a police officer with some terrible news. Four Somali Bantu children were killed by their father this morning, all under the age of 8, a few miles from our community center. He was coming to see if we had contacts in the Somali Community to help translate, so I helped him with that. What a way to start off the day. At first my stomach was feeling quite sick, wondering if I knew this family and they were kids that came here. The police officer did not know the names. I have since learned that we did not have contact with this family here at Americana. Instead they went to another community center not far from here and were clients of Kentucky Refugee Ministires. Not that this makes it any better, it is still an awful situation. But I am not sure how I would handle this if I knew the family. Sorry to end on such a sad note.