Good deeds and injuries

Karin took this selfie when she helped to build the Habitat for Humanity house.

And this link is to a copyrighted photo of some volunteers. You can easily recognize Jimmy & Rosalynn Carter. Garth Brooks, the singer, is the only worker wearing a dark blue shirt.

Karin is in the second-backmost row, the fourth person from the left.

Unfortunately, when she came home, she was badly sunburnt.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

I also am injured. Chopping an onion last night, I nicked open a fingertip; this morning, while showering, I reopened the wound. This minor injury has been amazingly bloody.

Karin has been looking after me, and so has Mary, who quit teaching high school English to become a nurse-in-training.

The Carter project

Our Indiana county is the site of this year’s Jimmy & Rosalynn Carter Work Project, an intensive building campaign by Habitat for Humanity. Later this week, Karin will help to build one of the houses.

I wanted to peek at the Carters, and so, yesterday, Karin & I attended the “project launch,” which was held inside Notre Dame’s basketball gym in front of thousands of people. I thought Jimmy Carter might say a few words about the Bible. Alas, what transpired was an hour of mutual congratulation by the local bigwigs.

I did learn that one of the dignitaries – an architect named LeRoy Troyer, the designer of the main building of the Ark Encounter – had long worked with Habitat for Humanity, and that he’d been inspired by the Amish practice of raising barns.

David Letterman told a few jokes and introduced the Carters. Jimmy Carter said very little. Even so, he was the night’s best speaker. As the proverb has it: when you reach the end zone, you should “act like you’ve been there before”; that was what Jimmy Carter did.