Woodworking at “The Harbor”

I’m sure you are looking at this photo and wondering what contraption is this! Well, this is a shoe rack. In many Russian apartments you have a shoe rack near the door. It’s a custom here when entering a home to take off your street shoes and put on some slippers. Often, homes have extra slippers for guests. The shoe rack helps organize the shoes and slippers so they are not all over the floor.

Projects like these are done in “The Harbor” to teach life skills to these graduate orphans that live there. Briefly, “The Harbor” is a privately funded organization in St. Petersburg that takes youth who have “graduated” from the orphanage and puts them in this two year residential program. During these two years, boys and girls learn life skills like how to cook for themselves, budget their time, money, and keep up an apartment. They go to school or work depending on their individual situation. They have mentors that live with them to give structure. SAC works with them on our short term trips to teach some of these life skills. Woodworking seems to be a popular project when I come.

For this trip we built this shoe rack as something practical that could be used. I went to their home in early April to begin the project. We had purchased some of the wood, but after about 3 hours of looking, we couldn’t find the rest. That first night we began cutting the pieces needed with the lumbar we had. They had all the tools, but the saw blade on the jig saw was a dull as a butter knife! I could have turned the blade around in the saw and cut with the back side of the blade and it would have been just as successful. So, that first night we didn’t get much accomplished.

I came a couple weeks later with some members of our first mission team. However, they didn’t have a new blade by that evening yet, but at least they had found the wood! Again, we didn’t get much done that evening. I did tell them what they needed to cut and gave them some “homework” to do.

This past Saturday when I arrived, I had brought some new saw blades. However, the boys had cut the wood anyway! Everything was cut and ready for assembly. I’m not sure if they cut the wood with a new blade or not, but everything was ready to go at long last! In Russia, things take a lot longer to get done. I just can’t hop in the car and run down to Home Depot and put up the things I need. The store may be out of the items, we have no car to transport them, and it takes a lot of time to find the items we need.

Nevertheless, I showed the guys how to assemble the project. After they got going, it was all assembled with glue and nails in under an hour!

The project was taken from a picture I saw in a magazine. I like it as the plan could be modified easily either in height, width, or depth. Thanks to Kevin Kelly and his son who helped come up with drawings and measurements for this project along with a prototype they built on a Sunday afternoon. The guys modified Kevin’s design from the original measurements to make it fit into a certain space in the girl’s apartment of “The Harbor”. They also decided to make it a 3 shelf version than the 2 shelf design our prototype had been designed from.

This was a great project for them as it was practical, easy to build, and easy to modify to specific apartments. The guys had a lot of fun building it. They waited for me to arrive on Saturday afternoon. We assembled the project and then had dinner together. The mentor who speaks English had to go, but I hung around with some of them for a couple of hours. It was interesting as I tried to use my limited Russian skills to have a conversation. It worked and I understood about 80% of what they were talking about if we took time to explain it to each other.

Thanks for your prayers for this mission trip. Saturday was my last project that I needed to complete before going back to the states. I have some meetings and visits to make Monday and Tuesday before heading back on Wednesday, but the completion of this shoe rack gave a sense of accomplishment. It also serves as a reminder of the simple carpenter, who came to earth, assembled a plan of salvation, and from a wooden cross proclaimed, ”It is finished”.