Awake

Update on furnishings for refugee friends

I have neglected to post an update to the "Bunk Beds for Famo and Isha" campaign. Allow me to do so now. Through the wonders and many times "delayed clarity" of cross-cultural communication, I discovered the actual sleeping arrangment of the 6 refugee kids living in this apartment near Ruth (the Somali Bantu refugee I tutor every week). Famo and Isha do have their own bedroom and did have beds. The beds however were not assembled properly and thus had been deemed "broken". Several twists of a screwdriver later, that problem was rectified.

There was a bit of a mattress spectacle, however, as I had understood (not entirely accurately) that the mattresses were "broken" and in need of replacement. (In actuality, the bed frame was the problem, not the mattresses—although they were old and a little, ok, quite, stained.) Due to my misunderstanding of the mattress/bed situation, I had procured mattresses from a family from church whose daughter is in my 4s class. When I brought the mattresses and boxspring over to the apartment to replace the "broken" ones (which weren't really broken, just kinda gross), they decided they wanted to keep them and actually I only ended up with one icky mattress to take away. This produced another problem: what was I going to do with this icky mattress? I ended up taking the icky mattress to the dump out in Hillsboro where they graciously allowed me to dump it for free. (Usually, the minimum charge there is $29!)

So, bunk beds would have been nice, but that would have produced another problem, what to do with the existing beds? So it all worked out in the end.

Now to deal with some other little things...filing a complaint to DHS for the interpreter they provided who didn't speak Ruth's dialect and caused the discontinuation of desparately needed TANF grant money; getting a $10 plastic toilet set at Lowe's to replace the cracked one in Ruth's apartment (the manager wants to charge $50!). (Thanks for the tip, Drew, property manager extraordinaire.) And, finally, the tedious task of getting the phone wiring repaired in Ruth's apartment, the failing of which has deprived Ruth of a phone line. (Oy. What next?)

Thus I continue my foray into the tangled webs of social services, public utilities, and landlord-tenant agreements...for single illiterate moms recently relocated to a new continent with refugee status.