With a little help from Toby and a steep learning curve for an aspiring geek, here are some photos of the CHRPA “campus” and a few shots of our jobs so that you can visualize where we are and what we might be doing. First, is our present “home”.
The CHRPA office is the green building behind the red van. They just moved in last summer. Before that the “office” was a large closet – now a laundry room – in the VS (voluntary service) house. Our RV, our home, while we are here, is behind the Cholla cactus in the foreground. Our truck that was stolen was parked right where the van is in this photo – and we were in our RV at the time! (The guy wasn’t timid. It was 2:30 on Sunday afternoon.) The shop is on the left, and that’s where we keep all the tools and supplies when they aren’t on one of the trucks. A Curved Billed Thrasher lives in the Cholla and sits on top of the plant and sings for us almost every day, if we are around.
Below is another perspective. Looking from East 30th Street, the Shalom Mennonite Church is on the left, the VS house is straight back, and our RV is obscured by the 5th wheel trailer on the right. You can see the shop beyond the hedgerow on the right.
Things have come together for us here now, our new truck runs well and provides us with more room and more tool storage than our stolen one did. It’s much more comfortable on our backs too.
The word went out after our truck was stolen, and as of today CHRPA has two “new” (old) trucks to replace it. Last week TEP (Tucson Electric Power – the local electric company) came by with an enclosed utility body truck that they donated. Meanwhile the pastor at Shalom Menno Church who comes from Ohio contacted some friends in Kidron and the Kidron Electric Co. donated one of their vans to CHRPA too. The question of how the van would find its way to Tucson came up and a local Sunday school class decided to use some of their mission funds to finance the trip and a couple from the church drove the van down. It arrived two weeks ago, and is already part of the “fleet”.