Wow, it’s been a long week, but it’s gone so quickly. We’ve work 7 straight days just to make sure we really topped up our money fund, and the week has gone by so fast.
We’ve got tomorrow off though as the people we are working for are off out somewhere and said we should have the day off anyway!
This week we’ve been up at 6am most mornings, cycling up and down various hills, across rail tracks to a nice part of Tauranga where we are working then working until 5pm and coming home again, getting home about 6pm, having dinner, relaxing for an hour or 2 then off to be ready to be up again for 6am, so it’s been long tiring days, but we are really enjoying them as we are working alone together, so it’s been really nice.
But the week didn’t go by without it’s incidents, with me nearly going blind at one point!!
During the week I was asked to help out the son of the people we worked for … fine I thought, I bit of different work away from the kiwi fruit pruning would be good. And it only turned out to be holding some wire fencing together whilst the son welded it all, not so hard I thought.
That was until half way through the day and I realised that because I wasn’t wearing any goggles the metal dust had been getting in my eyes!! … silly of me really, but anyway, they were a little sore but I carried on throughout the afternoon without any goggles.
By the time we got home that evening my eyes were really sore, but nothing over the top that I didn’t think a good nights sleep would solve, so off I went to bed about 9pm I think it was, and woke up about midnight, going to go to the toilet and realising I couldn’t open my eyes!
At first I thought it was just because I was sleepy, but I started to feel quite awake and couldn’t open my eyes, not matter how hard I tried … I got quite panicky as they were really sore and I could only open them fractionally, enough to see a blur everwhere, so I woke Dena up in a state mumbling something like I’ve gone blind I can’t see … I can’t quite remember what I said because I was so panicked by not being able to see!!
Anyway, she got some cotton wool and soaked it in some warm water and lavender oil and I put them on my eyes, and it really started to sooth the soreness thankfully, but after a couple of hours I still couldn’t open my eyes properly, so we thought a visit to the hospital in the mornings was in order … by then I had calmed down a bit and could talk coherently!
I put some more warm water and lavender oil on some cotton wool, and tried to get back to sleep.
The alarm went off at 6am and I just naturally turned over and turned it off … forgetting about my eyes, then I realised they were open and I could see, woooo! …. they were still a little sore, but the difference was really amazing, I could open them fully and see!
We took a little longer getting ready that morning just to make sure my eyes were OK, and when we got to work we mentioned it to the people we were working for, and they told there son off for not getting me to where any goggles, which was nice as I had blamed myself … but then never having done that kind of work before I didn’t know for sure!
Anyway, we’ve also done a bit of flax weeving this week. One evening a couple of Maori ladies come into the hostel and showed a few off us a little bit of flax weeving and all about it in the Maori culture, which was really kool. They have plans of going around hostels etc and charger a little bit to show people how to weeve some flax and give a little talk on the Maori culture, which everyone thought was a good idea!
The Bearded Midget 