"Other duties as assigned"

This phrase is probably the running joke in a million job sites around the world. It's that catch-all for the things you can never IMAGINE being called on to do in the course of a work day...but yet they happen.

I had one today. Friday afternoon is rec/PE and crafts day for the kids; the older ones have rec while the little ones work on some arts and crafts, and then the two groups switch, and then we all have a snack and go home. It's a great day. Despite the pretty strong wind today, 99% of the rec time went without any major incident, barring the usual "so-and-so cheated!" accusations and someone getting pegged a little too hard by an errant ball. We made the mid-afternoon switch-off, and Escuelita I came outside. They, too, played well, and barring having to chase the occasional kid and bring them back to the game (which isn't exactly out of the normal...), it went spectactularly.

And then, just before snack time, it happened. The kids had to make an attempt at shooting a basket in the basketball hoop before going to wash their hands, and on the last person, the ball got caught up on the ledge, exactly behind the hoop and goal board. Somebody had to go up and get it...and I'll bet you can guess who ended up with the job.

Fabiana: "Kevin, you don't mind going up there and getting the ball, right?"
Me: "Sure, no problem - where's the ladder?"
Fabiana: "Oh, we don't have one. You have to climb up the back door onto the roof and walk from there."
Me: "WHAT?!?!"

Suffice it to say I had never been asked to climb up a door onto the roof of a building before, and I was a little unsure as to how this was to work without me falling and breaking a tibia. Fabiana and I went around the other side of the building to the aforementioned back door, and the plan was laid out for me in more detail. Fabiana would hold the door still (taking care of concern number one: "how is the door going to stay in place while I'm climbing it?"), and I was to use the deadbolt as my first foothold. From there, it was a matter of climbing up the metal bars across the window of the door and grabbing the lowest part of the roof, then getting myself up onto the roof from there.

I am not necessarily the world's biggest fan of climbing up things. I had a near-phobia of ladders/climbing as a child, and the phrase "acrophobic" HAS been used to describe my relationship with heights in the past. I've gotten past a lot of that, in no small part thanks to certain African situations in which my options were "climb up this ladder that doesn't even look like a ladder and sleep on the roof on top of a cliff" or "certain death." Nonetheless, I was still a smidge nervous during the execution of this feat. However, I made it up to the roof, and walked over to the ledge: step one, complete.

Step two: get the ball out of the wire cage behind the basketball goal, without sliding off the slanted ledge, with an audience of 6-10 year olds yelling "don't fall!" I, carefully, walked across the ledge to the goal, and discovered that the ball was in the dead center of the cage - just barely in my reach. I managed to snake my hand into the cage and, with a finger tip, roll the ball close enough to get a hand around it, pulled it out, tossed it down, and step two was accomplished.

However, much like every other mission in life, this one wouldn't really be over until I got "home", and as any fan of movies knows, this is without fail the hardest part. If climbing up a door onto a roof was a little tricky-seeming, climbing down was doubly so, as the gap between the roof and door required a blind, backwards, "I hope to God my foot is going to find the top of this door" step of faith off the roof. I even prayed a short, but exceptionally earnest (and not fit for ELCA blog publication) prayer as I got ready to make my descent...and it went off without too much problem, other than not being to find the deadbolt with my foot and saying "oh well, I'm close enough" and jumping down off the door a few inches higher than I'd have liked.

My Lilliputian crowd was already there, waiting for me. They even chanted my name as I helped usher them in to the dining room for snack-time (whether for my rooftop heroics or snack-time, I don't know). I felt like a war hero, or an astronaut returning from the moon. All in a day's work, kids - just doin' my job.