Can you imagine that you are about aged 4-10 and you have never seen a vacuum cleaner before...never even imagined that there was such a thing or that there was a need for them in the world. Well, the Primary Room at the Kauma Branch meetinghouse is in the 2 car garage and FM recently carpeted it to make it nice and to help make it quieter with all those little plastic chairs moving around all the time. The carpet did solve both of those. It is much quieter and it doesn't look near so much like a garage ... but ... the branch doesn't have any way other than a broom to clean it. Because it was getting pretty bad even before the branch Christmas party we brought our vacuum cleaner with us. A broom does a decent job with the big stuff but after all those kids eating all that rice and stuff in there we thought it would never be the same.
Well into the cleanup phase Elder Prete got the vacuum out of the truck so we could tackle that carpet, something we were dreading with all that sticky rice tromped around. There were still a couple of dozen kids around and of course they were curious to see what the contraption that Elder Prete was plugging in was for. As always when something might be about to happen, there was instantly a circle of kids around him. Of course, the first thing that came to Elder Prete's mind was to pull the wand off the hose and try to get one of the biggest kids on the front of his shirt. Oh my word!!!! You would think he had let a lion loose the way their eyes flew wide and they all scattered! Of course it didn't take long for them to creep back, the big ones first followed closely by the littler ones. He showed them how it would suck onto his hand and that it didn't hurt. One by one they would stick out their hand then pull it back as soon as the hose got close.
I just kick myself for not having my camera ready. I'd give anything to have a video of that. It's almost time to take the machine over again so this time I'll be set.
After a few minutes we showed them what the vacuum is really for and then the fight was on. Who got to run it? Finally we had one of the branch presidency pick 6 of the bigger kids and we shooed the rest of them out because there wasn't even room to move by then and it got tracked up as soon as the head passed. Those kids vacuumed for most of an hour in that room. They even had a couple of kids down with damp cloths loosening the ground in stuff. After they couldn't find any more on the carpet, they did the window sills, the grooves in the metal garage doors and anything else they could think of. We couldn't believe how good it looked. Elder Prete earned a new name - Tom (as in Sawyer).
We'll post some pictures of the next go-round. You had to be there!!! It was great!
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