We remain in Zagreb, confined to our quarters, except that we can go to the office to work each day. Not having an officially assigned duty, I do whatever needs to be done, including making runs to the store, oiling stuck/squeeky doors, getting cars serviced, fixing toilets, etc. In other words, I mostly do the things I've always enjoyed doing.
Zagreb is doing a great job of getting things cleaned up after the earthquake. The huge cranes continue to operate throughout the downtown area, getting broken chimneys down and rubble cleaned up so roofing guys can get up there and repair the damage. Our missionaries continue to work in shifts to provide service by helping with the grunt-work of hauling the rubble down to the ground where it can be loaded into trucks.
The parking spots in front of the mission office have been filling up lately. A couple of days ago, the only spot we could find was right next to a big pile of dusty rubble, so we risked it. Just before lunch Liz walked by the window, gasped, and told me I needed to get down there NOW! When I did, I found a dump truck on the street immediately behind our car, another one just farther along, and a front-loader gathering up the rubble and dumping into the trucks amid clouds of dust. They had already pulled the rubble away from the car, and the car was fine, other than having so much dust on the windows that it was running down in little avalanches.
This photo was taken after we'd driven around town, letting the dust blow off, and returned to the mission home.
There are now just the five of us in the office, and we are all new to it. So Liz is helping the new finance guy learn how to pay the bills, and they are figuring it out together. I help the lady in charge of cars and apartments, and she constantly asks me things to which my only answer is, "I've have exactly one more day doing this than you have." But we generally figure it out together, too.
Yesterday we got a delivery. Two boxes labeled 3M on the tops. We opened them up and found 16 boxes of N95 masks, which are the really good ones that actually will help to prevent the spread of virus. However, they are considered a critically short-supply item, reserved for medical personnel. We started to pass them out, but I suddenly realized they were not for us. Where we will need them is when a missionary gets sick with Corona. They will wear them to protect their caregivers. We let Sister M. know they had arrived and at her instruction, sent a box to each of the three remote senior couples who are still in place in towns where there are also young missionaries.
Sadly, by the time I realized they were not for us we'd all tried them on, and it is forbidden to share masks. So, we took a walk in the park at lunch time, wearing our highly effective, very uncomfortable, N95 masks.
We all have cloth face masks. They are held on the face with elastic loops that hook over the ears. I find them horribly uncomfortable, too, and of course a cloth mask is not very effective. However, the government wants everybody wearing a mask when outside, so they are largely for show. We wash them at the end of each day. If we really needed them to be effective, we'd have to find some filter material to put inside the cloth, and I expect we will get there soon enough. I discovered the mission home has a large supply of furnace filters in the basement, and I think that will be our filter material, if we don't find something better before then.
Zagreb international airport is the last regularly operating airport in the mission. They now have flights only to Frankfurt Germany, and you have to check with the airline for the schedule within 48 to 72 hours of your hoped-for flight date. From Frankfurt, you can get a flight to London or a few airports to the east, Turkey, Iran, etc. It seems like this is as minimal as it will be possible to get, unless the whole World shuts down. The good news is that rate of growth of COVID-19 cases has slowed tremendously in the last week.
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