Dad Kistler in Najile

One of the greatest blessings of Dad Kistler's visit was his willingness to do the various odd-jobs we never felt like doing ourselves. Dad's handiness came in handy time and again, and our house is the better for it.

One of our biggest debacles has been our lack of gate for our compound. For months we have realized that we needed a fence if we wanted to end the daily routine of herding livestock from our yard. When dad arrived, we had one half of our fence installed, but it needed painting and the second half of the fence needed to be installed as well. Dad worked multiple days on our fence, painting both halves black and mixing the cement for the second half's installation.

A second project of dad's was removing the bats from our roof (belfry). Our house had been home to a small colony of about 40 bats which was fine aside from their excessive excrement and annoying bat-sounds 24-7 (nocturnal my foot). Dad “volunteered” to spelunk into the roof, drive out the bats and stuff the holes in the wall with plastic bags. It took multiple hours of shooing and stuffing before the job was complete, but dad was up to the challenge. As of now, we are still bat free!



Dad's most valuable contribution to Steph's well-being was doing the dishes and general cleaning. Neither of us particularly enjoy doing the dishes, its difficult with limited water. Dad took over dish-washing duties, following our exact instructions on how to wash. Despite his clear annoyance at washing dishes, he did more washing than both of us combined during his two weeks.

Finally dad was a great help while working in the garden. Once our gate was installed we could finally plant vegetables free from goat interference. Dad's insight into planting and muscles put towards weeding gave us the kick-start that we needed to start our garden growing.
Overall, we had a great time with dad and took mom's advice to “put him to work.” Dad was (and remains) the Najile Handy-Man