RCLPC Senior High Mission Trip

NEW ORLEANS MISSION TRIP

Well, we’ve had a good time. The youth have done some hard work, both on houses and in their faith lives. We’ve had fun and fellowship and food that is in no way healthy for us. We’ve watched the Variety Show—and our youth put together a little comedy routine about “what singers in a choir are thinking while they’re singing” which was very funny (at least to us). Today we have one more Bible Study, a Closing Celebration, and a visit to the IMAX planned. After that we are going with the flow before we go to the airport...and then we’ll be seeing “all y’all” again! (making fun of southern-ese has also been a popular pastime this week...and sometimes slipping into it ourselves without thinking!)

Here’s a picture of our youth at the variety show....

See you tonight!

Peace
Teri

Hi friends!

Well, here we are on our last full day in New Orleans. Yesterday a lot of good work got done, and we had an intense discussion in our church group devotions about justice and equality and working for change in the world so no one is hungry, no one has to live without access to clean water or education or housing. It was a good discussion, and I look forward to continuing it throughout the coming year! Tonight we are talking about “change”--both within ourselves and how we can help change the world. I’m sure there will be lots to talk about!

Last night we had a free night because the chaperone hunt was cancelled, so we spent the evening together playing Capture the Flag and making ice cream sundaes. It was great fun, but we stayed up a little bit late—hence the afternoon email instead of the morning. I needed to sleep in a little bit today.

I don’t know yet how other work groups have gone, but we had three days in a row at the same house. It’s almost entirely cleared out now—the bathtub and other large fixtures came out today. Yesterday the truck came and picked up our debris piles twice, so this morning we had a fresh sidewalk to fill up—and fill it up they did, and quickly! The pile today was easily the size of both of our previous days’ piles together...and we got rained out after only about two hours today. The storms here come on quickly, we’ve noticed! One minute the wind is blowing one way and the storm seems to be passing us by, and the next minute the wind has reversed direction and the storm is coming straight at us. At first it was just a sprinkle, but the downpour came quickly and then just stayed there. People inside the house could still do some work, but once lightning and thunder started we were all back on the bus, wet and cold and heading back to campus. I’m still very impressed with the work for today, though!

Tonight is the variety show, then packing packing packing! Tomorrow morning we leave after worship and head to the IMAX theater to watch “Hurricane on the Bayou” and have lunch near the Audubon Institute. Then, depending on the time and weather, we will either visit Algiers Point (via the free Canal Street Ferry which conveniently docks right next to the IMAX theater), make another last-minute visit to the French Market, or possibly drive through the Lower Ninth Ward to see the extensive damage there. We leaders will decide tomorrow afternoon which option works best.

The photo I’m attaching today is of the machine that picked up our debris—it was fun to watch (we watched from the bus due to light rain and safety issues).

See you tomorrow night!

Peace
Teri

“Do YOU have the toilet paper????”

This was the second-most common phrase at our church-group devotions last night, where we started using a roll of toilet paper as a “talking stick” because everyone had so much to say, they all started talking at the same time! The most common phrase we heard last night? “Today the thing that made the biggest impact on me at the worksite was how we all worked as a team, where yesterday we worked as individuals.”

There’s a lot of team-building going on. Youth are making friends from around the country and across denominations, and they are all working really hard to help people get started on rebuilding their lives. The hard part of that is that first they have to throw away the stuff from their previous lives. Time after time we heard stories of youth bringing out personal possessions of those in whose houses we are working—lamps, pictures, calendars from walls, lightswitch plates from children’s bedrooms. We’ve seen houses with signs that say “We are at home!” and garage doors painted with the phrase “We’re still alive”--both of which are a powerful witness to the spirit of the people. We’ve also seen that the hurricane was a great equalizer, in terms of property. It is no longer possible to tell which is the “bad neighborhood” because every neighborhood in the city looks like one you shouldn’t be in—streets are damaged, yards are overgrown, windows are blown out, paint is peeling, garage doors are broken, whole subdivisions are deserted. My workgroup drove by Six Flags yesterday—it’s been closed since the storm. The sign is broken out and looks like a storefront sign in a sketchy neighborhood, the flimsy buildings are destroyed, and I suspect the roller coasters will have to be dismantled. Part of me is sad that you can’t even go have some good clean thrill-ride fun to take your mind off how awful things are in New Orleans, and another part of me is glad that millions of dollars haven’t been spent on rebuilding a theme park when people are homeless.

I think the thing that had the biggest impact on me yesterday came while we were driving, about two miles (ish?) from where we’re staying. I looked out the window at yet another abandoned apartment complex, with blown-out windows, boarded up doors, chain link fence around, and big signs saying “danger, keep out.” Then I saw a smaller, older sign—and then another, around the corner—saying “New Orleans Housing Authority” in large print. We were driving by a housing project, a block of affordable subsidized housing for those who can’t afford to live in a home. But it was uninhabitable. I wonder where those people have gone—they’re the ones most likely to have been stuck here when Katrina hit. If the people in the middle class neighborhoods where we seem to be working can’t afford to rebuild their homes and so need the help of various relief organizations, what happens to the poor?

After a long day of work, we came back to a masquerade party. We have some incredibly imaginative and artistic youth! We had clowns, princesses, guys in togas, and more. It was quite the group! Each youth was encouraged to create a costume that expressed something of who we really are, since the theme of the day was “imagine acceptance” and we talked about how God accepts us and therefore we should accept others, look behind the mask we wear and the masks others wear, and see Christ in each person. The dance floor was filled with youth in costumes of every color and shape, and they all had a great time.

Today we are imagining equality and wondering what the world would look like if everyone were treated fairly and equally. Maybe I can ask what happened to the people from the housing project—that seems like an equality issue.

We are beginning to get tired—late nights and early mornings, plus hard work and hot weather, are starting to affect us. Please pray that we’ll have lots of energy to work hard!

Happy Thursday!!
Peace
Teri

Okay, so it’s the morning of day 3 right now, but here’s some of what happened on our second day....

We split out into our 10 groups and headed to Bible Study and then to the work sites. I was with the “red square 10” group (each group has a similar name, and a stamp that looks sort of like a passport stamp inside their schedule/devotions booklet). We joined up with blue square 20 to go to a house that was about half done: most of the big stuff (furniture, etc) had been removed, but carpet, drywall, flooring, and some random possessions still needed to be removed. The yard had not been cared for in any way since the hurricane. The whole neighborhood had sustained a lot of damage—several houses in the neighborhood were either boarded up, in the process of being gutted, or still sporting the blue tarps that double as roofs even after 2 years.

The youth took two shifts inside the house—each shift is 15 minutes, as they have to put on these blue Tyvek suits, respirators, and goggles to go inside, and it’s about 90 degrees outside. The youth who were not on one of the shifts began to work on the yard, pulling weeds, clipping the grass down, or working in the back dismantling a rotted wood porch. Because it was orientation day, we only spent 2 hours at the work site. For some of the youth, it seemed to go by really quickly, for others more slowly because of the heat. Luckily we have four big water coolers at our site, so everyone is drinking water on each 15 minute shift that they are not inside the house.

The youth who are working with the Second Harvest foodbank spent the day sorting a huge truckload of sweet potatoes. They said some had rotted during shipping—when they picked them up, they would just fall apart in their hands. To which I replied, “please tell me you were wearing gloves!” Yes, they were. At the end of the day, the group had tossed four dumpsters full of rotted sweet potatoes, and were not all the way through the truck yet. Kind of makes you think about the cost of shipping your food across the country...

In the evening we had a fun party—each Bible Study group was a team, and they played all kinds of games from slip-n-slide Jenga to tug-of-war over a kiddie pool to field hockey. The Jenga was my favorite, so I’ve attached some of the funniest photos of our youth sliding across a tarp with their Jenga piece. Cecily and I have decided that this game is coming soon to a hot RCLPC day near you!

The theme of worship and Bible Study yesterday was “Imagine Stillness”--as in Psalm 46: “Be still and know that I am God.” We spent the day practicing being still, being present to God, listening for God’s voice. The worship has been good—the camp pastor is a second year grad student at Candler School of Theology at Emory University. Today we are “Imagining Acceptance” (from Romans 15.7: “Honor God by accepting each other, as Christ has accepted you.”) And tonight we have the masquerade dance—masks and costumes, here we come! I’m excited to see what each of our youth has brought to show their imagination. In case you were wondering, I made a mask that looks sort of like a cloud (only sort of because my artistic skills are nonexistent!) so that I can “have my head in the clouds” since I tend toward idealism!

That’s all for this morning. I’m attaching a few photos, and I’ll send more to Kim so she can put them on the website tonight when she gets home from work—check it out!

I hope you are all well. Please keep praying for our health as we go to work between 11-4 when it’s very hot!

Peace
Teri

Hi mission trip parents!

It’s early Tuesday morning and I just want to drop you a line before breakfast and let you know how things are going.

We had a completely snag-free airport experience and even the flying-haters among us survived and thrived on our two hour trip. Wayne has a GPS system that tells us where to go, too, so we had no problem getting around once we got vans! It’s lovely to have the little voice telling us when we made a wrong turn. :-)

We started our day by visiting the French Quarter and having lunch at Café Beignet, then doing some shopping in the French Market. Lots of our youth are really great at bargaining so they got some good deals!

We were wearing our t-shirts and we had several comments throughout the day. People stopped us on the street to ask where we were from and what we’re doing, and to thank us for coming down to help. Several youth have commented that they feel a little weird being thanked when they haven’t done anything yet, but we talked some last night about the fact that we are here being a great witness even if we aren’t able to do a ton.

Speaking of doing, we were told yesterday about our worksites. There are ten groups out working here this week. Nine are working with ACORN (learn more at their website: http://acorn.org/index.php?id=10969), doing demolition on houses that were flooded and then made uninhabitable by mold growth. We have to wear Tyvek suits with respirators to go into the houses. The other group (two of our youth are in this 10th group) will be working with Second Harvest Foodbank ( http://www.no-hunger.org/ ), packing food for people left homeless by Katrina. We were told last night that before Katrina, the foodbank moved 14 million pounds of food per year. After Katrina, they have moved 72 million pounds of food per year. It’s quite staggering, how many people are still homeless and hungry two years later.

We have driven through the city a little but not too much yet—and already we’ve seen piles of debris, the French Quarter is looking more dilapidated than usual, paint is peeling, roofs are covered in blue tarps...there’s a lot of work to be done. We’ll see more of the city today and I suspect the real destruction will begin to become apparent.

Our days are structured with devotions first, then “celebration” (which last night was like a big party, with beach balls flying through the crowd, icebreakers, games (I had to play “youth leader leg wrestling”--I won my first round but lost the second), and other assorted fun, then Bible Study, work (4 hours), free time (one hour), recreation party, worship, and ending with devotions again. It’s a packed schedule every day, but so far it seems to be going well, with a lot of good energy, creative staff, and lots of general fun.

Pray for us to survive the heat in our Tyvek suits, to stay healthy (we already took one group member to the hospital for some antibiotics...don’t worry, if you didn’t get a phone call, it’s not your youth! And she’s going to be fine, no worries.), to not step on any nails, and to not get bitten by too many mosquitos!

I’m attaching a few photos of our first day—enjoy!

Thanks, friends. (I almost typed “y’all”--I’ve been here one day and my seminary-acquired southern accent is coming out strongly again...apparently even in my typing!) I hope you have a great day—and I hope we do too!

Peace
Teri