Youth Mission Trip

My sister Becky and I led a group of six teenagers from our church on a mission trip last week. We stayed at the Calvin Center, a camp/conference center that is part of the Presbyterian Church (USA) just south of Atlanta.

We all met at the church on Monday morning, were seen off by the associate pastor Rev. Heather Shortlidge (who had just returned from Iona), and piled into Samantha Mierau and Lisa Allison's cars for the trip to the airport. I have to say the group and I were slightly disappointed when the hardware in my leg didn't set off the metal detector, but it sure made the security checkpoint simpler than I thought it was going to be. Once in Georgia it took a bit of time to get our rental van and drive to the Calvin Center, so when we got there we started our Global Village experience right away. Our leader for the Global Village, Godsway (his actual name), was from Ghana. Our dinner was specifically designed to teach us that the world is full of haves and have-nots. Godsway randomly passed out our plates which had portions of varying sizes of noodles and veggies. A few plates had a small piece of chicken as well, but not all of them. We put our bags in the lodge where we would be staying when we returned and grabbed just a few items to take with us. Pretty much we just took sunscreen, sleeping bags and pillows. We were driven to the Global Village which was in the woods a good ways away from the lodges and modern facilities. We stayed in the Haiti section. There was also a ghetto, a refugee camp, and a Palestinian area. We were "hired" for some chores - fetching clean water (about a half hour walk round trip), cleaning the kitchen and dishes, gathering fire wood, weeding the field and watering the crops. Once they were completed we were given money to spend at the market (another staff member, Robin, showed up with items to sell to us for our breakfast and lunch). We had 4 or 5 kerosene lanterns and a camp fire once the sun went down for light. The buildings were exact replicas of actual houses, separate kitchen area, outdoor shower and out houses that the staff saw in Haiti. Godsway said that they were similar to the conditions in which he grew up in Africa too. We each got a mosquito net (some of which had holes or rips) and set them up on our bunks. All six girls slept in one room, Matt and I slept in the other. Each room was half of our "house" and was just big enough to fit three bunk beds, a small table and two chairs. Robin and Godsway lead us in a short worship service around the campfire and then left us on our own for a hot and a not-so-restful night's sleep.
We woke at 7am, ate some of the fruit that we had purchased for breakfast and a few of us made some cowboy coffee and ended up with a lot of grounds in our teeth. Godsway arrived and "hired" us to work in the village field. We created rows in the soil with hoes and rakes, pulled weeds and planted a couple rows of corn. Heat index that day was 103 and Sara got a little bit overheated which caused all of us a bit of concern. We had the nurse come check on her. She was OK after a while in the shade and a good bit of water. Our lunch took quite a while to prepare. We cooked rice and beans over charcoal and it took forever to get the water to boil. Darian sauteed a bunch of veggies and Godsway cut up a mango, papaya, sugar cane and coconut for us to have as well. We spent the afternoon making bricks with a really cool machine which you can see here. It is not motorized. It works entirely with levers and brute force. (Godsway took lots of pictures and I will be getting a disc in the mail soon, so I will post pictures as soon as I have them.)

Many groups spend time in Global Village in order to simulate and prepare for oversees mission trips so that they don't experience such culture shock. We were there for just under 24 hours and I think all of us gained a new appreciation for what we have as well as a better understanding of how many people in the world live.

We spent Wednesday at Six Flags Over Georgia and had an absolute ball. I found that my leg was only an issue on a few of the rides that I wanted to ride. Everyone in our group was a major roller coaster enthusiast. Here are some pictures.

Thursday, Friday and Saturday we spent participating in the Mission Work Camp. We worked on a very nice lady's house in an old mill town. Unfortunately all the textile industry has moved overseas and the town is suffering as a result. Mrs. Hamm and her husband worked for over 35 years in the mill. She was widowed about 10 years ago and very little has been done on the house since then. We spent most of the first morning clearing debris from her yard. We filled a trailer with an old fence that had fallen over, rusted old chairs that were on the edge of her property and lots of odds and ends. We power washed and scraped peeling paint off of her foundation, front and back steps and helped her sort through a workshop/shed/storage room and carport. We also painted her living room. There was quite a list of items that the Calvin Center plans on doing to her house, but we were the first group to work on this house. There were three job sites within a few blocks of each other and a much larger group from Greensboro NC was working on the other two. One of the houses was at the end of the list of repairs after six months of groups working on it. Here are pictures of us working on Mrs. Hamm's house.

Interesting coincidence --the Greensboro group is the church in which Katie Cashwell grew up. Katie will be interning on our staff at FPC Annapolis for a year starting in August. It also turns out that this is the same church where Rich and Grier, who I met at Princeton Youth Forum (Sara Ferguson's very good friends), were youth leaders before moving to New Jersey. I love the interconnectedness and how small a community the Presbyterian Church can be.

The Calvin Center is a really great place to take a group. The staff was wonderful, the facilities were really nice and they had so many things to do. They lead devotions each morning before we went to work and we had a really nice worship service outdoors each evening. They had recreation activities for our group to choose from for the afternoons (canoeing, rock wall, ropes course, etc.). For worship, a concert and bonfire on Thursday, a pool party on Saturday, and a movie one night we joined with all of the other campers and staff.

Our group worked so hard and I am extremely proud of them. They really bonded and enjoyed spending time together too, which was great to witness and be a part of. This was not the trip that we had originally planned, but I don't think I would change anything about how it turned out. Here are some pictures of our gang just having fun

Our trip home was not as smooth as our trip down, but we all arrived safely back to our families yesterday afternoon. After boarding the plane yesterday we sat at the gate for about two hours while they fixed a broken fuel gauge on one of the wings. So we took off about the time that we were supposed to be landing in Baltimore.

My parents have been on a cruise, brother-in-law Jesko was on a business trip, Becky and I were in Georgia and my nieces were with Jesko's parents, so it was great to get home and have dinner with the whole family last night.