senior high mission experience : day three

day three.. we lost wi-fi, but it is back now

monday we set out for our first day of work. this work was a bit different than in years past as we plugged in with st. pauls episcopal church and their mobile ministry in the 9th ward. the group set up a site to hand out simple supplies for relief efforts. what were these supplies? some varied canned meats, a cup of ramen noodles, toilet paper roll, paper towel roll, a bottle of water... doesn't sound like much but for a day that it just rained and rained people came from all over. also for the day was saving a train from wreaking, fixing a ladies plumbing who was taken advantage of by a local person, listening to a latin american fellow who was upset and angry that he might loose his home unless he paid some people a large sum of money to gut his house, and other stories from people coming by to pick up some supplies.

we had plans of walking the neighborhood to play with the children and talk to some of the folks. due to the rain, we didn't do that, so we took some tours through the 9th ward area that was at the point of impact from the levee breaks. funny thing i have heard this week is that this isn't the first time this area was flooded, but this time it was much more populated, so thus the impact. it was crazy to see that the area is still being worked on and cleaned up, 2 years later.

in the afternoon... it was dinner time.. though the whole gang had the task of cooking dinner for themselves and the adult leadership. they had an easy budget of 75 dollars to work with, but for some reason the whole task seemed daunting. indicated by strong words of loving hate for me doing this to them. the group rallied, got a plan and we had a great dinner of tacos & rice with chips and salsa. it was a pretty darn cool bonding experience for everyone. plus, that third taco for me and preston was excellent!

we've uploaded more pics to our flickr set