Day 4: Food Bank

Again, today was awesome! :) We got up this morning and ate, OF COURSE, and headed off to the Capital Area Food Bank. As was mentioned last night, we were under the impression that we were packing food boxes like the community christmas chest. When we got there we were all SHOCKED at how big of an operation this really was!!


As soon as we arrived, we headed straight to the volunteer department to get instructions. In this part of the warehouse there were huge metal, open-top, boxes full of food. The food was all divided up- for example: canned meats, canned soups, condiments, baby food, etc. Our first task was to box these things up. The girls boxed and the boys carried the HEAVY boxes over to the pallets so they could be loaded into the 'unvolunteer' side of the warehouse. We got done so quick the volunteer coordinator began to panic because she didn't think she had enough for us to do!

After we cleaned all the metal crates out, the coordinator had us sort some donated food back into the metal crates. Which, again, took us no time! By this point it was time for lunch!!! :) Thankfully, the room we ate lunch in had air conditioning!!!! That warehouse was awful stifling!!

After lunch, the coordinator, Oye, explained to us their program that is identical to backpack buddies- only the food is put into Wal-Mart sacks. She told us that since it is the summer not as many kids get them as do during the school year, which makes sense. The figure, though, blew our minds: EACH WEEKEND they deliver 2,100 food bags to school-age CHILDREN! Can you even fathom what 2,100 KIDS looks like? Our job for this project was to get the assembly line set up and ready to go for the TEAMeffort Sevierville group that will get to go there tomorrow. Once again the boys got to do the labor intensive work. Oye had them moving pallets and unloading all of the boxed food into more metal crates. Once they finished this they had to assemble boxes for the sacks to be loaded into for delivery. The girls had to take grocery sacks and double them up...2,100 of them! Sounds easy....try it some time. ;)


This may all sound boring- but we made it all kinds of FUN! Knowing that we were helping so many people who didn't have access to food made it all worth it. It's kind of like Moses leading the people to the Promised Land....he did 40 years of work and never got into the Promised Land. We worked hard yet we'll never truly understand/comprehend the magnitude of an impact we made! 


Because of the hard and efficient work everyone did today, Chris took us out and treated us to Dunkin Donuts and Baskin Robbins! :) Yummmmm. Supper was really good tonight, too. We had a huge cookout and ate in the parking lot with all of the other churches here. Good times. Worship was phenomenal and, like always, our devo. time was SUPER!!! :) God's moving- No doubt about it! :)

Happy Birthday America!

*WARNING: This post is going to be SHORT and full of pictures from yesterday and today.*


Today was CRAZY, to say the least!!! We got up early this morning, ate, and headed out to downtown to celebrate America. We split all up into groups and all did different things. Between all of us, I feel I'm safe to say we hit about all of the big museums, the parades, some GOOOOOODDD food, spent plenty of money, and had a fantastic time.


At about 6:30 we met up and all headed to the Washington Monument Park to get settled in for the fireworks that were to start at 9:10. Talk about a show..... it was unbelievable! What we would normally consider the finale at a local fireworks show was just normal for this show. At any random moment there were at least 10 different shots either heading up or going off. However, after our experience yesterday we couldn't really justify the money that was spent to shoot the fireworks off. We all found it interesting that the government can afford to pay that kind of money for something that will explode and disintegrate but can't spend that kind of money on a human LIFE! Now, don't get me wrong....they were beautiful, amazing, wonderful, stupendous, but with the experience we had yesterday, it was just hard to justify.


After the fireworks we split back up into our groups and made a mad dash for the metro. Luckily, this was not DC's first rodeo, per se. We got out of there and back in a SUPER quick amount of time. We read online that tonight the metro was supposed to move 500,000 people. INSANE!!!


Since we all ate a late lunch, we were starving by the time we got back to the center. Chris packed us all up and we headed to the only thing we could find open, Checkers. We JUST walked back in the door from that...and now it's bed time.


Tomorrow we are scheduled to go to a local food bank and pack boxes of food and load them onto a truck. Apparently only ONE group has gotten close to loading an entire 18 wheeler trailer...so our goal is to not only fill one, but fill TWO! We are anticipating it to look like the Community Christmas Chest....if it DOES, we should be set since most of us have helped with that at some point in our lives. Also, having Brad (a shipping supervisor) here will only make the process quicker!

Homeless lunch numero uno.

Homeless lunch numero dos.

Meet Nature Boy.

Listening to Nature Boy preach some CRAZY stuff.

The group with Nature Boy.

Singing for Gayheart, our new friend.

Waiting to pass out more lunches.

Dumpster diving for aluminum cans for our scavenger hunt.

Union Station

Hat swapsies....

The Art of Video Games- PacMan

Can you guess what game this is?

This is the preamble written with license plates.

Johnny Rockets with Michael and Jessica.

All of us...

Enjoy the pictures from yesterday and today! Check back tomorrow for more updates!


-GUMY

The grand finale.

Day TWO: Homeless

Just like yesterday, today was AWESOMEEEEE!!! :) The youth were SUPER excited to get to do more of what they did in Atlanta last year. 

We got up this morning and ate breakfast (DUH!) then we sat down and took a survey about homelessness in the world, America, and DC. We were shocked at the answers we found out. The statistics about the child homelessness and poverty in AMERICA were absolutely astounding. After our survey, we packed 70 lunches in plastic sacks. Each lunch consisted of a plain hotdog, a packet of ketchup, packet of mustard, bag of chips, bottle of water, and a roll of smarties with bible verses on them (compliments of US!). Our objective was to find a way to carry all 70 of the bag lunches and a FULL water cooler to about 5 different parks. We DID achieve this objective! We got on the metro and got off at one park and walked and walked and walked. We passed out ALL of the lunches!! We got to meet some SUPER interesting people, for example: nature boy (a man with only shorts on and they were cut up to the waist) & Paul (a guy covered in bleeding sores that he says came from a tarantula bite). The youth were such good apostles by praying with each and every person they gave a lunch to. You could REALLY tell how much they affected each persons lives. 

After passing out the lunches we met up with a lady named Janna. Janna had a CRAZYYY story; let's say 'a series of unfortunate events' have happened to her in the past 12 years and her life is on a downward spiral. Anyways- Janna works for a newspaper company called Street Sense. Street Sense was started by a guy who wanted to employ the homeless. The workers buy a certain amount of newspapers (with articles written by the homeless) for 35 cents each and then sell them on the street for a dollar each. Janna had 46 newspapers to sell so we divided them up (2 each), got in groups of 4, and went to separate street corners to sell the newspapers. We thought for SURE it'd be easy to sell these papers. We assumed that by NOT looking homeless and being youth people would be proud of our endeavors and buy papers. Unfortunately we learned REALLY quick this was NOT the case! Everyone from adults to the youth were completely ignored. Some of us were called hateful names, we were shunned, we had people completely avoid us, people tell us they were in a hurry and then slowly walk off, and even people accuse us of being scam artists. In the end, we earned Ms. Janna $80.50 by selling 41 papers (we got donations too). She said this was the MOST money that had ever been earned!!! By helping her she was able to buy headache medicine and her prescription medicine she was needing. Just wait until you hear the youths stories from this experience...they are HILARIOUS!! 

After working with Ms. Janna we finally got to eat. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention: we didn't get lunch today to simulate what it's like to go hungry. Of course we had snacks in case someone was getting lightheaded....BUT, they were all CHAMPS!! :) For 'lupper' (lunch/supper) all they had was a fruit cup OR apple, a pb & j sandwich OR a cheese sandwich and a bottle of water. Needless to say we're hungry. LOL!! We were super excited  to have a few minutes to rest.


After eating we split up into 4 groups and went on a super scavenger hunt! We had to get 25 cans out of a trashcan, start with a penny and barter for things bigger and better, find a homeless person and find out their story, etc. We did this for about 2 hours. It was a BLAST! There were some crazy things!! :)

After the scavenger hunt we were supposed to have worship in the park but it started raining and lightning.... After getting back we had a great devo time! God's really doing some awesome things in our youth. We, as adults, are SUPER lucky to be able to serve alongside them and watch them grow so much in their faith! :)


Everyone is ecstatic about tomorrow. We are leaving at 8:45 in the morning and heading to The Mall for the National Parade, museums, monuments, and FOOD; oh yeah, and FIREWORKS!!! :) During devo time the youth were going on and on about what their plans and expectations are for tomorrow!! :)


It's late and morning comes EARLY...check back tomorrow night for updates! :)


-GUMY

**For some reason it's not letting us upload pictures tonight. We'll try to get the pictures uploaded tomorrow at some time.**

Day ONE: CityGate

Today we had an awesome day!! We got the opportunity to work at one of the MANY projects in the SE DC area with a group called CityGate. 

CityGate was founded by a baptist preacher not too many years ago as a way to break the poverty cycle. Basically the group pulls teenagers from the local project and pays them to run a 'day camp' for 2-13 year olds. The teenagers are helped with budgeting skills, college applications, job applications, etc and the children are shown that there IS another life besides the one they are raised in.

The culture in the projects is SO different from ours! The kids are very trusting and loving; they each chose a youth and latched onto them for the ENTIRE day (to the point of taking naps in their laps). However, they would make a sailor blush from their language and are VERY physical with one another. While we were there we split the campers up into groups by ages: 2-6, 7-13. We ran rotations for them. One rotation was making play-dough from flour and the other was games, jump rope, football, etc.

A few highlights from CityGate today:
-Travis got told by his new friend that he was his 'new daddy'
- Sarah got cussed out
- We had a water balloon fight
- We saw two little boys have an all out brawl
- We got to play guitars and teach the kids some new camp songs
- We got to talk to the kids about Jesus
- We showed them UNCONDITIONAL love...that some never get to experience in their 
   everyday lives. 


After 'work' we came home, relaxed, ate supper, showered, and had a SUPER moving chapel. Oh yeah, AND our boys played a game of basketball with the local neighborhood boys and WONNNNN!!!! :) We think they should get a ring for that feat in itself! ;)

We just found out that tomorrow we get to deliver 70 lunches in 5 different parks to the homeless. The group is STOKED that they get to do a similar ministry to the one in Atlanta last year!


Now that it's 11:30 and we have to be at breakfast by 7:45, I say it's time to wrap this up!

Prayer:
- TEAMeffort
- The kids at CityGate
- Our group
- The homeless we will come in contact with tomorrow
- The local neighborhoods 
- The other groups that are here with us this week.

-GUMY

We're hereeeeeee!!!!

We started this morning out at 7:30 at the church. After cramming everything into the bus and van we were off- all 21 of us! On the way we began to worry about the storm damage. We knew DC was considered a state of emergency but had no clue if we'd have power, gas, bathrooms, cell signal, etc. We were super excited to hear from camp informing us that we WOULD have power!! As we do on every trip we stopped about 10:30 for church. We were in Roanoke. Not thinking about storm damage there we chose a church online and plugged it into our gps. As we got closer we saw more and more limbs down. Anyways- we arrived at South Roanoke UMC to discover they had NO power and subsequently, no AC either! They were extremely welcoming and we had an awesome, yet HOT, service!! After church we ate lunch (provided by our awesome UMW) on the lawn and then headed on to DC. When we got to DC we missed our turn and took the scenic route through the ghetto l, literally, to find The Urban Outreach Center, where we're staying. We lucked out this year and have awesome facilities. All but two of us have BEDS!!! The center is located in a semi-rough neighborhood with awesome ministry opportunities around us!! All we've done tonight is get settled in, meet our staff, and have a phenomenal worship aervice. Our theme this week is baggage...we are excited to hear the theme evolve throughout the week. We found it awesome that our apartment'mates' for the week are from First Sevierville UMC- ours conference sisters!! So far all is well and most are asleep! You'll have to forgive the typos in this post- an iPhone screen isn't the best utility to blog on!! Tomorrow we have a full day at an awesome Ministry, called CityGate. Check back tomorrow for update on our experience there. Continue to pray for: - our youth as they prepare to fulfill God's call - our chaperones a they help the youth fulfill their call - people without power along the east coast - the people we'll be ministering to - the TEAMeffort staff as they lead us this week -GUMY Check

And we're ALMOST off...

We are extremely excited to venture off on our Senior High Mission Trip on Sunday. For those of you just tuning in with us, we are headed to Washington D.C. on Sunday and will return the following Saturday. 


Our Schedule looks like this (at the moment):
Sunday- Head to DC and get checked in with TEAMeffort & Worship
Monday- Work all day, shower, EAT, & Worship
Tuesday- Work all day, shower, EAT, & Worship
Wednesday- Stay at The Mall all day enjoying the celebration of our Nation in the 
  Capital!!!
Thursday- Work all day, shower, EAT, & Worship
Friday- Work HALF of the day, visit the National Zoo, shower, EAT, & Worship
Saturday- Make the journey back to Galax


The youth and the chaperones couldn't be more excited to work once more with the homeless population of our country! As of now, we are THINKING that we will get to work with local youth and children, in homeless shelters, in soup kitchens, and on the streets. We can't wait to watch our youth grow spiritually on this journey.


Make sure to check back here each and every night to stay up to date with what is going on. As of now, the plan is to add videos and commentary from the youth of their experiences. We love that we are able to utilize the internet to stay in contact with our ever faithful prayer warriors!


As Sunday nears, we ask that everyone be praying for:
- Strength for all attending the trip.
- The lives that we will soon encounter.
- The TEAMeffort staff as they prepare this incredible journey for us.
- Our youth's parents as they prepare their hearts for the 'scariness' and unknown we may
  encounter.
- Rest & spiritual nourishment for all who are attending so that we may be useful and
  equipped servants to God.


Last but certainly NOT least- we ask for any and all to join us on Sunday morning in the church parking lot @ 8 to pray before we depart!

Have you ever seen a flock of Mongoose flying wingman for a Falcon?