A group from St. Timothy’s Church in Perrysburg, recently returned from a mission trip in New Orleans. Their blog has been added to our blogroll on the right side of this page. Thank you to everyone that went on the trip for sharing your stories!
If you would like to continue reading about the journey and experience of the group from St. Paul’s, Medina, click on the link to the right under “Blogroll.” The group will be writing posts throughout their trip and including them on that page.
A special thank you to St. Paul’s for sharing your experience with us!
By Steve Rucinski. The day dawned bright and sunny, breakfast at 7:30 with orientation at 8:30. We received our work orders for the day, rule-one, take twice the water you think you will need.
Our first project was a yard cleanup project at a newly built home about 3 miles away from camp. We arrived and started working, the yard was not too bad but the front drainage ditch was full of everything. We loaded about 1.5 big dumpsters full of stuff. From tires to photos to a can of mini-weiners we cleaned it all up. One of the finds was a 4 year old Ohio license plate pictured.
We also had the opportunity to meet the owner of the home, she told us her story as well as the neighbors’ story in which a mother and son drowned. The water was 8 feet high and the son was trying to get a boat to the house to rescue his mother, unfortunately the waves would sweep him away whenever he got close. The end result was they both died.
Meeting the owner and some other experiences is really bringing home for all of us how important this work is to this community and the individuals who live here. There is so much work to be done I wish everyone could be here to help and feel the blessings we are.
Please say a prayer for Nathan Snitzer who had a dehydration problem today, he is fine but has to stay out of the sun for a couple of days. We had a reflection meeting tonight to reflect as a full group (140+ people) about the days events, share some thoughts and thank God for the opportunity to serve. Tomorrow we are doing the reflection skit with our Toledo teammates.
Time for bed, this is a quiet camp tonight, some tired campers. More tomorrow. Thanks for your prayers.
After 16 hours of driving over 2 days we arrived Sunday evening at about 6 pm.
The 10 hour first day drive was uneventful, except for me (Steve Rucinski) going a little crazy with 5 teens in the car. If we could bottle their energy we could elimate oil as fuel.
We went to the 8 am service at St. John’s (Decatur, Alabama) which had a lot of thee’s and thou’s in it, not like our normal service. We will post more church pictures as time allows. We then hit the road for the final 6 hour drive to Bay St. Louis, MS.
Thanks be to God that we arrived safe and sound, Mary and her vehicle crew only got waylayed shopping for about 90 minutes and put her last place for arrival at the camp.
We start today with breakfast at 7:30, orientation at 8:30 and work projects at 9:30. Most days we will start working at around 8:30. There are probably over 100 youth here sleeping in 4 seperate 40 person quonset huts in cot-sized bunk beds.
Keep us in your prayers that our work here is helpful to those in need and that our efforts are injury free. More later as I have had no coffee and breakfast is almost ready.
Six adults and 8 young adults will be leaving for “Mission on the Bay’ on our churches first ever mission Trip. We will be leaving at 7:00 AM Saturday June 7th for a 9 day adventure!