We started our last day by going to the Last Organic Outpost (LOO for short). This is a community garden site that was once a parking lot. They didn't even take out the parking lot, they just piled soil on it and planted stuff. Vegatables and flowers of all kinds are present here. Members of the community can come and plant, tend and then harvest
fresh produce. Sometimes when volunteer groups come to help out the produce that is harvested is donated to local charities. After getting all "sunscreened" up and donning our gloves we met the person in charge (for that day anyway). Being in a giant garden in the city with the morning sun, the humidity and the birds chirping was strangely surreal. We walked all around the garden, but couldn't locate anything that really needed to be done. This being the case we got back in the van and Amelia our CSM guide tried to make other arrangements for us.
We returned to the CSM housing site where Amelia was finally able to get in contact with the CSM city director Paul. He was able to set up for us to go to Food for Kids Ripley House and deliver... wait for it .... SANDWICHES ! What a perfect opportunity to frame the week. On Monday we had been at the other Food for Kids site making the lunches and today we were going to get to see where those lunches finally ended up. We met our contact at the Ripley House site and were given 106 lunch bags (plus a couple extra) and a list of addresses and instructions for delivery. We drove to the area and after waiting for a long, slooooow train, we started handing out the lunches. It was incredible the poverty and isolation in these neigborhoods. Even though the tiny run down houses were almost on top of one another, each place seemed to be like a miniature prison complete with fences, bars and gaurd dogs. A few places dared to have a flower bed or painted house. At times it seemed as though we were driving through a third world country instead of urban America. We carefully navigated the narrow streets and at times saw the actual children that came out to get their lunch. One small boy had all he could carry in taking 5 or 6 lunches back to the house for his family. This was probably one of the most challenging and heart wrenching activities that we performed all week. Everyone did a great job even though it was hot and chaotic work.
Our afternoon was spent with the Open Door Mission. This center houses and feeds a lot of homeless men every day. We were shown to the kitchen and split into two groups. The first group stayed in the kitchen and made, you guessed it, SANDWICHES ! Only this time we made just enough for the ODM to hand out to certain guests. The sandwich here was comprised of 2 slices of SPAM (not the email variety) and 2 slices of bread. Each lunch got 2 sandwiches, crackers or pretzels, and a can of ice tea. The other group was shown to the dining room and got set up to chop onions. Once the sandwich lunch group was done we joined the dining room crew for some TEARFUL onion chopping fun. We made short work of that huge (50 lbs or more) bag of onions each larger than a softball. Everyone's eyes hurt and many pounds of onions were chopped. We cleaned up the area and ourselves and then waited until it was time to serve the meal. We assembled and handed out trays of food and beverage for the dining room. A man named Zacharius got us involved in some Bible trivia lessons which the participants enjoyed greatly. We left the ODM, our last mission site of the week with a sense of tired accomplishment and relief.
Then is was off to eat Thai food at Thai Spice with the other groups. We didn't linger here too long and we were off to a huge park for wrap up. We spent a while in the park taking group photos and then split back into our groups.
We sat in a circle in the grass reflecting on our week and talking about the ways that we had seen God at work through us and our mission sites. We shared affirmations of each other and prayers. After this we took our group photos near a statue. We loaded up and went back to CSM housing, we did some skits of our favorite moments from the week and evaluation forms were filled out. For a special treat each group got to do something fun, we went for treats at a nearby Sonic. When we came back everyone chipped in to clean and pack for the early departure for the trip home. What a great week it was.
No comments:
Post a Comment