Arcade Wesleyan Church

We can’t believe this is our last night. The students have been working so hard (and us), there were barely time for pictures or blogging. We completely sheet rocked a house, disassembled a deck, moved the deck, reassembled the deck, sanded down a bad mud job, reapplied mud, mowed a lawn, cleaned out a shed, painted, repaired the subfloor in a house, put up insulation, put up more sheet rock, ate aligator, fried pickles, onion rings, pork medalions wrapped in bacon, pancakes, a thousand mcflurries, and went to Walmart three times. Needless to say, we are going to sleep easy on the plane tomorrow, especially after we wake up at 4am, yikes.

And we made it the whole time without any major catastrophes everyones coming back with all their fingers and toes and a couple hundred mosquito bites. Tonight we were also able to take part in the youth group service at the host church. It was a great time of worship and communion, the perfect way to end the week.

We had our first full work day today. We woke up about 7:30 and got to the work site about 8 ish. We were just finishing demo that had begun there earlier. we had to finish stripping all of the sheet rock and as you can tell from the picture to the right, we had to rip a floor that was rotted out.

The kids worked hard and did a great job. I have tones of pictures that the parents can use as proof once we get back that their children can perform manual labor and not die. The house we were working on is in bad shape. It still has standing water under the floor but that is common here in the swamp lands.

We finished knocking out the rest of the drywall by lunch time and moved onto the floors in the afternoon. Part of the group also worked on getting up the linolium squares that were from the bad place. They worked hard all day and still only got up maybe a quarter of it. It didn’t want to budge.

Needless to say, everyone should sleep soundly tonight . . . what am I saying, the adult sponsors will sleep soundly. Mostly because one of them is very good at knockout basketball and it’s not who you are thinking (think shorter).

We are excited to see what God is going to show us and teach us this trip. We definitely learned a good lesson in servanthood and doing all things without complaining. To help institute the last lesson we bought muzzles. Seriously, it amazing to see these houses that are still in chambles 6 months after the storm surge that wiped them out. Many of the families are busy back at work and are ust plain tired of living in a FEMA trailer and working on their homes after already long days at work.

The other team showed up tonight and together we make a strong crew. Look out sheet rock.

Well we made it to Orange, Texas, after a nice stop at Whataburger for lunch. Definitely not In n Out but close, and a good Texas establishment. The Youth Center where we are staying at is great. There is a gym, a bunch of pool tables, ping pong tables, etc. The staff is great as well, and the other team that is going to be here is from East Parkway in Sacramento so that is cool.

We have a full day of demolition tomorrow. We are going to be working with about 5 or 6 houses that have various needs, mostly stemming from flood damage. We are going to be working with sheet rock, painting, plumbing, sanding, and a lot of trash removal.

The sleeping quarters are very nice, a little nicer than tents in Mexico to say the least. There is one shower for guys and one shower for the ladies, so once there are 50 folks on hand we will be instituting 2 minute military showers. The staff that we have already met here are really nice and they have a very cool building and set up. Orange is a medium size town and on Wednesday nights here they pull in over 300 kids. We are going to grab dinner and play some b-ball in the gym

Elijah says hi.

We are at the airport and there are some males on the trip who were apparently ordering for their girlfriends, but to my surprise they drank it themselves. We are all alive and rockin. We made it through security without a snag. Olivia was the only detainee, but we broke her free. Keep checking for more posts because we are blogging maniacs. We are now boarding!