Mission Team to the rescue

The last few weeks have been really busy and I haven't had a chance to update this thing..sorry.
Anyway, I need to backtrack a few weeks and catch up, so I'll start with the last week of June and update until now.

Last week of June
During this week, we had a mission team from Virginia come and help out. The group included two adult chaperons and about ten or so youth. All in all they were a very helpful group and we were thankful for their visit. The week was filled with kudzu-pulling, gardening, playing with our kids, and exploring a new neighborhood. When the kids got here they were a little timid about the neighborhood, as can be expected when coming from a small town. By the end of the week they were willing to walk around and say hey to our neighbors as they saw them out and about. We also did a poverty simulation dinner with them one of the nights. Each participant was given an envelope with a certain amount of money ranging from $30-500. Each food item was given a value and the participants were to eat according to their budgets. If they wanted more money they could either go to the "bank" and take out a loan, which had to be paid back in 5 minutes or they would go to jail, or they could go talk to a DSS worker with a bad New York accent. I played the part of the DSS worker and found myself quite entertaining. The youth and chaperons were great and went along with the game as well as expected, occasionally getting very frustrated because they were hungry and didn't have enough money to eat. The point of this poverty simulation was to get the youth familiar with situations that many of our neighbors encounter everyday, especially when having to deal with DSS and banks to try to get loans and are denied because they don't have an ID and can't get an ID for a variety of reasons.

 

All in all it was a good week. Wednesday we took a field trip to the Green in Uptown and the kids had fun playing in the fountain.