Mission MN: Day 1

With Day Zero being a late night, Day One seemed to start even earlier than it actually was. After breakfast, lunch making, and devotion time, my work crew (the orange igaunas!) headed to Youth Enterprise.

At each of the 80(ish) YouthWorks sites, t-shirts are for sale. These t-shirts are made by Youth Enterprise, a Christ-centered organization that employs youth in urban communities to help the youth build life and business skills. We got to work with four high school/college employees while helping to package orders to various YouthWorks sites. We broke into teams to two and tackled the large pile of invoices. With the majority of our work completed before our lunch break, we got to visit the shop where the t-shirts are screenprinted in the afternoon. (And we had a quick trip to DQ!) Our work was still finished a bit early so once we got back to our housing site, we walked around the park across the street and collected trash.

To be honest, packing orders of t-shirts was not the most excited task that one could do, but I was motivated to see how much fun our high schoolers had with the project. The pairs became competive about which team could package an order the quickest and I could see the kids opening up to one another and starting to build relationships as we worked.

Our daily schedule always included an post-dinner activity. That evening our activity was visiting the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden.




Cherry in a Spoon Sculpture

The botanial center part was technically closed, but (before we knew the building was closed on Mondays) we entered through an unlooked door to see these and many other neat flowers and plants.

Mission MN: Day 0

Sunday:

Day 0! Traveling to MN!

 

10:30am (ish): All 77 high schoolers and adult leaders met in the church's overflow parking lot to load our weeks-worth of belongings into ten vehicles

11am: Prayer, group picture and good-byes to families and other well-wishers

1pm: Lunch for my 12-passenger van, Vixen (all of the vehicles were named after Santa and his reindeer), in Cedar Falls, IA

5pm: Found our home for the next week in MN (well most of us arrived then, a popped tire delayed three vehicles)

That night we set up our air mattresses (not as easy as it sounds with many mattresses and few electrical outlets) and ate dinner (pulled pork sandwiches) before we had a meeting with our Youthworks Site Coordinator to learn more about how the week would work logistically. We also had Club time and got to meet with our family groups. Our families were a group of five students with one leader who would meet each evening to reflect on our day.  

This was a long day, but I was so excited for the "real part" of the trip to start. I was very excited to work with the youth in my work crew and meet with the girls in my family each night.

Mission Trip 2013 Prep

Sunday marks the start of the 2013 youth mission trip through my church. I enjoyed last year's trip to Chicago so much that I volunteered to be an adult chaperone again this year. This year we are going on a YouthWorks facilited trip to Minneapolis. A neat part about this trip is that we will have "work crews" who we will work with during the day and then a "family" that we will meet with each night to reflect on that days experience. We also will have a cookout with the community on Thursday night where organizations we've worked with for the past week will be invited to share a meal with us.

Trip Facts:

Miles to Minneapolis: 359 miles

Number of Vehicles: 10

Number of Students and Adult Leaders: 76

Trip Length: 6 days (4 days of service)

Tomorrow, I will be celebrating America's Birthday (and my day off) by doing laundry and packing for this exciting trip!