Canaan Fellowship

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the United Methodist church organised teams to go down to Biloxi and other areas along the gulf coast. For the last 4 years volunteers from our church have gone to Biloxi MS for a week with the Poughkeepsie United Methodist (PUMC) church to help with the rebuilding effort. The trip has generally been towards the end of May.

The first year, 2006, my sister Martha, and cousin Becky went down to Pass Christian with her Uncle and his United Methodist Church from western NY. Later that year I went down with Team #15 which was led by Paul Mosley from PUMC. Patty Little, Grace Raunick, Tony Hagin, Pauline Huff, Don McNeil, Mike Shields, and Bill Yates from PUMC. Howard Dennis also went with us from Connecticut. On this trip we started the week off with several smaller jobs including adding ridge vents to a recently roofed house, framing work on a gutted house, and some scraping and misc work at another house, before we started working on our main project which was a house where we did some sheet-rocking, and built a porch. While we were down there youth group of 70 people came down. They were really organised so we ended up sharing meals with them. Some of the older youth and I went to the old quarter of New Orleans the night before we left.

Em and I had a really wonderful trip to Nicaragua that started January 2 at 5:25 am when our plane took off, to January 14, when our plane landed back in JFK at 2 am.  It was a full time and we got to make lots of new friends, work on our spanish, and learn so much about Nicaraguan culture. 

I spent almost every night in the orphanage, which was really neat.  The little girls were so excited that they were going to get to share their bed with one of the Americans, and it was interesting for me to see the way bed time worked in the orphanage.  I was, like the last time I went down, struck by how selfless and hard working the older girls were.  About eight girls in their late teens (who lived at the orphanage) essentially ran it.  They took care of the children, made the meals, and kept order in general. 

Spring break of 2005 was like no other I've ever had before. Like many classmates, I went traveling, swimming, to the beach, and came back to school with a tan. I'm guessing that my trip was a little different than theirs, however. Becky, Mrs. Teubl and I spent the week in Nicaragua. Nicaragua is the second poorest country in South America, and Becky can tell you all you would ever want to know about the country. It's hard for me to say what our absolute purpose in going was; it felt more like a collage of working, playing, helping, being helped, thinking, praying, and doing whatever we could to touch the lives of a bunch of little kids.