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Mississippi, Summer 1997

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The summer after my freshman year in high school, my youth group went with an organization called Adventures in Missons (AIM) to Mississippi...we were told that we were going to the poorest county in the whole USA...our tasks were: to help renovate/clean up several buildings that we would be staying in that used to belong to the school system but had been bought by a church to use for their facilities; to install smoke detectors in homes around the area, and while doing so, present the Gospel; to scrape, prime and paint several houses in the area; and to run a VBS for the children of the area around the church... We were joined by a group from Chicago and another group of students from the area we were working in...it was an interesting experience to be working not only with our own group, but also with other people...it was one of the best experiences though.... even though we were living with these other groups, since we worked with our own groups on painting the houses, it wasn't really until tuesday that we really started connecting...it rained that day and we couldn't do any painting, so we spent several hours, all together, bleaching down the walls to the dining room...we had great fun drawing patterns in the mildew that was covering the walls... on thursday we finally made another connection when we all got in a HUGE water fight! what fun! but soon after it got dark that night, some of us went outside to bring the volleyball net into the gym so we could play in the light, and we discovered that a fire was burning on the property not too far away...we immediately went to our leaders, and then, since there was not much else we could do, we huddled in groups to pray...we were sooo scared 'cause we knew that it was probably and arsonist's actions since we were white people in a predominantly black area in the middle of mississippi where prejudice was still extremely strong...the act of praying was what brought us together the strongest..."for where two or three come together in my name, there i am with them" (matt 18:20)... our last day in mississippi consisted of going to a man-made swimming hole for a day of relaxation and fun...we spent hours together in the water, (even though all but one of the mississippians couldn't swim!) building pyramids, playing tag, having chicken fights (there were no lifegaurds on duty) and generally forgetting about putting sun-block on...haha...unfortunately, it wasn't funny when we got back to our "home base"....three girls were so burnt that they had sun-poisoning and were in agony, and many others of us were just plain burnt too...we were quite a sore bunch on the way home.. I think the thing we learned the best on this trip was that prayer is extremely powerful...when we came back to report to the church, this theme was said over and over again.