a faux adventure for my Adventure Book.

I realize that its been a while since I actaully posted something that is actually going on in my life. Mostly I just like to type up my thoughts. But I have a good adventure to share.

Well, maybe its not an adventure.

The first two months of Mission Year have been.... Hard. Living with five other people who all have a different idea of about everything is stressful enough. But then we have to be "building relationships" with people in the community. Now, I don't know about other cities, but the people around here seem to be pretty used to punks like us, showing up thinking we are gonna change the world and then leaving when our time is over. In addition to my program, the community center I work at has an annual batch of Americorps workers come in and out, as well as a TON of short term missions teams that stay there. Its pretty safe to say that the people here are used to strangers showing up and leaving. Some of them are pretty jaded.

With all that said, the only important thing to know is that, personally, I don't think we have really connected with many people here, except for coworkers. People don't share problems or needs with us. They just allow us to exist.

So for the first time, last week, I really felt like we were DOING Mission Year. You know? Like, we were finally getting it right. After church, we had a picnic in the backyard with all the youth. We walked down to the market on Olive and got Po'Boys. We ordered pizza and just hung out at our house for hours, eating pizza and candy and po'boys. It was great! we had eleven people over: jada, tanya, yasmine, keith, raquel,wayne, lexi, danielle, popcorn, jt, kyra, two of our neigbors and another boy whose name escapes me.
It was great! We laughed and had fun. We played a game where you have to list things really quickly. For instance, if the topic were Movies, you would say a movie that nobody else had said. When the topic was "Famous People", jada kept answering with Historical Figures, the funniest being "sojourner truth". She is very funny.

My friend Ali, who is doing Mission Year in Chicago, told me that the first few months of Mission Year are like smelling a cake. Its really cool, but after a few months, its like EATING the cake. The good parts from the beginning are amplified. I'm SO excited for this. I hope that maybe the next few months can be like last sunday, but BETTER!