Olivia+F.

The past two summers I have done service projects with Grace church - each 40 hours.

__August 2011__ //I went on a mission trip with Grace Church in 2011 to Chicago, Illinois. On this trip, we focused on helping the homeless, with a particular focus on homeless children.//


 * Day one**: We split up int two groups - one went to the YMCA, the other went to a homeless shelter. At the homeless shelter, we organized activities for the kids to do at a vacation bible school; we decorated jewelry boxes and played outside on the playground. We also sung songs - I played my guitar - about the bible story we were talking about that day. We ate lunch with the kids, making sure they ate all their food, and went back to the dorms where we were staying. That night, we went out to dinner at a Chinese restaurant and then went back to our dorms to sleep.


 * Day two**: We went to the homeless shelter again to work with the kids, but it was raining so we couldn't go inside. Instead we sang songs, talked more about the bible story, and we spent extra time coloring. That night, we got split up into different groups and each group went their separate ways to a different part of the city. For dinner, each group was given a dollar for each member of the group: we were seeing what it was like to live like we were homeless. We had no phones, no iPods, no water bottles, no sunglasses. My group got sent to the middle of Chicago, where we met two homeless men on the street. We started talking to them about their lives and their families, and after about twenty minutes, they offered us some food. We ate it and we tried to thank them by giving them our four dollars, but they refused; we said goodbye and kept walking. After a while, we met another homeless man, but he wasn't as nice the two we met before: he was racist and sexist, but we were polite and we kept talking to him until he had to leave. There was an ice cream shop that was giving away free samples, so we all took one of those for dessert. It was getting hot and we al had to go to the bathroom, so we went into a shopping center and used the bathroom and a drink from the water fountain. By then, it was time to go back to our dorms and go to sleep.


 * Day three**: We started off the day going to the homeless shelter again - this time we made necklaces out of beads that we brought. We played outside for almost an hour. Then we ate lunch and went right to another homeless shelter: A Safe Haven. This shelter was actually more of an apartment complex than a shelter - the residents had rooms with running water, their own beds, etc. At A Safe Haven, we helped serve the residents dinner. After they were all served, we sat down with them and got to talk to them about their lives. I - along with a couple other people - got to talk to a few teenagers, about my age. We talked about movies and books - one of them was reading one of my favorite books, //Looking For Alaska//, so we talked about that for a while. But, sadly, we had to go, so we said goodbye and went back to our dorms to go to bed.


 * Day four**: Day four was a very chill day: we went to the homeless shelter, played outside and colored with the kids. After lunch, we went back to the dorms and just hung out for a while. We went to dinner at a Vietnamese restaurant, and then we went to a soup kitchen. I helped serve the food to everyone when they got in line, and then when the soup was ready, I went around to the tables and served everyone the soup. We didn't have much time to talk to the people there because we were serving food the whole time.


 * Day five**: This was our last day working with the kids, so we spent the whole morning with them decorating t-shirts. Everyone signed everyone's shirts - we took picture and some of the kids cried. After we ate lunch, we said goodbye to all the kids and left. We went to dinner at a restaurant near the homeless shelter, and after that we went to a homeless shelter. It was an all-men's shelter where it was first-come, first-serve and there were strict rules to follow: no stealing, no fights. The men were mostly older, but there were some in their twenties and thirties. Some of the men had brought food with them because the shelter didn't serve food - the owner made it very clear that this was just a place to sleep. I sat down with one of the men and we started talking about school and what we liked and then we got to the topic of TV: I said my favorite show was Doctor Who, and he went on and on about how he watched that when he was my age but he didn't know it was back on the air and was it any good? I told him it was fantastic and he started talking about when he was a kid more. I listened, enthralled in his life's story. I talked to him for the rest of the night until we had to go back.

__June 2012__ //I went on another mission trip with Grace Church, but this time instead of working with the homeless, we rebuilt and trailer for an elderly couple - Ernie and Linda//


 * Day One:** Our first day on the job was mostly learning how to use tools and cleaning out rooms so we could fix them up later on in the week. My job on the first day - because I wouldn't go on the roof due to my incredible fear of heights - I pulled nails from the wall and floor of the back room; that didn't take us too long. With five girls doing one job, nothing would take us long. We noticed the water boiler in the corner of the room, and we had to move it because we going to replace the floor. However, it wouldn't move. We saw that it was connected to the ceiling, as was a single light bulb, and we tried to get it out. I tried pulling the wooden beam out with a hammer, and then a crowbar, but nothing was working. We had to get Kurt Equiey to bring in the electric saw to cut off of the wall. It was loud and caused the whole room the shake, and the very unstable window shattered and fell out of its hole in the wall. Before we continued to worry about the water heater, we had to clean up the glass. Kurt, done with the saw and back to using the crowbar, accidentally put a hole in the wall with the crowbar. We all went outside to ask Joel what to do about it, and it started to pour. We figured that we could't work outside on the roof anymore, so everyone took a break and we all played ninja and ate lunch. After the rain stopped, we went back inside to deal with the hole in the wall. We found a lot of water damage in that panel of the wall, so Kurt said, "well, might as well take down the rest of the wall." So we did. We removed the top layer of the wall, making sure to stop when we saw the insulation (because, as we would find out later, while insulation looks like cotton candy, it is not something you want to touch with your bare hands). After we finished with the wall, it was time to go home, so we left the insulation there, making sure to tell Ernie and Linda to not go in the back room.


 * Day two:** The second day was the most action-packed day of the whole week. First, Kurt, Priscilla, Alex and I went to the Cluster 13 headquarters to find a replacement window for the one that shattered in the back room. At the HQ, there was only a double window, and we needed a single one, so we had to break it apart, without breaking the glass. After we got the window, we went back to Ernie and Linda's to install it. We got back to site and tried to install the window, but the wood beams Kurt had cut so the window would fit were too long, so he taught me how to use a circular saw so I could cut the beams while he checked-up on everyone else. It was really awesome. I cut the beams down enough so they would fit into the hole, so we installed the window and it looked magnificent. After that, I thought I would try to conquer my fear of heights and help out on the roof. I was not as bad as I expected it to be: as long as I didn't go too close to the edge - or the hole that Aiden made with his foot -, I wouldn't have a panic attack. The roof was in horrible condition: we had to take out all the nails from the metal shingles and take off the shingles. The nails were rusted and tarred onto the roof, so it took a while to get them out. There were windows in the ceiling, and around the windows there was tar. It took us about fifteen minutes just to get the windows off of the roof because we had to remove the tar around the windows. Before we left, we put a giant tarp over the roof so there would be no damage to it over night.


 * Day three:** The first half of the day I spent working on the roof. At first, I was nailing in the new metal. After a while, the height of the roof was really getting to me, so I started to help Calvin cut and lift the metal so it would fit on the roof. After lunch, however, we decided we had to fix the roof where Aiden's foot fell. That hole just so happened to be in the kitchen. First, we had to take off the first layer of the ceiling. Then we had to take off the dry wall. After Kurt mad the initial hole, we saw that there was rotted insulation under the dry wall. Before we continued, of course, we all went outside to get the most protective gloves on. We had to carefully remove the dry wall so that the insulation wouldn't fall on us. As we removed it all, we had to clean up because the ceiling made a very big mess very quickly. We were taking out the insulation, and everyone was coughing and scratching at their arms because the insulation was overwhelming the air and was getting in our skin. We had to go in shifts because it was painful and tiring. During my breaks, I was cutting pieces of plywood, and I nailed them onto the floor of the back room. Eventually, we got all of the insulation out, and we had to put new insulation in, which was not as horrible because it was covered with paper on both sides. We put more cleaner, newer drywall over the insulation; and then the ceiling was done.


 * Day four:** I spent most of the fourth day in the back room: first, I nailed in the rest of the plywood down with a nail gun. After that, Kurt, Molly, Priscilla and I went back to the C13 HQ to pick out tiles to put down over the plywood. We brought the blue and gray tiles back the the house and put down the tiles so we knew how many tiles to put where. We didn't glue them down, however, because we had to leave earlier from the site to go to the lake.


 * Day five:** We had a lot to do on our last day, so we got started right away. First, we picked up all of the tiles that were laid down the previous day, making sure to keep them in order. We put the tile glue down in sections and put the tiles on top in the pattern. When we finished, we realized that we left the electric saw in the bathroom off of the back room. We couldn't walk on the tiles until the paste dried over night, and the only other way into the bathroom was a little window, so Priscilla had to climb through the window and get the saw out. When everyone was done with their respective jobs, we had to clean up all of the old dry wall and metal that we had put in a big pile on the side of the yard. We said goodbye to Ernie, Linda, and their dogs and cats before we left the site for the last time.