Greetings from sunny, cool — and very dry — Gallup, New Mexico. It’s hard to believe that a year has flown by since our mission service team has been here, but amazingly enough, we’ve picked up where we left off.

While we’ve only been here a few days, so many wonderful things have happened –- so here’s the latest from the southwest.

When we arrived on Saturday, we were invited to the MCC of Albuquerque to meet, greet, eat and share with them our work with the Southwest Indian Foundation (SWIF). It was a fabulous time of fellowship and sharing, and feasting. (We were definitely spoiled!) We learned that the MCC Albuquerque folks were preparing for a big event in the next couple of weeks called “A Thousand Cranes For Peace” service. They were in the midst of creating and hanging 1,000 origami cranes in their sanctuary –- and still had a long, long way to go. To lend a hand, our group decided to join in their “crane making marathon”, and after an internet tutorial (and a few crane disasters), the plan is to make 100+ cranes and drop them off before we fly home.

This year, our assistance with SWIF is very different.  We are working in the SWIF warehouse (in Gallup) on new home construction — which will eventually be moved out to the Navajo Reservation.

There are two houses currently under construction in the warehouse.  One, called House #11, is basically up, framed and roofed, so our jobs are mainly inside work –- sanding (cough), priming walls, and painting.

The other house, House #12, was started on our first day! We literally laid the first board in the foundation. Our team members have been sawing, nailing (with air guns no less), painting, hammering, driving fork lifts and scissor lifts, and generally having a great time!

Wednesday and Thursday some of our folks will be working at St Michael’s Association for Special Education — delivering the reading project books and assisting in adapting curriculum for the student’s needs.

Another important aspect of our trip is building relationships with the organizations we are working with. Wednesday night we are having about 40 people from SWIF over for dinner and fellowship!

Finally, to everyone back at Jesus MCC — thank you, thank you, thank you for all the prayers, support, well wishes and wonderful care packages we’ve received from church this week. Keep the chocolate coming!! We’ll be home soon with lots of pictures and stories!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 15th, 2008 at 7:12 pm and is filed under Helping Those in Need. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.