Rhode Island

Pro tip: don't drink milk with breakfast when you know you have to sing alone in front of a couple hundred people at 8:03 AM. Other than that, the mission trip is going pretty well!

The junior high leadership from PCTR has a special scale for how insane one can get: "On a scale from 1 to Thursday of mission trip..." By Thursday we are all hopelessly overtired and crazy silly, but haven't quite gotten to Friday when we are no longer self aware or self conscious. Tonight will be full of giggling and incoherent conversations about who knows what, but it's one of the charming parts of our great friendships with each other and one of the more memorable (even if we can't remember why or how or what on earth we're talking about) parts of being leaders on week-long mission trips.

It's Thursday! But I got off easy this year-- I volunteered as Worship Leader, as I did on Walpole Island last year. While this has resulted in even less rest than usual, it does mean I haven't been able to spend as much time with our kids, which means I'm not quite as crazy as my compatriots-- or at least, a different kind of crazy. I have been able to split my time pretty well and get to hang out with them every evening, but I do miss being on the worksite and having the extra free time to just be with and talk with my group.

But despite the insanity that is about to befall, the week is going really well. We have such a great group of middle schoolers, an age group that people typically describe as "barely human" or "monsters". Seriously. Their angst is pretty minimal, their respect is pretty great, they talk about how much they love their parents and siblings even though they would NEVER say that to their faces, they are hard workers and they are accomplishing great things in South County, RI.

I managed to get out to sites on Monday and Tuesday. Southern Rhode Island is really interesting. There are some really big, beautiful homes but also some really small, run down places. I went to houses that you could see Block Island Sound from, and I went to a house at the end of a long, pothole filled dirt road with Amtrak running through the front yard. Rhode Island reminds me a lot of Prince Edward Island in that it's so close to the sea but full of forests and farms. It's pretty rural with little seaside towns. It's charming. That's the best word for it. Until the holiday today, it was a far less crowded version of my own hometown.

And the people have been so welcoming and wonderful. I was able to spend some time visiting with a few of the residents who are having strangers from all over the US work on their homes. A local woman brought a bag full of snacks to the office just a little while ago just because she was so thrilled that kids would come and do this kind of work. The co-sponsoring church has been helpful and encouraging. It's awesome.

The drive up here made me crazy because driving the entire length of Connecticut on I-95 just seems to take forever for it being such a small state. But it wasn't too bad. When I arrived last Saturday night, it was dark and I had no idea what was surrounding the extremely windy roads that I took to Chariho High School, where we're staying this week. Most people assumed the name somehow came from the Narragansett people, whose reservation we are right next to, but it's actually the towns that go to this school: Charlestown, Richmond and I don't know if it's Hope Valley or Hopkinton, although I think one is a borough of the other. Anyway, Rhode Island has been pretty cool. I came up here sometimes as a small kid but I remembered nothing other than having fun with Grandma visiting family friends.

The front half of the week was really cloudy, sometimes rainy, very hazy and foggy and humid and misty. So grey it was blinding. The weather has let up, resulting in a little bit of sunburn despite my best efforts at the beach yesterday, but it is pretty gloriously sunny now, which will really help the work campers finish their jobs at their sites this week. The original forecast was pretty abysmal, which didn't bode well for the 20 or so homes that were exterior paint jobs, but things have definitely improved and I think most sites will finish their work.

This started as a coherent description of this place and experience, but I can already see the tired crazy creeping in as it slowly became a stream of consciousness about where I am this week. Ha ha. Still, things are going pretty well here, and I'm happy to be a part of another great mission trip with my youth!