Ecumenical Work Week 2011

Until now, most of my blogging has come from trips to foreign countries and was designed to help me stay in touch with friends and family at home. This time, I'm in the U.S. but it feels just as different and new. I'm writing not to stay in touch but to share a story. I'm writing to you from the Ecumenical Work Week here in New Orleans.

Most of you know New Orleans as the site of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. You may not know that this friendly, happy city that was once the scene of so much heartache is beginning to come back. Residents are returning. Rebuilding their homes and businesses. Reuniting with friends and family they had lost. These people, known for their parties, their gumbo, and their breached levies, are becoming a city once more.

This is why we're here.

The American Baptist Home Mission Society has brought 9 universities from across the US, from Oregon (that's us!) to Indiana to Kansas. There's even a really fun group of students from Puerto Rico- I had a blast chatting in Spanish with them today! 80-ish students are gathered to participate in a week of service. Some of us come from very different backgrounds; we've met students from Christian schools for whom required chapel is the norm. At Linfield, we don't even have a chapel (yet!) We've met journalism majors and theology majors and people with majors I can't remember because they don't exist at my school. We are mingling and playing cards and having powdered sugar fights with the remnants of our beignays, and as we do so, our horizons are being broadened, just a little bit more.

This is why we're here.

Every morning at 8, we start the day with a devotional, a time to pray and prepare for the day. We went to church on Sunday before spending an afternoon at Jackson Square, and we pray as we get in the bus to go to the worksite. For me, it's an interesting combination of the mission trips I did with my church in high school and the Alternative Spring Break trips I've done since then. Yet it's coming at a good time in my life. I graduated from college, volunteered in Afghanistan, returned home to start a new job, and moved to a new apartment all in the course of two months; it hasn't been easy to avoid the frustrations of change and not falter a bit in faith. This trip is about service, but it's also about fellowship and seeing God in every day.

This is why we're here.

Last night, the pastor of the church where we are staying told us incredible story about finding faith in post-Katrina New Orleans, and it made us cry. Stories of a man who rescued his neighbor as his mother died of a heart attack, of a random truck driver who delivered water to people who had gone without for three days, of the church feeding thousands of displaced, trapped residents for three meals a day for six months after Katrina. Pastor Randy told us that our presence here proves that New Orleans has not been forgotten. Our presence proves that this is "the city that God remembered."

This is why we're so lucky to be here.