Tallulah, Louisiana--Home of the first Indoor Mall!

Okay, so I wanted to a post on our youth mission trip to Tallulah, Louisiana.  We went at the end of June, so this is a very belated post, and people might not care, but I at least wanted to document how fun and special it was for us to be chaperones.  We went on the trip without knowing any of the kids well beforehand.  I had actually babysat some of them a long time ago.  That made me feel kind of old since, you know, these kids are in high school!  Wow.  One kid admitted that he was pretty bad whenever I used to babysit him.  :)  It was true.  We had eaten a meal and talked with the kids about the trip before we left, so we had some preparation.  

Walnut Bayou in Tallulah

Anyway, so we left early on a Sunday morning with 7 kids with plans to pick up the 8th kiddo on the way down.  We made it to Tallulah late that afternoon and had various activities to keep us busy that first night. The week was divided so that each team (named after dinosaurs) would spend two days at a work site and two days at Kids Camp.  Kids Camp was offered for free to all the children in the community.  The youth facilitated three different activity rotations.  The work sites were work sites.  However, the work that was planned for the kids to do were mainly minor work projects so that we all would have opportunities to not be so overworked that we would ignore the families that we were serving.

J and I were on different teams, and we each had half of our kids from our church.  We were both paired up with another adult and kids from a Catholic church in Chicago.  The other church group (United Methodists) were from Reno, Nevada.  The diversity of the group was pretty interesting.  The other churches thought we all had very strong accents and mostly made fun of the way that we say "Facebook"-- apparently, we separate it into two words.  Face.  Buck.  It's been a long time since I've been on a trip with teenagers, but it was so amazing to see how loving and accepting all of the kids and adults were.  I can't remember ever being with such a large group of people in such a short amount of time and being loved just for being part of a community.  This speaks a lot to our group, I would guess, because not only is it difficult to be a teenager in this world, our church has had some division lately, and it was special to be able to trust in a community.  I also was remember how hard it can be to be a teenager.  Some of our kids must really face a lot of ridicule and struggle with their self-worth, but going away and starting in a new place makes it so much easier to feel like you can really be who you are.  It breaks my heart to know that so many kids (and adults!) think they have to change themselves before they can be loved.

Courthouse in Vicksburg, MS- So great!

Back to trip details, Tallulah is a very small town in Northern Louisiana.  It's a very racially- and socioeconomically-divided town.  There are very distinct white and black parts of town.  It's not unlike many towns in the South.  The poverty level is super high, with almost half the population living under the poverty level.  I saw a very glimpse of the town as a whole, but there are places that were basically just different types of material put together.  My work team served a family that lived in a trailer.  Their son had respiratory problems and had to be hooked up to a breathing machine every night so we worked on getting the nasty, moldy (and dusty!) carpet out of his room to put tile flooring down.  Then, I took the kids on our team from my church and went to a lady's house to weed her whole yard.  (This is where I picked up my poison ivy!)  This lady was so grandmotherly, and I could tell that my teenagers really felt at home in her house.  We also spent a morning at a nursing home visiting with the elderly that we living there.

There were parts of town that we were advised not to go to.   We had some issues with plumbing and water pressure at the church.  But, overall, it was such a great experience.  One thing that I loved (and I'll wrap this up soon..) was that people in the community participated with us.  We were invited to a local family's ranch one evening.  We weren't just welcomed and then left to do our own thing.  The minister of the church where we all stayed brought his family to eat dinner with us.  At the end of the week, it felt like we had gotten the opportunity to become part of the community that we served.  :) 

Silly Group Photo

On the very last night of the trip, we had a footwashing service.  I don't know if you've ever had your feet washed by someone before, but it's a really moving experience.  Jeff and I washed the feet of each one of the kids in our group.  We could really sense the Holy Spirit just moving through our group during that time.  It was a very real, genuine experience.  Everyone let their guard down.  There was no fear of being made fun, no fear of having to act like you know what's going on when you don't... it was a time for our kids to love each other and to feel loved by God.  It was such a blessing to be able to pray individually with each of the kids and to praise God for making each of these kids who they are and their gifts that they bring to the group.