National Youth Gathering-Day 6
The day of service today was great, even with the tornado and the unexpected mission. I have to admit that when I first found out about the ditches which we would be cleaning trash out of for our service day, I was a little skeptical. I could not get the thought out of my head that I would rather be doing a mission such as painting or building a house, working in somebody’s yard, or doing something that would directly affect a victim of hurricane Katrina in a positive way. The ditch next to the highway that we were instructed to clean though, still possessed the trash which we could tell was put there by the storm 4 years ago. We found bikes, a set of dishes that were shattered among tons of glass, a pillar, and even a bottle with some change in it, which we would clean off and give to the “Change for Change” charity at the Gathering that night. At the end of the day, it was apparent that just because the project wasn’t necessarily what a lot of people wanted to do with their service day, that didn’t mean that somebody didn’t need to do it or that the work wasn’t needed in the community.
Even though it was along a highway, there were homes along the road. One man came out into the road, thanked us for the service we were doing, and then proceeded to get us 10 big watermelons in which we then of course scarfed down.
One other big thing was when we first got into the Superdome at the National Youth Gathering in New Orleans. I still remember the camera shot of the top of the Superdome getting blown away, and when the building that was said to be able to withstand 200 mile per hour winds got its roof annihilated by a hurricane. One of the first things I did at the dome was looked at the roof. The outside was fine, but inside not so much. There were still missing panels. There was still a missing part of the ceiling. For a second, it was as if I was reliving the shot on CNN of the cracking of the aluminum of the ceiling as it got blown away by a hurricane.
Blog written by: Cooper Domgard
