Work Day

A bunch of people got together to work on our church building today.  They had fun and, while working on the building, I think they did some building of the church as well. Some people who didn’t know each other before today fixed that. Some people who had worked together in Gulfport, MS, brought those relationships back to Fort Wayne.

Thanks, everyone, for your work together. And for your work on the building.

There they go again

Last October I spent a week in Gulfport, Mississippi with a team from our church. I wrote about it (and talked about it and pictured it and….).

This week another team from our church is there, and we decided to create a blog just for those times that our church does collective stuff outside the walls of our building. So far, two members of the team have been blogging and there are several pictures up.

Here are the cool things:

• We keep going back to the same place and there are particular people who are making repeat visits. So often churches go to a place once. That is great for the people going, but it means that learning comes at the expense of the people we are trying to help. With a sustained presence, we can make sustained change.
• With the new blog which is focusing on a KIND of work rather than on a PERSON, we have multiple voices talking about what is happening. Laurie’s word pictures today are familiar to those of us who have watched her trace the outlines of her own life, but there is something transcendent when she describes a place that I have been and that others have heard about. Mark is also writing and leading the team…a combined project which I personally know is challenging.
• We’re building an online reflective presence for our work. How 2.0.
• Our team has 37 people and I don’t know all of them.

Go see what our team is saying and doing. And let them know they are doing well at doing good.

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no journalist, but….

Last week I tried. In some ways, I tried too hard. But I learned some interesting lessons.

Oh. In case you just joined this conversation, I spent last week in Gulfport, Mississippi with 19 other people from our church working to repair damaged houses and encourage damaged lives. I was along to work, to pray, to provide spiritual direction. I also had my own agenda of seeing how well we could report on our progress in real time using new media.

We did pretty well. I wrote several posts, another guy wrote a guest post, we created some audio posts with several people talking, and I even tried a video blog. I uploaded some of our pictures using flickr.

Here’s what I learned:

• passing a phone around is a pretty good way to interview people, especially with the audio blogging feature of hipcast.
• warning them in advance so they have some time to structure their thoughts is even better.
• Odeo wouldn’t work for me…and I’m glad I found out before I left town.
• I had an mp3 recorder that would have been nice, but the audio card in the laptop I had was not reliable for processing either audio or video…but I knew before I left.
• I had to give up on the video editing project by wednesday. I was working too hard on the whole package to make that happen too. And giving that up was a wise thing.
• I am not a good interviewer, am not good at finding the questions to ask that will put people at ease. That’s okay, I’m not a bad commentator, but for other aspects of embedded citizen journalism, other people will have to do it.
• Thinking about producing this much media, until the habit is formed, keeps the brain working. By Thursday, something had to give, which ended up being my migraine (mild and I kept going, but it was my reminder that I am a very finite creature).
• Other people can help, and another time I will prep people for blogging ahead of time. Brent’s post was a wonderful sample of how different perspectives can help.
• I don’t see this as very difficult, but the fact that not many other groups have tried to report on the spot means that we need to work at it more. HCRN is trying and has added a forum to their website which will be great as more groups use it.
• test everything before you go. Have an extra camera and phone battery. Don’t depend on power cords being available at worksites.
• I created a CD for our team to listen to as we traveled down. It was, I knew, a 30 minute podcast in style, but almost no one in our team knows anything about iPods, so I just didn’t call it anything. But it proved to me that that format can work very well for a narrowcasting project. 4 cars, 20 people, same trip, same directions to hear on the road. [produced by having people from previous trips leave stories on my K7 answering machine, used Audacity to assemble the stories, recorded my pieces with a headset mic that I use for skype as well, and added a couple songs.]
• Talking with Chris about the project got him posting and requesting funds. We’re still working with HCRN to find out if anything came in through that appeal, but it was a great model of using the blogosphere for requesting support of projects.
• I’m thinking about the next project which will test some more of the lessons as well.

For those of you who read along with our trip, thanks for coming along. We had a great time.

Home

We made it, most of us, in less than 14 hours. No accidents, no arguments. And already, driving home with Paul. we realized how easy it is to be back in Fort Wayne as if we hadn’t started the day on the gulf coast. Fairfield Avenue still runs unscathed toward downtown.

And I run the risk of running unscathed toward downtown if I too quickly forget George and Ken and Kevin and Wendy and ‘Pete’ and 19 dear friends who I saw in new ways on this trip. But I know that we are all changed and must consider how the church working in Gulfport can become the church working in Fort Wayne.

But for now, bed.

On the road home from Mississippi

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Finished

It’s 8:00pm, local time, and we leave Hope City at 3:00 am. This has been a remarkable week.

We spent time after supper sharing one word that described our feelings at that moment. Satisfied, contented, uplifted, juiced-up, peace, challenged–these were all words that were shared. We’re glad that we have had a great time getting to know each other. We wonder how long this change will last.

Some of already are in bed. Others are getting silly, the silliness that comes from having been away. Still others are playing a game called “stun”, a word which one of us cannot remember.

Great cinnamon rolls. A person who had worked with cement for all of 2 hours teaching another person what to do. A woman who had only ever done a tiny bit of drywall wanting to build a garage and learning that Porter-Cable is the right drill to buy.

What else can we say? We had communion tonight after talking about our one word and spent some time thinking about Jesus’ last one word: finished. Because He finished His work, we don’t have to prove anything. Instead, a group of very different people, some retired, some unemployed, some taking vacation, some taking time without pay, none professional craftspeople, all very human…this group of people can make a difference in lives.

And we know that as the last four of us trickle out of this room tonight, that this week apart is over. Tomorrow we are on our way back to our lives at home.

And we are, to be honest, very glad. We love these people, but we will be thrilled to see our families again. (and if I could fly, I would be there in five minutes).

But I have been changed–a little–this week. It had little to do with seeing the devastation, though that continues to be terrible. It had everything to do with thinking about spiritual responsibility, about needing to be the spiritual adult….and finding that the prayer of many people made that possible.

Thanks to very many people for praying for us, for encouraging through emails and texts, for giving up family members and friends for this week.

And pray for us on the way home tomorrow. Because tomorrow starts way too soon.

P.S. Is it true that Ed isn’t allowed to eat Snickers?

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It’s curtains for you….

If you come to Hope City

A crew from First Missionary made curtains for all of the sleeping compartments (beds) in the two sleeping trailers. These will make it easier to hide our clothes when the beds aren’t all in use and we sue the bunk above us for clothing. They will hide unmade beds when, as one person said, “I make the bed at home as an act of love for my wife. Here, it isn’t getting made.” (Not me, Nancy). They will help moderate the temperature for those who find it too cold in the summer….or rainy season.

Thanks to Sharon and the rest of the crew who worked on this project and to the person at the fabric store who gave us a very good price.

Audio - on tour with the food crew

I spent the middle part of the day taking the food crew on a tour of our work sites. We got to see the end of one project, the starting of a new project, and the next to last day at George’s. We also ate lunch at the Salvation Army base camp in Biloxi. Four days before the storm, the Salvation Army signed a deal that gave them the old Biloxi High School football stadium in exchange for some other property.

They have pitched food tents in the end zone, converted the space beneath the bleachers into store rooms and dorm rooms and a common area, and provide a base camp for Salvation Army, Project Teamwork, Hope works, Americorps, Habitat for Humanity, Beverton Falls (Oregon) Foursquare Church, and someone else that I’m forgetting. It’s a wonderful model of cooperation. And the food was pretty good, too.

We’re going out for supper tonight, which is why the food crew could go off-site. However, they’ve been doing a wonderful job of ministering to us here, and we needed to let them see the work of the rest of our team.

This is, by the way, an amazing, cooperative, creative, supportive, mentoring, serving group of people. It’s a great place to be.

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Gulfport-Thursday

The team from First Missionary Church is starting the fourth day working out of Hope City. It promises to be the busiest day yet.

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late night thoughts from Gulfport

Actually, it isn’t very late on the ground, but it is 11:00pm in Indiana, and we have a 10:30 lights out here at Hope City. That’s a good thing for most everyone, because our work is pretty tiring for the crew that’s here…or for any crew.

• This morning I watched one of our crew talking on the phone and looking at the pile of rubble next door. While I watched, he stopped, bent down, and picked up a metal pitcher of some sort that was in the pile of debris. I started wondering whether the presence of that pitcher might demonstrate the difference between first world and third world disasters.From what I know about the third world, everything gets scavenged (?) and reused. There is a creativity that is astounding (and Paul pictures some of these finds in Kenya marvelously). A pile like the one next door would be gutted, I assume, with the stair rails, the blocks, the pitchers, the carpet scraps, everything finding a new home. Even if it belonged to someone else, it would be used.

  On the other hand, in a country where there is comparatively little need, the stuff remains piled up. I don’t mean that people here don’t need houses or jobs or other things. They do. However, there is not the systemic need to make do with little that exists in other parts of the world.

  That may be why so many buildings and signs and other stuff remains. The fragments aren’t needed for anything. They are so much disposable stuff.

• It is hard to wear multiple hats of worker, encourager, leader, and reporter. The reporting side, particularly as a videographer, gets pushed to the side as I work on the other tasks that I am involved in. I finally decided today that that was acceptable for the success of the team, even if it meant I couldn’t accomplish a personal goal. I’ll do what I can and let go.
• Community 2.0 creates interesting networks. My friend Chris worked today to help get some money flowing toward our work today. Neil Cox at IndyChristian, a site that is working to link churches in Indianapolis also pointed toward us. The children of one of the guys on our team looked at us from off the coast of Africa. There is a set of real connections between real people who are really concerned about making a real difference in the lives of other real people. Someday, I’ll actually SEE and TOUCH (shake hands with) Chris and Neil. Until then, the friendship this way is pretty cool.
• I spent the morning with Ken, trying to get a tire fixed and other stuff to get to the work site. It took 3 hours. On one hand, this seemed like a tremendous waste of time. I mean, the work is drywalling, right? On the other hand, this was an incredibly great time to learn how this guy has seen God work in his own life, in such a way that he was honored by the president, is volunteering almost fulltime but still finding God provide for him (and his family), and is helping do great things for the people here who are his neighbors. We discovered that we may have very different lives, but we have common cause as sons of the same Father, trying to live out faith in a way that touches bodies and souls.
• It’s time for bed, even though the stories keep coming to mind, scuttling as quickly as the crabs we saw on the beach two hours ago. (tired minds use tired metaphors).

technorati tags:gulfport, community2.0, chrisbrogan, blews

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