Catching Up: Part 2

Hey y'all! We've officially been here a month! This week I'm going to try to give you an idea of what a typical week looks like:

Monday:
We start most days together at 7:15am with coffee and someone leading us in prayer and thoughts for the day. Abi and I catch the bus around 8am to go to the Fletcher building of Mission Centers of Houston. It's about a half hour bus ride. Of the four MY teams in Houston, our house is furthest away from downtown, so we have to make plans well ahead of time. As we approach the city, the demographic ratio decreases in Hispanics and increases in African Americans. Currently on Monday and Wednesday mornings Abi and I work in the nurseries during the ESL classes. For almost three hours myself and another nursery worker tackle 12-16 toddlers. This being a new experience for me, the first day is still fresh in my mind of how overwhelming it was. But now the kids have settled in pretty well and I find myself enjoying it! Let's be honest, Spanglish-speaking toddlers are just about the cutest thing God ever made.
Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday afternoons about 15-25 Preteens come to hang out. Dodgeball, soccer, and basketball are their favorite games, and I quickly discovered how much I love soccer! Those are the best days, even if it does mean coming home with a few bumps and bruises. :) We close our time with Bible study and a snack.
By the time we get home it's usually after 6pm. Our teammates who work with Ecclesia make the team dinner Mon-Thurs so it's ready when we get home and then we clean up. Mondays we gather and sing some songs together before dinner, and after we have our weekly team meeting to talk about logistical stuff - house concerns, fundraising, and also ways we were encouraged during the past week.

Tuesday:
Tuesday is clothing distribution at Fletcher to homeless and low-income people. We act as personal shoppers to those who come, and also hand out some food and hygiene kits. It's a cool opportunity to talk with people one-on-one and hear their life stories. We also spend some time organizing the clothing closet with Emilio, which can be a lot of fun because you never know what you're going to find in there! Sometimes we'll also ride with Daphne to Sam's to get snacks and stuff for the kids.
Back at the house, we have Teacup Tuesday, which just means we decided to only drink out of teacups on Tuesdays to make Curriculum Night a little more special. We discuss the assigned chapters in the book for that week and enjoy pastries that we get super cheap at the Panadería down the road. :)

Wednesday:
Wednesdays we brace ourselves for Kid's Club in the afternoon. This is by far the craziest day. About 60 elementary-aged kids running around screaming, and all you can do is pray that plenty of volunteers show up to share the load! Eventually I'll get to join in on the art class for the Preteens that goes on at this time...yeah, I'm looking forward to that day. It's not all bad, though. This past week I got to just love on some girls who missed their moms and draw some pictures for them, and that was really sweet. :)
Evenings at the house are Team Nights. The idea is just to spend some quality time together as a team. This month we've been taking turns telling our life stories, although this past week we decided to go out for pizza because two of our team members had birthdays! Sometimes kids in the neighborhood will come knock on door to see if we can play frisbee with them too.

Thursday:
Abi and I don't have to be at Fletcher til the afternoon on Thursdays, so the mornings make for some great down time - catching up on reading, playing my trumpet, etc. When we get to Fletcher we hang out with Noe and Daphne (the directors at Fletcher) and pray together before Preteens. Afterward we head over to the Gano building of the Mission Centers for City-Wide! This is the time that we get together with the other Houston teams for food, fellowship, and worship. Last night our team led worship and it was a lot of fun :)

Friday:
It's our Sabbath! Which means we can do anything, really, with the hope that it will be restful. During our technology fast we also have access to technology today (clearly), so we usually head for the library or a coffee shop. Taft, Ecclesia's old location, is one of my favorite places to chill on a Sabbath. There always seems to be homeless dudes hanging out in the cafe making art. I plan to bring some materials and join them one of these weeks. Later, my roommate Scarlet and I might close the day with a competitive game of Spanglish Bananagrams. :)

Saturday:
This is our community day. In the mornings we try to head out before the heat to visit neighbors at garage sales or the park. There are a lot of deep ditches in Houston, and in our neighborhood they tend to be full of trash, so a couple weeks ago we went trash picking for items we hope to use for art. Half of the team will go grocery shopping, which is always an adventure. In the afternoon we might make cookies for our neighbors or play with kids, and then in the evening we might have a community dinner and play frisbee or futbol (soccer).

Sunday:
We ride the bus part way to Ecclesia, and walk the rest of the way. We've been helping out with parking as the church gets used to their new location. They've been growing so much that they had to re-locate, and now we're in what used to be an old warehouse. After the service we head out with other volunteers to Simple Feast at James Bute Park. We hang out, give out food, and play volleyball with the people there. Rich and poor intersect, and it's like a glimpse of the kingdom of heaven. By the time we get home, some might be able to catch a nap while others go the local Washateria to do laundry. Eight white kids in a mostly Hispanic neighborhood stand out. We are recognized by more people than we can recognize yet. But that's also helped us to connect with people on a regular basis. The Washateria is a great place to do that.

Well, I was hoping I would have enough time left for a story, but it'll have to wait til next time.
Hasta luego!

Catching Up: Part 1

It's hard to figure out what to write about for my first in-Houston post. If I could tell you everything that has moved my heart over the past few weeks, we'd be here a long time and they'd probably kick me out of the library.

Let's start with my housemates...

Thanks to these beautiful people, I don't think I could feel any more at home in a foreign city as I do now. I live in a house full of fantastic musicians, and I am so excited to see where this goes! These past few weeks have been a time of beginning to discover who we are. What makes him laugh? What annoys her? Who opened up right away, and who is holding back? And why? And what is it like to live with me? Our perceptions constantly shift as we try to figure each other out, but it is remarkable how quickly you can get to know people that you are suddenly living with. And it's simply uncanny to me just how well we've all been getting along since Day 1! I wake up and pinch myself to make sure I haven't dreamed this.

In a few short weeks, things that were once unusual for me have become ordinary. But as Brennan Manning says, "We encounter God in the ordinariness of life." We spend more time waiting for buses than we do riding them. We spend more time walking home from the grocery store than we do shopping. We play volleyball with the homeless. And then there's my service site, where I spend mornings speaking Spanglish with toddlers and afternoons playing dodgeball and soccer with preteens.

I'm super crunched for time, but here are some more highlights from this month:
My trumpet, which I've barely touched over the past four years, has been seeing the light of day again.
David Crowder led worship at our church last Sunday :)
Last Saturday we had some neighbors (who happen to have 8 brand new adorable puppies) over to our house for frisbee, homemade pizza, and music. It was absolutely wonderful!

Little by little we are growing in love.
Until next week....!
Tracy