Coahoma, Day 5 (Thursday)

Okay, so this was the hardest day of the trip by far. There's a couple of reasons, like these...

First, my group ended up going to a retirement home for the morning. I'm not sure if this is true or not, but I was told that every person we talked to had some form of Alzheimer's. That makes things tough right away. But, we get there, first walk in, and there a woman who says nothing other than "Help Me! Please!" It was soooo hard. She didn't understand the nurses were helping her, and they were completely loving to her, thank goodness. I ended up talking with a guy who grew up in Mississippi, then moved to Chicago for a while and is now back home. Having Lorie's family in Chicago it was easy to talk to him, and having Adam with me (the biggest Bears fan around) we had a good talk. He also like to color, he worked really hard at coloring a picture of an apple. It was also weird that people there were allowed to have snuff. It was a little odd.

After that we went to the last day of sports camp, even hotter than before. Hottest day yet, the guys were even harder to work with, and our students were now a little more tired. it just was a great combination, but we got through it, we managed to talk to the kids about Jesus and obedience. That's the most important thing :)

What made it worse was on the hottest day after we played football. How did we do? I threw the game winning interception. But that was followed by a shower, and yet again clean socks have never felt so good.

For dinner we had a community dinner. The mayor made his home-made fried chicken, the rumor is he actually injected spice and hot sauce into the chicken. It was awesome. Honestly, it was great to have southern home cooking again. I didn't realize how much I missed it. So dinner was great!

Then came the footwashing ceremony. Always great, but with one minor problem. Right before dinner the air conditioner broke in our meeting room. It had to have been 100 degrees in there with 90% humidity. Don't believe me? When I walked in I could suck the moisture out of the air. Then the Youthworkers asked me to play a worship song to buy them a few minutes. I was sweating after the second chord. It was incredibly hot. But, prayer is always more important. We (our wonderful adult ministers!) prayed with every single student, some more than once. People were praying and caring for each other for hours. We didn't stop until after 11:45, and honestly, the only reason we stopped that early was the stinging in our eyes from the combination of sweat and tears and 90% humidity. The students were so great together, we actually ended up staying up a little and letting them shower at night, it was only fair.

It's odd, we've been a Youthworks trip before and we knew the footwashing was coming, but it was really great. Adults who had never been on the trip before were asking to pray with students, people were running all over and talking with other students, praying for them, hugging, caring, just actually living the love of Christ and praying for their friends.

So that was the last night, trip home tomorrow.

T