ReCreation Day 7

This is our last day of being together at ReCreation! After a eventful night before we had a early start! Lauren, Amy, Audra, David, and of course LeAnne didn’t get back till sometime around 4:00 AM. We had to be up at 7:00 to preform our clean up duties. Our job was to clean the bathrooms. 280 people were on base this week. The girls and guys each had 4 toilets. You can probably guess what those bathrooms looked like. We got it done though! Before leaving town we had one more stop to make. The church our families were from was having a fundraising sale. We dropped in to visit them! It was a blast! Madison and Bronson were their with their families. So we got to see them one last time. After purchasing a few items we took off. We were on the highway around 10:45 AM. The rest of the ride was pretty uneventful. Until the chick-fl-a stop. The big bus started to show problems. First the door wouldn’t close and the interior lights wouldn’t work. Once on the road however a bigger issue arose. The AC stopped working. For the last few hours of the trip we had no AC in one bus. But as you know our group we still made light of the situation and it just made it more fun. We arrived at the church shortly before 11:00 PM.

So now I must say farewell. ReCreation 2011 is over. I’m exhausted and so is everyone else. We’ve meet some of the greatest people on any mission trip, visited a hospital, Re-roofed a house, Painted, hammered, planted, White water rafted, Shouted (a lot), Scared every other group, and most importantly learned about serving and grew closer to our creator. This trip has been a awesome end to our summer mission program. After Rush Week David will post a recap of the summers adventures. Thanks for reading! -Alex Confer

ReCreation Day 6

We are done! I’m writing this post on the bus ride home right now. Last night was very eventful! But more on that later. It was a slow start to the morning. Richard had to get the guys going. We were dead tired. It was nice not having to paint for a day! At first. With only 4 people on the roof at a time, rest of us needed something to do. So we got the task of cool sealing a mobile home. It came in these large buckets. Upon opening then up we discovered dark liquid. It had to be stirred with a drill till it turned silver. Each bucket took over an hour to make. The temperature was about 65 degrees with rain and wind. So it was a nice change. The rain however delayed the roof a little but not for long! By 1:00 it was done! Including the Mobile homes roof. We cleaned up the site and started to move on to the best part of the day, the talent show. All the neighbor hood kids came out to help set up. Meghan and Madison did the planing and invitations. They carried their clip boards and invited the neighborhood! We were soon ready to go! People from the neighborhood we hadn’t seen all week came out to watch! Everyone got the opportunity to get up on stage and share their talent. But it also happened to be Niki’s birthday! So we brought cup cakes and sang together for him. It was a tearful farewell as we loaded the buses and had to say our goodbyes to our new family. The impact that the neighborhood had on all of us will never be forgotten. The lessons we learned from them are invaluable.

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ReCreation Day 5

We have only one more day on the work site! The house is fully painted with 3 coats of paint. All the flowers have been planted. Tomorrow we will be placing the shingles on the roof and finishing it all up. By lunch time the project will be done and man are we excited! But of course what will we do with the afternoon? Well that can only be answered with what was everyone’s high point of the day. Each night we take turns talking about highs and lows of the day. We also all have random prayer partners, which we have the opportunity to complement. Tonight everyone mentioned the kids at the worksite. Whether it was their high or what they admired about their prayer partner, the kids were the highlight. There’s 4 kids hanging out with us: Madison the 5th grader, Bronson the 4th grader, Niki the kindergartner, and Lilly the 1st grader. They are as cute as it gets. Usually I don’t have a lot of patience for little kids. Actually let me rephrase that, I have no patience, but I was able hang out with them all morning and completely lose track of time. These guys are awesome. They all have special talents and can’t wait to share them. So we decided that tomorrow afternoon we will put on a talent show. It’s going to be great! It’s so great I don’t know what to do!

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ReCreation Day 4

So it’s 30 minutes after lights out right now. What a long day! But man was it great! Today was our day off. We decided to spend it white water rafting down the french broad. It was a 3 hour tour. Just kidding it was 5. In total we traveled 9 miles. I wish I could list everyone’s rafting team and tell all the crazy stories. My raft included Richard, Erick Wintercamp, Camden, and Rollin. We called ourselves the A-Team. Mostly because we had Richard. The rapids today were as high as a class 4. Luckily no one in our boat went swimming by accident. However we did briefly lose 2 others in our group. That would be Grant and LeAnne. Luckily they quickly got back on the boat with lots of laughs. By them and the team. The entire trip was a blast to say the least. We then went to Dairy Queen and Mellow Mushroom. It was a great break and we are PUMPED to get back to work tomorrow.

David said I should sign the post at the end so I guess I will. But I don’t really know how so here’s my best shot: Hi I’m Alex Confer and I wrote this.

ReCreation Day 3

We are now halfway through our work time here! The house is almost completely painted and the roof only needs shingles! Tomorrow is our day off and Thursday we plan on finishing up the paint and the roof! Today Meghan lead up a new project. We are now also building flower beds out of wood. Grant, Eric W and Christa were the math geniuses of the day! They calculated the placement, size, and level of the flower beds. It doesn’t sound complex but believe me it was! LeAnne, Ally, Bridget, Austin, and Rush decided on what flowers to plant and spent most of the day gardening and planting. While they were busy, a problem arose. That problem would be spiders. As we moved things out of the way from the house to paint, spiders scrambled everywhere. It was crazy! Luckily Kyle, Justin, Jonathan, Grant, and Bobby became the spider killers. They used what ever they could find to protect us from the evil monsters. I was scared till they came to the rescue. The roof team shifted a lot today due to the high hear and humidity after the mornings rain. I think everyone has spent time on the roof. It’s a lot of fun! It’s like your in Florida again when your up there!

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ReCreation day 2

So we have made it our first full day!! Sadly though I ran out of time to write the blog! It’s after lights out and our captain, David the youth minister, said to go to bed. So I’ll make it short for today. Basically we roofed and painted and are all still ok! The house is primed and ready for the first coat! I don’t think anyone hasn’t enjoyed this trip. We’ve got a great group who’s willing to work together. I’ll post more tomorrow night! For now goodnight!

ReCreation Day 1

I can say with glee that we are here in safe in North Carolina! We had no bus problems and no fist fights this time. Just kidding we’ve never had a fight. Yet. We arrived at 6:30 PM after a 12.5 hour drive. David drove the entire way! Yes that’s right. David is a beast. I guess it’s all that 4Rivers he’s eaten in his life. Audra Croup and Richard B switched on and off driving the other bus. Luckily it was Sodapalousa at Race Trac. Which means more soda then a human can drink for the rock bottom price of $0.49. With it being 8 AM it was well accepted and got the morning started. We ate at subway after David was out voted all to one against hardies. What a mistake that could have been! Justin M managed to convince the guy to give him a free cookie. David enjoyed eating it. Amy, LeAnne and Peyton some how managed to sleep most of the way after lunch on the luggage. It looked very nice!

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On the bus to NC!

We are off!

ReCreation 2011 Day Before

It’s the eve of ReCreation 2011! What will we be doing for the next week? Well, I can’t tell you. It’s a secret. In fact its so secret I don’t even know. This secret is so secret no one on our team has any idea! Ya, it’s really that big of a secret. What I can tell you is that last year we did a combination of digging septic lines, roofing, and painting. The year before that, we dug the entire week through rock and clay for septic lines. It was a blast! All we really know is that we are going to Asheville, North Carolina. We will be working with ReCreation Experiences (http://www.recreationexperiences.org/). Their mission statement is “Sharing our Faith through Home Repair Mission.” This will be the third year in a row we have served with them in recent history. Each time we’ve gone the entire team has grown in every way. It’s going to be AWESOME! We leave tomorrow morning, Sunday July 10, 2011 at 6:00 AM and return Saturday July 16, 2011 at 10:00 PM.

But wait! There’s more! With this trip we will be keeping everyone well informed with what’s going on. Each night we will update this blog right here with the day’s activities and news. We will also be carrying around a GPS tracker that you can watch here: (http://elevatesm.org/Short/c) We will have it in the bus and it will update every 10 minutes. Join our facebook page too. There we will be putting pictures up when we can of the work site. (http://facebook.com/elevatesm). Feel free to comment on a blog post and we’ll read them out to the team!