We picked the girls up at the church last night at about 8 -- more than two hours earlier than their expected ETA from their week-long mission trip to Marvell, Arkansas. When we arrived about half the kids seemed to have gone already, but a core group was still milling about, parents talking, kids hugging each other goodbye.
On the way home the stories started coming. This had been a wonderful trip. They saw terrible poverty and they saw strength and joy in people despite it. They saw their own efforts pay off in the smiles and laughter from children at Kids Club as well as elderly people in a state-run nursing home. And they saw their own group -- already a strong-knit bunch -- grow even closer, bound by friendship, love and service.
These are some impressions I got listening to them talk last night. I know I don't have all the details right, and this is by no means a summary of their trip, but I think it gives a small idea of how their week went.
About Marvell: Meg said, "When we first got there we saw a lot of really nice houses and thought, 'why are we here?' This isn't so bad.'" But the next day they learned. " It was sooo segregated," Suze said. "On one side of the street was the white neighborhood with really nice houses. On the other side of the street was the black neighborhood," where the houses were all rundown.
On their accommodations: They were housed in an old abandoned elementary school that the city had sold to YouthWorks for a dollar. On the second day they were there, the pilot light for the hot water in the girls' shower went out. Apparently in schools, pilot lights and other such potential hazards are required by law to be sealed off somehow so that just anybody can't get at them. So the hot water stayed off. "We took freezing showers for the rest of the week," Suze said. Nobody had the time or the money to come out and fix it.
"They really didn't feed us very much," Suze told us, considering how hard they worked. "Three meals a day and a snack late at night. Sometimes. So when we could we went out to the gas station to get snacks. The gas station is so over-priced," she went on. "Especially for an area with so many poor people. Somebody should do something about that, in my opinion."
About working at the YouthWorks Kids Club: Both girls enjoyed helping out at Kids Club, probably almost as much as the kids liked being there. Meg said most of the kids didn't want to go home at the end of the day. "We'd have to drive them back to the projects at night," Suze said. "And they'd cry 'cause they didn't want to go home."
"The little kids were so much fun," she said. But "You have no idea how hard it is to run around all day in hundred-degree heat with little kids on your back."
Those kids were amazing, Meg told us. "They had nothing, but they were sooo happy."
"This one tiny little girl came up to me and climbed on my lap, like she knew me," Meg said. No introductions, nothing. She clung to Meg most of the day. Turns out she had befriended Suze the day before and must've figured Meg was Suze come back to play with her.
They got a taste of culture clash. "There was a girl there who was 14 and had a 2-year daughter named WahWah," Meg said. Suze chimed in: "There was another girl who had a little kid named Pooh, like Winnie the Pooh."
When one girl learned that one of our youth leaders was 22 years old, she asked her, "How many kids you got?" "None," was the youth leader's answer. "I'm not married." "Who says you have to be married?" was the girl's response.
Many of the kids they worked with seemed to have experienced things beyond their years. "One little kid saw a man get shot outside his house," Suze said. Another could demonstrate all the moves for taking someone down and putting them under arrest. "Even little 5 year old kids were running around swearing," Suze said. Meg told about a little girl she absolutely loved: "Her mom died this year," Meg said. The girl had been through a lot, but she was buoyant. "She was just so happy."
About house painting: They scraped and painted the outside of one family's house. "It was over a hundred degrees," the day they were there, Meg said. "Miss X sat outside and watched us. She had just been diagnosed with lung disease and heart disease and she wasn't supposed to do anything except stay in bed," but she sat and watched them all day.
She even made hotdogs for them, according to Suze. "She apologized because the food wasn't ready 'on time' and because she couldn't be more hospitable."
Meg stood on a ladder and painted up under the eves, fearlessly, I take it, while wasps buzzed around her head and flew in and out of a hole near where she was working. On the day Suze was there, the leaders wouldn't let her on the ladder. "You freak out too much when you see a wasp," they told her. Suze did painting at a community center where they teach people to be better parents, she said.
At the nursing home: About a third of the kids on the trip also sing in Kirk Singers, the high-school age choir at our church. Naturally the singers put their talents to work in the nursing home. After they sang, one of the women told Suze, "I prayed a choir would come in and sing for us today."
Meg had two stories about one lively and talkative old woman. When she and two other girls first went to the nursing home they were walking down the hall and they noticed a woman sitting in a wheelchair in the door of her room. "Hi, Amy!" The woman said as they walked by. Since none of the girls was named Amy, they kept walking. But when the woman said it again, Meg turned around. "Hi Amy!" the woman repeated. "Come here!" she said, so Meg went. "Are you talking to me?" Meg asked her, "because my name's Meg." The woman motioned for Meg to come closer. "I'm Amy's aunt," she confided. "You look just like her," she went on, talking about Meg's beautiful blonde hair and how Amy never comes to see her anymore. Meg and the woman talked for awhile, then the girls went on to visit someone else.
Later that same day, Meg encountered the woman again. "Remember me?" Meg asked. But the woman said she didn't. In fact, she said she'd never seen her before and she'd never met anybody named Meg.
Another time, the woman was in her bed in her room. A group of kids was gathered around listening to her stories -- but she wasn't wearing her dentures. "We couldn't understand AT ALL anything she was saying," Meg said. "When I got there, she'd already been talking to Dan for about 20 minutes." Then, horrors, the YouthWorks leader said he had somewhere else to go and was leaving Meg, Dan and another girl with the woman. "Uh, OK," Meg said, and they sat and listened some more. "We knew when she said something funny and where the stories ended," Meg told us. "So we just laughed in the right places and said 'mmm hmmm a lot.'" Finally Dan reached over and put his hand on the woman's arm. "Well, our group is getting ready to leave, so we have to go now," he told her. Meg says the woman talked another 10 minutes before they finally saw a way to make their exit. Kindly, of course.
This morning Suze was talking to her brother about their trip. He knew they were gone but wasn't exactly sure where or why. She gave him the short version of their week. "You do that with the church?" he asked her when she finished. "Of course," she said. "Where else are you going to get an opportunity to do something like that?"
"I wouldn't exactly call that an oppportunity," he said.
"You have do to it to understand," Suze told him. "Nobody knows what you're talking about when you tell them. You have to do it yourself."
Wednesday morning 4:30 a.m: We arrived at the airport. Sus had stayed up all night, but Meg couldn't quite make it -- she slept for two hours before Sus woke her at 3. They spent the night making cookies and "puppy chow" to share on the plane. 
