Thoughts from the kids on our second day of work....
photos are on the bottom of the blog for each day...so if you missed them ...look again:)

 Kids are doing great! As usual, we must be flexible..as the saying goes...stuff happens! We have moved a few teams to different worksites each day but everyone continues to work really hard. It was 91 yesterday....over 100 degrees on the roof one team worked on.
Last night was great fun!
A blue grass band(see photo below) came to play! The kids got up and danced and we had a ball. The 4 old guys who played were right out of central casting. They come once a week all summer to entertain ASP groups ...it is their way of saying Thank you to all the volunteers . They had some wise words for the kids including( read this with a Tennessee mountain drawl) " tonight before you go to bed pick up that textin' machine I know all you kids have and tell your family and parents you love them"....well since our kids don't have them for the week, I want you to know they Love you!!!!

WE had our own reflection time last night...had special prayers for some special people....Sophie Rose(Charlie's cousin), Michael Goodgame( it would have been his 21st birthday)and Vince( who is John's dear friend and neighbor who died yesterday).
Below are words form one youth on each team...you will hear from 4 different kids each day for the week.

 Sasha
Today we worked on a different home, fixing up Miss Lucy's house. Miss
Lucy is an elderly woman that lives  with her little dog named Mo.
When we first visited her house, we found that there was some work on
the roof that needed to be done and we have to paint her room. Today
we had some of the group working sanding the room and prepping it to
be painted and the other half worked on fixing the room and getting
ready to lay some roofing. The room had been primed and ready to paint
tomorrow and the roofing will be continued also.


Alex
Today is day 2 of the mission trip.  My group consists of our
parents Sue and Mark, and my fellow kids Matt, Madi and Wrenn. After
Day 1, we were very eager to work. The reason was because Day 1 had
very little work for us. The mobile-home that we are working on is at
the bottom of a hill and on Day 1 it poured. An absolute river of mud
and water flowed down towards the home and all we could do before and
after it rained was move some flowers and clear out some junk. Today
we were greeting with the perfect conditions to work in. It was hot.
Very hot. And I was so glad for it. As I worked out there today, I
faced the heat head on with the happiness that we were actually doing
work for Evelyn, the elderly woman who lives in the home. We got a
great amount of work done and I am so glad for it. With the amazing
leadership of our group's dad, Mark Moyer, we were able to install
headers and footers to lay the groundwork for putting in the actual
underpinning. Day 2 was great and the Sonic milkshakes that we had
before going back to the World Cup disappointment were very worth it.
I can't wait for Day 3.

emma
Our crew worked on two different houses today. First, we worked on
insulating and replacing the ceiling in our primary family's home.
There are five children, two parents, and one grandfather in the
family that we work with. By noon, we found out that the eldest
daughter and the two parents were sick with a stomach virus, so we
worked on a different house. The second house that we worked on today
belonged to an old lady (Eighty on December 22nd!), and a little
dachshund named Mo. We sanded and primed a room for this lady, and
worked on beginning her new roof. Tomorrow we will be back at our
primary family's house, finishing up fixing their ceiling.


Elisabeth
Today, day two, "tattuesday" (according to ASP),  we continued to work
on what we had begun yesterday.  My family, consists of  Deb,
JR(Matt), Jordan, Graham, and Max.  Yesterday we met our family, a
young couple, Christina(19) and
Jordan(20) who are expecting a baby girl, Harley, in late August.
They also have seven very friendly Chihuahua and a baby kitten!  Today
we worked on two rooms in their home, the future nursery and Christina
and Jordan's bedroom. I specifically worked in their bedroom.
Yesterday we sanded the floors in preparation for today. Today,
Jordan, JR, and I cleaned the floors to prepare for the tiling.  By
4:30, we begun to head in to camp, we had finished tiling their entire
room!  Graham, Max, Deb and JR worked yesterday taking out the old
floors in the nursery, where today they begun to set in the new
floors. It was a very labor intensive job, but they managed and have
done and continue to do a spectacular job.  After a long and very
successful day working on the Nox's house, we left for the evening on
our relatively long drive back.  On the way we stopped for gas where
we met a very sweet lab mix that had been abandoned just two weeks
prior.  I truly hope the pup finds a forever home in the near future.
Back at camp, some of us raced to the showers, or the basketball
court, or out for a run, or even to watch the last of the US game in
World Cup.  Overall it was a great day, super successful and I hope
the rest of the week continues to go this way.
-Elisabeth

Tuesday

Good morning !

The previous post was from an email Sue received this morning that we thought was particularly appropriate to share with our group .

We have also added a photo of last nights sunset.

K

To Make Something of Beauty

To make something of Beauty - repost

By David Anderson

For blog go to: findingyoursoul.com

One of the simplest joys of life is to make something beautiful.  For me that joy is greater when that something has been run down or broken or left for useless.

For the past three days I have been painting my daughter and son-in-law’s new apartment in New York. Actually, I have been working on that place for months because the place is a fixer-upper. I like the work. This is their first home; reminds me of the first place Pam and I bought. In my mind I can still go room to room at 36 Kane Street and see before and after. It became beautiful, maybe—because I did nearly everything myself—the prettiest home we have ever lived in.

Maggy and Andy’s apartment is an old pre-war, two bedrooms, a real kitchen, room for a proper dining room table. Seven years of eating dinner on the sofa and sleeping on blow-up mattresses is over. I am happy for them. Proud, too, of course.

The last owner rented the place out, and it shows. People with more beer than expertise painted the walls and woodwork with rollers soaked in cheap paint. Wires for a defunct security system, along with TV cables had been stapled to door frames and base boards, then painted over and over. When we tore out the cables it looked as if someone had glued broken spaghetti to the edges of the trim. Parts of the walls were crumbling. There were gouges. The walls were littered with flecks of crud from the clotted bottoms of paint cans.

I offered to do this work because I knew that, on their budget, they could only hire the handyman in the building to throw a coat of paint on things. That would be more of the same.

I used sharp scrapers and a power sander to restore the lines of the woodwork. It took hours, days. I covered everything in plastic but dust was still everywhere. I filled the wall gouges and sanded down all the crud. I went through two tubes of caulk. I listened to Dire Straits and Victoria de los Angeles. At the end of the day, the kids would come home from work, marvel at my progress and take me out for dinner.

Why, since I was exhausted and popping Advil, did I feel like the luckiest man on the planet?

Yesterday I finished. It was beautiful. It was far from perfect, which is why its beauty made you feel like dropping to your knees. There were limits, thank God. We couldn’t just strip out the old and put in new. We had to work with what is. We had to take something broken and find a way to fix it. We had to take something neglected and see if we couldn’t love it a bit. We had to take what others had recklessly torn up and gradually coax it back to its old form.

There is an old prayer which we say on Good Friday. “Let the whole world see and know that things which were cast down are being raised up, and things which had grown old are being made new, and that all things are being brought to their perfection by him through whom all things were made….”

“Don’t tell the kids,” I say to Pam, “don’t tell the kids how much joy I get out of going down there to paint. I can’t explain to them that I am doing this . . . not really for them.”

Here are some blurbs from our kids wrote about their teams as they completed their first day of work.

Mark and Sue's team,( Wrenn, Madi, Alex and Bateman) were to put in skirting on Evelyn's trailer. They removed a large Iris bed and prepared the ground for the footings until the skies opened up. It poured for 2 hours! By the time the rain let up, they were able to replant the irises as a focal point of her driveway but the river of mud and water  prevented them from continuing construction work. 
They have Bear, a German Sheperd who loves visitors on site!

Susan and Mark's family( James, Charlie, Emma and Halle) and JC and Kimberly's teams( Jack, Cole, Sasha, Sydney) all worked  together today. The family we worked for had 4 girls and 1 boy, 2 dogs and 2 cats. The roof
has been replaced but there was still water damage that had been there
before the repairs. We tore down the ceiling and found  a lot of dust
and mold ( don't worry we have gloves, masks and eye wear.) As we moved
into the girls room there was water in the ceiling that we had to poor
out. We took off the sheet rock in 3 of the rooms and took out the
insulation. We also had to make some repairs to the roof as well.

Matt and Deb's family( Jordan, Elisabeth, Graham and Max) sanded a floor in a back bedroom, did demolition of a floor in the nursery. The young couple are expecting their first baby in a few months.
Their is quite a bit of activity at this location including 7 Chihuahuas!!! 


The camp that we are staying at is a very typical middle school . We are
very lucky to have amazing  air conditioning and hot water! We have 2 other groups here, One form North Carolina and one from Tennessee. 
We have good meals( chicken pot pie and homemade biscuits tonight) and the kids are well fed and happy!.
They are all really hard workers!! Not a slacker in the group !!!!
I have attached a few photos from the last few days in random order! Everything from Line dancing in Nashville on our fun day to arriving at  camp and then of course

photos of our first day of work.
More to come later!