Chattanooga - Rachel and Allison

Saturday night as we rolled into the driveway of Hope 4 Chattanooga, we were shocked to behold our housing for the next week.....

The building is surrounded by a chain link fence and barbed wire fencing. On several of the windows there are bars, and a sign located beside the door saying, "Please make sure all windows and doors are locked!!" This sign by itself was not too scary, however, in the dark, the combination of these things can be a bit nerve wracking.

So anyway, to what we are actually doing...Sunday we woke up at like 6:30 am for a training session and then church, and then another training session. These sessions prepared us for this past week. Our team split into two main groups on monday-wednesday. Team "A" went to a house in the process of being built and team "B" (our team) went to a house to hang sheet rock. The family we performed these services for consists of a mother and her three children (2 daughters and one son).

This was a fun learning experience for everyone. We were able to clean her son's bedroom, do the dishes, take out the trash, patch a hole on the roof, and most importantly fix the dinning room ceiling.

Ally, Emily, and I removed the insulation from the attic in-order to knock out the ceiling. Removing the insulation was real fun! We had to balance on the ceiling beams and transfer the dirty insulation from one end of the attic to the other...with cooking pots! :] Once we had finished that we hammered the roof out, removed the remaining debris hanging from the ceiling, and removed leftover nails. Next came the actual hanging of the sheet rock....this was when Mr. Vonhof came in handy. He was the only one tall enough to hold up this heavy sheet rock, without standing on a ladder. So he held it up and we drilled in the screws :] that was an adventure let me tell you. It was a wee bit harder that it appeared, but we got done. The awesome guy named Freeman was a worker at Hope for Chattanooga and he instructed us on all the things we needed to do. He was incredibly patient and kind! (Especially when it came to nailing up the trim. inside joke ;]) Well, that raps up that work site, but wait don't leave...there's more!

We have had the opportunity to work with the children at Inner City Missions for several days this week. There are six of us (Katie, Tara, Me, Emily, Keina, Stephanie) who have been doing tutoring after school. We each "have a kid" that we help and it has been a fun thing to help each one of them with their school work. We have also painted the girls bathroom in a unique and fun girlie way. This project was designed by Natalie, but everyone has pitched in for painting. We also painted a hallway with the Noah's Ark theme. This projected was mainly designed by Ally and Kelsey, but Keina, Stephanie, Mrs. Parsons, and Natalie pitched in as well.

While they were all doing the fun part, I was helping Coach update Windows onto classroom computers, which wasn't bad, I actually learned some stuff :]

Glenwood Recreational Center was also graced by our presence. We had the opportunity to go there two nights. The first night we got to put on a mini program for the kids. We did songs, performed a skit, made bracelets, and played basketball. The kids enjoyed playing basketball with us. The second night we went, we anticipated simply playing basketball with them, but as it turns out the kids had a tournament so we ended up having practice.

oops...We forgot to mention that we went to Covenant monday night to check out the college and practice. Their gym was kinda big...it had three courts side by side! We also went to Lee (on Thursday) to check out the college and watch the girls and guys basketball games. All in all it was really fun. The basketball games were my favorite (and Allison's too). The girls played incredibly. Their defense was superb! OK, well gotta go.