What a Long, Strange Weekend It's Been

This weekend was intense in many ways. Wednesday and Friday were spent doing more advertising and shopping for the after-school program kick-off fair. Thursday was CPR day, which as boring as it was, definitely feels good to have. We did adult, child and infant all at once, and guess who started to cry practicing on the infant dummy? I just really can't handle the idea of a choking baby.

Friday was weird and autumn like and I started to get sad and needed to call Sam, who can't really talk on the phone. Also, my aunt sent me pictures of the shore house being demolished, and I had a good cry over that.

We learned that night too about some drama going on within the church. First some back info. We needed to put up some signs on our doors just saying "YAV living quarters, please respect our privacy" This was due mainly to the fact that volunteer teams were cutting through our living room to use our laundry room at all times of the day and night. Mind you, even with these signs up, I still had a volunteer walk in on me in my underwear while I was changing my pants. However, now certain members of the church want us to take the signs down because they feel unwelcome and all of a sudden after not caring about this space for almost 10 years, they want our living room for sunday school and bible studies. I personally think they just want to be nosy and possessive. Obviously we are not feeling welcomed by the congregation.

Yesterday, I worked on fair stuff most of the day. This included going all the way to Ocean Springs (about half an hour away) to find out the place we were renting the bounce house from was actually just down the street in Gulfport. Good thing I wasn't too mean to the guy at the first place when he couldn't find our reservation.

I had a really emotionally challenging experience yesterday with a homeless man that came to the church. We've had a lot of homeless people in and out and its always sad because we're not really set up to give them a place to stay. I was completely alone when this man, Jason, came by. Luckily, I was able to get a hold of Pastor Scott and he came right by. After feeding him some soup, we talked to Jason for several hours about all the terrible things he's been through. Basically he's lost everything and has no place to go and no family. I don't know how to deal with these situations, knowing I am so fortunate and have so much. There's so many people like this, that it gets overwhelming at times, and the only thing we can do is listen to them.

Today was the fair and I think it went really well. We had terrible weather, but despite that we had about 15 kids as well as random parents and stuff. The kids were great to watch because the neighborhood kids were mixing in with the church kids. It looks like we'll have a couple kids to start the program off this week with. The situation could obviously be alot better, but its as good as we hoped for to start with. Anyway, I'm looking forward to finally working with kids.