pictures

Michael and Ashley's Group:

Our homeowner has lived in her house for aobut 30 years. For the last 9 years, she has lived as a widow without aide for upkeep or restoration of her home. The previous SOS crews have recreated the back of her house and have fixed the roof--and the work they did was amazing! However, the remaining walls of the home and interior still need to be fixed.

Outfitted in Haz-Mat suits, we tore down the existing siding and were horrifed to discover that her house was without any insulation. We have now installed insulation, put up OSB board, replaced her window, and will begin tomorrow putting up the next layer of boards.

On the inside, we are completely reconstructing her kitchen floor from the ground up! Upon arrival, her fridge and water heater were close to falling through the floor; you could feel the floor give beneath your feet as you walked. By the end of the week, she'll have a new, safe floor!

Our homeowner continues to hug us, thank us, tell us that she prayed for us, and that we are angels. In truth, she is our blessing and angel, and we thank God for the opportunity to glorify Him through serving her.


Josh Polkow's Group:

Hey, this is Josh! My group is Patrick Maloney, Alex B, Phillip O, Johnny, Noah E, Olivia C, and Hannah H. We are working on the home of the Johnson family. The Johnson family has four kids; one of them is an eleven-year-old named Josh who the boys in our group have really attached to.

Monday we worked on the roof of the house; Tuesday and Wednesday we worked on their fence, built garden beds, and did clean-up work around the interior of the house. The kids have worked really hard, but the majority of the time has been spent in relational ministry, spending time with the kids and their friends. Tomorrow we hope to finish tarpapering the roof and doing more shingling!


Ed and Dean's Group:

Team Dean and Ed are off to a great start to our week. Eric, Matt, Pat, Jason, Audry, Sarah, Matty and Lexie along with Dean and I have made a great team thus far.

We are working at a home in Bing Hampton owned by Miss Shirley. She is 32 years old and very friendly. Her family has lived in this home for the last 10 years. She has three children. A 15 year old, Chris, who left on a Greyhound bus to St Louis in order to spend the sumer with his Dad. A 14 year old, Kim who has kept to herself so far this week. The third child is Jasmen. She is 8 and the team has spent a lot of time loving on her this week along with her 5 year old friend Amber.

Our project for the week is to re-roof the front of Miss Shirley's hous. We are ready to finish shingling on Thursday.

Dean and I have been very impressed with the teams hard work thus far on our project, but we have been even more impressed with their focus during our devotionals at lunch each day.

What an amazing experience for the teenagers as well as Dean and I.

SOS Day 2 updates

Brett and Brooke here! We have Mikey, Parker, Evan, Abby, Grace, Emily C. and Emily P. in our group. We have the opportunity to serve Ms. Delores and work on her home for the week. Her house seems to be a revolving door for people in the neighborhood, so we have had the opportunity to get to know some of them. The boys have done a good job engaging Delores' grandson who has been living with her. They play soccer and an interesting game involving a ball and two smashed coke cans. We are very proud of their initiative game. Monday we finished the roof and began a garden...we are not to optimistic about the success of our flower planted in concrete ground. But we followed the orders we were given and Delores is pleased with the outcome! Today we began to remove the siding from the house, which required haz mat suits and lots of perspiration. Upon taking off the siding we found the house boards to be rotten and needing to be replaced, upon removing the boards we discovered the house did not have insulation. So tomorrow we will tackle insulating, residing, and continuing to remove the siding from the other side of the home. This group has been a joy to lead... we think every introvert was placed on our team, but with a point system/initiative we have been able to loosen sealed lips and shy personalities.

Amy and Josh's group includes Morgan, Emma, Katie, Matthew, Jacob, Caleb, and Thomas. We are currently working on repairing and reroofing the home of a very sweet woman named Miss Nadaine. On Monday, the guys tore off all the shingles which was no easy task. The roof had 10 layers of shingles. The guys did an amazing job and worked so hard. The heat index was 110 and it felt even hotter on the roof. The girls worked hard moving what felt like hundreds of wheelbarrow loads of bricks and shingles to the dumpster. This turned out to be tougher than we thought as both wheelbarrows broke in the first hour. That only slowed the girls down a bit as they carried bricks and shingles by hand for over an hour while we waited for new wheelbarrows.
Tuesday was spent pulling out damaged boards from the roof. There are a lot of holes in the roof right now. We have started cutting boards and nailing them onto the roof. We also spent some time visiting with Miss Nadine (our homeowner) who makes gingerbread houses and even showed us a few she has in her house. This is such a great group of kids, working all day without complaining. Everyone is safe and having a great time whether they are up on the roof or painting each other!

I will post more leaders groups later.

SOS 2010 Day 1

Hey Parents... today was a great day, but today was hot. All of our teams worked really hard on the work sites. Our projects this week include shingling, deshingling, tearing off siding, siding, painting, and landscaping. I'm really proud of our students because they worked so hard today even in the heat. We were blessed to have a safe day, but if you ask the students they will be able to tell you war stories. One student stepped on a nail today, but thankfully Brett our EMT is able to keep an eye on her and she is doing fine. We also had one student get a little sick from the heat. However she is doing much better after a couple hours of resting and drinking water.

I'm pretty sure that my favorite moment from the day was when I found out that two of our teams had to wear Haz-Mat suits because they were taking off siding with lead paint in it. I'm so thankful my group is on the roof and not in those dorky, hot, non-breathing suits.

We are looking forward to a great program tonight and I'm so ready for dinner. And of course, Sonic run #3.

We'll post more tomorrow.

Kurt