This has been an exciting week here in Plaquemines Parish! We had teams from another Fuller Center—Jersey Pines—and St John Lutheran Church, Charles City, Iowa. Both are special—St John is associated with Joining Hands, the Iowa arm of Peg Sennett’s group, and has been to the Gulf Coast many times. You’ll recognize other names from the group—Marc Quade and Pastor Dave Werges. Jersey Pines is special, first and foremost, because they’re just plain fun to be around but also because they’re the first Fuller Center partner to send a team to work with us. Their first trip was to East Texas last year.
Added to all the excitement, Peter Salemme is here this week! Hope you’re all tracking his cross-country mission—50 affiliates in 50 weeks. “Oops”, as we all have heard Peter say, he’s decided to stay here two weeks. Does that mean it’s 50 affiliates in 51 weeks?
Also major event this week—we did our first official work under the United Way grant which will be a major funding source for us here. The St John team actually demo’d a house! Yes, sometimes you have to take one step backwards, to go two steps forward (building a new house on the lot). But the team really did a fantastic job leaving town yesterday with a squeaky clean, vacant lot left behind. We expect to get the building permit for that house on Monday!! We didn’t have a house dedication yesterday so we almost substituted a decommisioning ceremony.
The Jersey Pines team is so hard charging that we had to spread them between Herman’s house and a nearby church construction project, Faith Temple. Faith Temple hosts the Amish teams in the area. We hope to have many of them join us!
If you’re not on the schedule yet, now is the time to commit! January has been colder than normal here (surprise!), so now you can book with confidence that you’re going to get warm weather when you come!
Submitted by Bart Tucker
Fuller Center Disaster ReBuilders
