Wow, we’re already halfway done these blogs! That’s crazy to me. It actually seems like these assignments (and this semester in general) are flying by, which was contrary to my expectation. I hope everyone’s semester is going well!

This week I’m going to be talking about my second mission trip to Farmington, Maine. This trip was in the week of the Fourth of July in 2016, and I was 14.

For most of the years that I have gone to Maine, we have elected to go on these trips during the week of the Fourth of July. That way, we get to take a day off from working, see the Fourth of July Parade in Farmington, and then spend the rest of the day having fun at Rangeley Lake. Rangeley is about an hour from Farmington, and going there is our holiday tradition. We swam in the lake, played kickball with a giant yoga ball, walked downtown to look at the stores, and ate ice cream from a little shop downtown.

During this week in Maine, I worked in a group that rebuilt the roof of a trailer home. The occupant of this house struggled throughout the winter with leakage coming through his roof, and this was a big issue since winters in Maine are so unbearable as it is. The snow on his roof constantly was melting through and filling his living room, bathroom, and bedroom with water. This man was also disabled. He was struggling with many medical issues which rendered him unable to fix his home himself. This was visibly frustrating to him, because he struck me as the type of man who used to be very self-sufficient and handy. I could tell that it bothered him to have to enlist our help.

Therefore, we spent the week putting tin slabs onto the roof so that snow would slide off the roof easily, without causing leakage into his home. This was difficult work since we were working on the top of the house, in 90 degree heat, with the heat reflecting onto us from the tin. I am an extremely pale person, and so, needless to say, I got very sunburnt during this week. This experience of building a roof was a COMPLETELY new experience for me. Up until this point, I had never been on a roof before. I also got to use new types of tools, like a Saws-All and a nail gun.

This work was extremely rewarding because we were able to directly see the finished product after all our hard work (unfortunately I do not have any pictures. However, for some of the next mission trips that I talk about, I may have some pictures that I can share). This work definitely made a large impact because it provided a safe, warm, leak-free environment for the man to live in in the winters. He expressed his gratification by making us cookies on our last work day, and he also ate lunch with us every day to keep us company. This was definitely among my favorite trips because of the challenge that the work posed and because of the friendship we formed with the resident of the home.

At this point I’ve already gone over two of the mission trips that I’ve been on in my life. Those are both places that I never returned to. However, now we’re going to be getting into the mission trips that I have done repeatedly. This week I’m going to talk about my first mission trip to Farmington, Maine. That’s right, the FIRST trip to Maine. Total, I have gone to Farmington 5 times. I go there every summer, but I didn’t get to go this year because of the Covid outbreak. It may seem like it will be repetitive to talk about 5 mission trips to the same place, but I promise you that each one of those trips is extremely unique.

The focus of the mission trips to Maine has been different from the other mission trips that I described. Part of this is because the Maine trips are with a different organization than the others. The Maine mission trips are with an organization called Mission At The Eastward, and the object of these trips is to assist people at their dwellings, fixing homes that require great amounts of manual labor. On the other hand, the other 4 trips that I have been on (to various places) were with an organization called Youthworks, which focuses mainly on community involvement and interactions with communities as a whole.

I got involved in these Maine mission trips because my grandmother’s church (High Mountain Presbyterian Church) has been doing the same trip yearly for over 10 years. I often go on this trip accompanied by my brother, my cousin, sometimes my grandmother, and other families affiliated with that church. In Maine, we stay in the dorms on campus at the University of Maine at Farmington. For each of my 5 mission trips to Maine, there have been varying manual labor tasks, so I will be describing the ones I worked on for my first trip to Maine.

My first mission trip to Maine was in 2015, when I was 13 years old. We had over 30 people from the church come on the mission trip, so we split into separate groups that were assigned to multiple different homes in or around Farmington. My work crew was assigned to a trailer home that had been damaged during a storm. A neighboring abandoned trailer had somehow blown over into the family’s backyard, damaging the family’s trailer and leaving a ton of garbage throughout the backyard. Therefore, our job was to clean up the trailer parts that were strewn throughout the backyard, and we also had to repair the portion of the family’s trailer which was hit by the abandoned one. Cleaning up the backyard was filthy work. We had to remove wood pieces, metal, insulation, broken furniture, and garbage from that backyard. We finished that task within 2 days, and then repairing the trailer was a relatively easy task. We had to just fill in a gap that was made in the wall. That only took one day.

Nobody anticipated that we would finish this job so quickly, so for the two remaining work days, we spent time demolishing an old barn in the community. The intention behind that was to make the barn into a tool storage area for the Mission At The Eastward base in Farmington. This was my first experience with a sledgehammer, and it was quite fun, to be completely honest.

Overall, this experience in Maine was very different from the other mission trips I had been on because it was a completely different kind of work. From this first trip, I learned essential construction and demolition skills that have been helpful to me in life ever since. Additionally, this mission trip was special to me because I had a direct opportunity to affect the life of one family. My work crew greatly improved their living conditions by cleaning up their backyard and fixing their house, and they were extremely grateful for that.

This week’s blog is about my second mission trip, which was to Niagara Falls, New York in 2015. This mission trip was a unique opportunity to go to a famous landmark in the United States while also serving the community in that area. When you think about famous landmarks in the U.S, you probably don’t think about the communities around those landmarks. Surprisingly, they are often relatively poor neighborhoods with significant struggles, and so we went there to assist the people in the area who are often overlooked by the country as a whole.

The drive up to Niagara Falls was about a 6 and a half hour drive. When we got there, we looked around and noticed that it was an extremely run-down neighborhood. The buildings and houses were old and crumbling, and you could easily tell that the community as a whole was struggling. We stayed in a school for the week, along with at least 10 other youth groups from churches all across the country. There was no air conditioning, and it was one of the hottest points in the summer. There were also no stalls in the bathrooms; there were only curtains. These things made it a difficult experience, but we were all happy to be there anyway. It was interesting to temporarily live in the shoes of the kids that attended that elementary school.

On the day that we got there, we took a short trip to Niagara Falls and crossed the bridge into Canada (because you can’t expect us to go to Niagara Falls and neglect to see the actual landmark, right?). That was a very cool experience which I was able to check off my bucket list.

For the rest of the week at Niagara Falls, my church youth group worked at a kids’ club. The fact that I worked there the whole week instead of just for a couple days was a nice contrast from the first mission trip I had been on. Since I worked there for the whole week, I was able to build better connections with the children I encountered. These children were different from those I had encountered in my first mission trip (see my blog from last week- Raleigh, North Carolina). They evidently were struggling much more financially. Many of them wore the same clothes all week, and their shoes were often much too small for their feet since their parents couldn’t afford to buy them new ones.

Even though we could see their struggles just based on their clothes, we still treated them with the utmost respect, and they reciprocated that for the most part. At the kids’ club, we played basketball, conducted Bible lessons and skits, and did arts and crafts. I still have a picture that one of the little girls drew for me there.

This mission trip was a really interesting and humbling experience because it exposed me to a different type of poverty which I had not been exposed to at all. I hope and pray that those kids are doing well now and that they are achieving the great things I know they are capable of. I hope that I made a little bit of an impact in those kids’ lives that week. I can say for sure that they made an impact in mine.

Since I got to introduce my love of mission trips to you guys last week, this week we now get to start going into the more interesting and specific details of each of the 9 mission trips I have been on. This entry is dedicated to my first mission trip, which was to Raleigh, North Carolina in 2014. I was 12 years old.

One of the best experiences of this mission trip, contrary to my expectation, was the 6 hour drive up to Raleigh. The excitement and anticipation of that drive cannot be matched. You don’t know what you’re going to encounter when you get to your destination, but the uncertainty is the most exciting part. I spent the entire ride getting to know the people in the youth group whom I would be spending the next week with. At this point, we developed strong friendships, made countless inside jokes, and learned much more information about each other than we ever asked to hear.

The atmosphere of support evident throughout the entire first mission trip was unlike anything that I can describe. We stayed in a church for the week, and it was actually a very developed and extravagant church (it even had a gymnasium). The relationships we built throughout the week made the experience even better.  We had group bible studies in the mornings and worship at night, and then my church would break away to do smaller and more intimate worship sessions late at night. Whenever we weren’t working around the community or doing bible study or worship, we would play games like basketball, volleyball, and card games.

In Raleigh, we worked at 2 different thrift stores and a kids’ club in the community. At the thrift stores, we spent 2 long days cleaning and sorting out clothes. This wasn’t the most interesting work, I must say, but it was still rewarding to see how grateful the store owners were. At the kids’ club, our job was just to hang out with the kids that came there every day. We played a lot of basketball and tag, and I don’t even think I can express how many times I lost to little kids in Mancala (which, oddly, was a very popular game there). The children opened up very quickly, telling us about their lives at home. Most of the kids that were there, were there because it was summertime and their parents couldn’t afford to stay home with them during the day. We learned about some of the struggles that these kids had endured already in their lives. Upon reflection, I realize that many of these kids were probably about my age at the time, and it’s crazy to think about some of the obstacles these kids were facing at such young ages.

My favorite part of this mission trip, and all of the subsequent ones, was getting to interact with people from the community that needed assistance in some way. Getting to hear the stories of so many people while I was at such a young and vulnerable age myself helped me to really understand the issues that people go through in their daily lives. It allowed me to see perspectives other than mine and motivated me to assist people wherever I could since I had the capability to do so. Starting this pursuit for service at the young age of 12 was the best decision I ever made.

I have gone to church since I was an infant. I went to the same church, Evangelical United Methodist Church (EUMC), for many years. I had the same schedule every week when it came to religion. It was always church on Sundays, tag along with my mom and dad to Bible study on Wednesdays, pray every night before bed, pray before every meal. It was all uniform, usual, expected. That’s just the way it was.

When I was young, maybe 8 years old, I used to go downstairs into the Fellowship Hall of my church to look at the pictures on the wall. I observed all of the pictures from the mission trips that the youth group at EUMC participated in. Every time that I looked at these pictures I promised myself  that I was going to do that some day. I needed something less uniform, more unusual. Sitting through the same sermons and same routines every week was just not meant for me, so I promised myself at that small age of 8 that I would do more.

I went on my first mission trip when I was 12 years old. The youth group didn’t technically allow people under 13 to go on mission trips, but I scooted my way in there because I really wanted to (but also because my dad was a member of the worship band, and he knew the youth pastor). My first mission trip was a scary, unknown, uncomfortable, challenging, humbling, and surprising experience, but I loved it more than anything. I learned more from this one mission trip than I learned in all of my years of going to church combined. I was able to apply my knowledge and learn in a hands-on manner that I had never experienced before. I am forever grateful for this first mission trip experience, because it opened up my life to many more mission trip opportunities. I took every single opportunity that I could get after that.

I have gone on nine mission trips total in 6 years. Each one has been a unique opportunity to expand my knowledge and faith, assist the people that need it the most, and make long-lasting friends. In these mission trips I used every moment I could to perform manual labor, interact with people of different backgrounds in varying communities, push my mental abilities, test my social capabilities, and impact lives in ways I never could have expected. I loved every minute of these experiences, and I have become humbled and grateful as a result of them.

In my future posts, I will delve deeper into each one of the trips that I have been on so others can fully understand my passion and possibly make it their own. There are unimaginable positives to dedicating weeks at a time to serving and helping people. It is my pleasure to get to reflect on and share these impactful memories.