Youthworks, Week 2

Hello everyone!
Greetings from Martin, South Dakota! My team and I completed one week of training in Denver on Friday and then on Saturday we took the nine-hour drive to Martin, South Dakota. I am not sure the exact population of Martin, but it is most certainly the smallest town I have ever been in. The highlights of the town include a few mom and pop restaurants, a park, a library, a Family Dollar, and they are in progress of building a Subway--the only fast food restaurant in town. My Site Director walked the entire length of the town in less than 30 minutes. Despite the smallness of the town, Martin's residents hold the biggest hearts you can imagine. Before we even arrived, a couple members of the town were calling our Area Director multiple times a day offering their services for ways they could help us when we arrived. When we arrived at the Catholic church where we are staying on Saturday, we were greeted by Fr. Bryan, who has been so gracious to lend us the space for the summer and supply us with more than enough supplies and services--one of which is internet! Sidenote: I have just about zero cell reception, but I have a great internet connection. Who da thunk?? Send me lots of online love!

Sunday and Monday the team began the process of organizing all of our things that were in storage and utilizing our spaces. Our main space is the Catholic church I already mentioned. This is the place where the staff will be living all summer (the staff will be sleeping/living in two storage closets for the summer...) and we will be utilizing one common room for the girls' sleeping area, all of our meals, evening worship, orientations, etc. The boys will be sleeping in a large tile room in a place called The Legion across town (this space also doubled as our storage room for our supplies during this past year). Both girls and boys (and staff) will have to drive across town to shower every day at a field house used for wrestling practice. Each side of the field house has four shower heads. Did I mention that we are going to have about 75 people coming every week? Needless to say, we are crunched for space. It will be a great learning experience for us staff and all of the youth that come to our site! Through it all, though, we thank God for everything because, as I mentioned before, we did not have any of this space a couple weeks ago. Praise God for His provisions! Please pray that God continues to provide for us in grand ways we cannot even imagine.

The last few days, the staff has been doing much manual labor cleaning, organizing, and doing inventory. For the rest of the week, each staff member will be doing tasks specific to their roles in the team in order to get everything established for when our first group of youth come on Sunday. My role specifically will be arranging the evening activities the groups go to each night, all aspects of the evening worship (including the ten-minute talks I give each night), devotionals, and orientations, as well as making connections with the members of the community. I have a lot of work ahead of me, but I am excited to get everything arranged. Next week, the staff from the two Pine Ridge sites will be joining us to shadow and help us through our first week with youth. It will be really fun to have 12 staff in one place instead of just us four! Prayers to keep in mind for the next few weeks:

-Safe travels for the other staff to Martin
-God's continued provision for space, supplies, and community contacts
-Diligent working for Martin's staff and that all of the pieces come into place before Saturday
-Good relations between the Martin staff
-For God in move in the youth and adult leaders' hearts that they may be open to Martin and its people

Thanks to all for your continued support! I will send you more updates in a couple weeks :)

For Him,
Allison