Thursday Showers brought out lots of smiles!

Jason's warriors taking a picture break!

A drive through Coney Island led to  ferris wheels and Coney Island hot dogs.

55 Bags of garbage cleaning out from under the house by Cindy's crew!

Can you guess where all the garbage came from and who these knights in white are?

Supplies for work!                                After dinner conversation with friends.

It is a happy anniversary celebration # 4 for Meg and David Marley today.  That fantastic pair is heading up our under 18 team.  Today while it rained they left their garden work and reported to a new project for a few hours under a roof.

Friday finds us all working a half day and then returning to First Church for showers, lunch, and an afternoon and evening in downtown New York.  3 crews will be working on the large garden project and 3 crews will be working with Friends of Rockaway in homes doing drywalling, painting, carpentry work, and other projects.   Keep us in your prayers as we board the bus on Saturday morning for a 6 1/2 hour drive back to PA.

A very special thank you to all of you for your gifts of dollars, prayers, and holding down the homefront for us while we were out here serving in the mission field.  God is very good.



A Special Blessing!

One of our mission workers found this painting on a stage in church gymnasium we were working on.
It was shoved between stacks of other items pulled from flood waters.  It was a stark reminder of God's love for us in the midst of all the tribulations of life.  Jesus loves us.  Thank you, Teresa.

It is 8:30 on Wednesday evening.  We are over the hump! (This means that we have passed the mid-week point when most accidents happen.)   Praise the Lord!   A large contingent of our group is doing Zumba in a class sponsored by the First Presbyterian Church.  It is loud and crazy and reminds me a lot of what it must have been like on Pentecost when the Spirit first fell on the church of Jesus Christ!

Today we celebrated a 17 birthday!  Happy birthday Mari.  Here she is pictured with her work team companion and close friend!

What a day!  Pictures  from Team Awesome!  Can you guess how many sand bags they made today?

   Gene  sanding ceiling in the above pic!  He has decided to take up NASCAR driving this week after experiencing New York driving!  Good job Gene.

Katie pictured with retired policeman and firefighter Tom after sanding drywall.

The divider in the background separates the guys from the gals......waiting for dinner.   1st Church on Wednesday evening serves a dinner for the area homeless and other weekly guests at the church.  Tonight they served over 225.  We ate dinner with the participants and a group of 70 youth from churches north of Chicago,IL and Knoxville, TN

We have you in our prayers as rains continue to pour out your way. That same weather pattern is merging with one off the coast here and tomorrow's weather does not good at all. .......but God still has something good in store for us!

Until Tomorrow.

Tuesday Night

Hello friends and family.  Here are your 42 mission workers 5 minutes before the Tuesday evening prayer service at the First Presbyterian Church of Jamaica, NY.  The church is 351 years old. (Not the building).  It is the oldest Presbyterian Church in the United States.    What a blessing they have been to us!

The church service was led by a group of lay leaders.  5 singers, a keyboardist, an intercessory prayer leader, and annointer/prayer team, a welcomer, and a different speaker each week.  This evenings theme was about "Trials and Tribulations" that we all go.

Meal time!  We have been blessed with fantastic homemade dinners.  Breakfast is usually cereal, fruit, toast, juice, &coffee.  Lunch has been a special meal this week because we can either make a sandwich with lunch meal or PB&J or we can take an MRE.  The Meal, Ready-to-Eat – commonly known as the MRE – is a self-contained, individual field ration in lightweight packaging bought and used by the military.  They have been a nice change to our eating habits and quite good!

Jason getting ready to do remediation work.        Mike make a tough decision about a purse.

Can you guess who these two are?

                                                              What about this crew of 5?

      Continue to pray for us!  Wednesday will find two of our teams heading out to do more mold remediation work possibly in Far Rockaway and Coney Island area. (They are spending a lot of time traveling to their sites, but the hardest hit areas do not have adequate housing for groups.)  Our under age team is continuing to work on a garden/pond project under the great leadership of Meg & David Marley.

Three other teams are working on the opposite end of Rockaway doing carpentry, drywall, sanding, at multiple sites.  Hope to tell you about some individual projects.  Blessings to all of you from Jamaica, NY.



Monday morning we divided into two groups.  Our under 18 team worked at a site sponsored by the Metropolitan Council on Jewish Poverty.  They'll tell you about it in the coming days.  In short they are building a garden and pond (with eventual fish) which will be used to help feed those in the neighbor hood in need.   Today they were moving lots of dirt before the rains came.

The thirty-six others headed out to Far Rockaway in 5 different vehicles.  Our destination was World Cares Center (WCC).  For 90 minutes we learned about WCC which was formed after 9-11.  Their function in the whole disaster response network is to do initial assessments, train mucking out teams and mold remediation teams, and then supervise their work.  They'll be giving our assignments the rest of the week.

Today this crew spent the afternoon doing mold remediation and gutting out of a  kitchen, bathroom, and storage areas of a large catholic church gymnasium.  This gym had been under 4' of water when Hurricane Sandy came through. We all had to wear the white tyvek suits, gloves, masks, and goggles.

These were really hot!   Many of us we'll be wearing this garb all week long!

Aren't we all beautiful.

One final picture until tomorrow.   Mom and daughter enjoying the week!

"I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters,^[a] by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual^[b] worship."  Romans 12:1

With those words the 42 members of the Kiskiminetas Presbytery work group to the Far Rockaway and Rockaway Beach areas of Queens set off on our bus early this morning.  

  Our excellent bus driver negotiated crazy traffic for 30 minutes in and around the George Washington Bridge.  Wall to wall cars!  A Presbyterian Church from the Bronx had an excellent dinner prepared for us.  
       This evening we spent time getting to know each other and worshipping together before we hit our beds exhausted to get ready for work tomorrow.

    Keep us in your prayers!   Blessings abound!