Temporary Made Permanent

Today we started our first day of training.  All the other hosts arrived..Courtney from Michigan, Billy from Arizona, Jonalisa from South LA, and Alyssa from California.  We just did some simple introductions to begin and then went out to our first ethnic restaurant, a Honduran restaurant.  We then left for our prayer tour.  The prayer tour is the first thing that we will do with every new group that comes...What this entails is driving the groups around south LA and the downtown area explaining everything about the area and the demographics...pretty much everything there is to know about the area.  This gives the group a good base knowledge for understanding the people they will be serving for the week.  It would take me forever to explain the whole prayer tour...the tour itself taking about 2 hours so i am just going to explain one "snapshot" that stood out to me and then hopefully the rest of the info of the prayer tour will come out later in future blogs...

As we were leaving the south LA area and transitioning into downtown we stopped at a school that is called the 9th Avenue School.  This school was founded in the 80s and was going to be a temporary fix to an immediate need.  There was a large population of kids that was beginning to develop in this warehouse district on 9th Avenue as children that were homeless living mostly on Skid Row and children of garment worker (those that work in sweat shops making clothing).  The population of kids in the area was growing as homelessness was growing and the amount of garment worker, working long hours that would bring their kids to work with them.  The school was founded with movable trailer type building to give kids a school but not thinking this would be permanent.  This school obviously has become permanent as it is still in existence.  The school was built to house about 500 kids and there are about 650 in attendance since last year.  Also 99% of the kids are on free and reduced lunches...with the lowest percentile averages on their math and reading scores.  As we stood in this school yard, the poverty trap just really struck me.  This school that was meant to be temporary has now become permanent as there has been no long term fix for these families stuck in homelessness and sweat shops...the problems have only seemed to increase.  The hope seems no better for these children that are receiving a poor education while extremely low math and reading scores.  It saddened me immensely.  We stood and prayed for the kids, the teachers, and hopefully for more programs to be developed to help these kids in need.  Some of the ministries sites we will hopefully be working at this summer, will be working specifically with these type of kids.  As my heart broke for these kids, my love for them already began to grow and i am excited to get to love on them this summer...

Day one of training and i am already amazed at the possibilities that God has in store for me this summer.