And They're Off!

At 8:00 pm Eastern, the team was in Tuscaloosa. By unanimous decision they are heading on through to Chalmette tonight to work in the morning. Talked to Brendan in Chalmette as well who reports the school building is operational as a volunteer center and he's busy bedding down arriving volunteers. We'll keep you posted!

Here's another group shot of the University of Buffalo group right before departure.

They all packed up and headed out at 7:45, ahead of schedule. Thanks to Westerville Christian Church for hosting them last night.

They'll be working all week with 400+ volunteers in Chalmette and staying overnight again at Westerville Christian, next Saturday, March 18 on their way home. You can come out and see them Sunday morning before they head home to see how their trip went.

I'll keep you posted throughout the day on their progress so check back often.

Team 10 - University of Buffalo Group

The Intervarsity Christian Fellowship group from theUniversity of Buffalo arrived in Westerville around 11:30 for their overnight. Bill Niess leads them on down to Louisiana to work early in the morning. They wanted to plan to leave at 7:00 (so as to get going by 8:00 :-) Here's the crew:

Spring Break is Kicking Off with a Bang!

OK, Gang! Here we go! It's been a busy week for disaster relief. There've been last minute scrambles to find vans; Scary FEMA induced panic; and yet amazing "only God could have made that happen" resolutions to those issues. This is GOOD work!

Friday night late, 25 University of Buffalo students will be rolling in to Westerville Christian to spend the night before heading on down to Louisiana to work for the week. They've been organized from the Intervarsity Christian Fellowship by Westerville native Marilyn Sloan.

NEED: Extra Air mattresses or cots for them to sleep on. Friday 3/10 and on their return, Saturday 3/18. If you can help out, call my cell @ 614-404-8610 to sync up on a time to drop them off.

Special thanks to Bill Niess from January's team 7 who will be leading this crew back down. Also special thanks to Westerville Christian for the use of the van and trailer and Nick and Lisa on the ministry staff for working out a deal with me for that :-)

You can come out and see them off Saturday morning at 8:00.

I was also able to rent another van after Enterprise had a last minute cancellation (thank you Lord!) and we have a couple of the UB group who are old enough to drive the rental (and again!). This means though that we have another...

NEED: More fundraising. The van rentals will be costing around $900. This depletes our funds more than expected since we also have the gas expense on top of the rental. I've recieved 1 very large private donation since our incorporation and a couple smaller ones. We need to bring some more gas and rental money into the organization to cover the costs we have coming up.

The team will be going to stay with over 400 other spring break volunteers in a VERY recently acquired and outfitted school building in Chalmette right in the middle of the work. Here's more about that God at work story. The Tammany Oaks Church is hosting 240. I'm really jealous I'm not going. The massive show of force next week will be very impressive. I'm really anxious to hear back from these students about what I'm sure is going to be an awsome experience.

I encourage you all to peruse and follow that WhereISawJesus blog as well as ours. I maintain that for the groups down there and the content is both more and different as it represents the general effort that more than 2000 of us have been a part of so far from all over the nation.

There have been massive changes since you were there last. You can catch up on them on that blog. That total number of volunteers (6 months worth) will double in the next month of spring break trips. My outlook on the changes is that God allowed some painful reshuffling to happen in order to set them up where they could handle that load. His plan is always impressive!

That's been one of the highpoints this week; the massive renewed interest. I've gotten several phone calls a day this week for people to go down with us. Seems when my faith starts to wear thin and building this organization seems to be making imperceptible progress, it all takes a huge leap forward.

More news on that front. I want to welcome Linworth United Methodist Church in Dublin to our family. Bill and Brian Niess who attend there and went with us on the January trip have engaged the church leadership and we gave a presentation last evening at their missions meeting. Their youth group will be joining our July 9 trip down and adult volunteers will be the initial members of a team leaving July 30. Linworth also plans to sponsor Servants Unite financially, with skilled first response volunteers, and other resources. I met more great people there last night and really look forward to working with them going forward.

I also want to highlight another one of our volunteers from that January trip, Gary "Sarge" Sargent from Westerville Freewill Baptist. He's agreed to lead the April 8 spring break trip. He's bringing a few friends from church after doing a presentation for his congregation and he's contacted several other churches about involvement. That's exactly the kind of work we need to build Servants Unite into the fully functioning relief network of volunteers that I pray for it to be. Thanks Gary for your continued service at home.

If you would like assistance presenting our vision to your church or others, we can help out with videos, materials, and presenters. To kick that off, talk to your church leadership about our organization and your experience and get them in touch with me.

We don't have long before we'll have a new mission to resond to. I want to remind you that the current needs list is at this link. You can also find job descriptions for volunteer positions in the organization here.

Thanks all! Keep checking the blogs for updates from our teams in the field over the next month.

John McGuire