Today I depart on an in-city "Close to Home" mission trip in South Tucson with my youth group from St. Andrew's Presbyterian Church. The trip goes from today (Sunday) until this Friday. I'm not sure of every activity we will be doing, as our leaders don't reveal them all until during the trip, but among other things we will be serving food and giving hygene bags to the homeless at Southside Presbyterian Church, a small church in a bad district of Tucson which opens itself as a feeding lot once or twice a week to serve at least a few hundred homeless and poor people in the area. Another day we will be taking a group of disabled children (patients of my mom, who is a physical therapist here in Tucson) to a place called Pump It Up, a large gym filled with various inflatable slides and obstacle courses and such. One of my favorite activities from that last Close to Home mission trip two years ago were the "random acts of kindness," in which we split our team into small groups and each group recieved $500 to go out and spend in any way they wished, as long as it's on other people. Last time my group spent our money in a variety of ways, from buying randomly selected people's groceries and gas to going to fast food restaurants and buying food for people who appeared to be in need. Call it luck or call it God, but every person we approached last time turned out to be in great need and had amazing stories, and they were all flabbergasted by the sudden kindness shown to them by complete strangers. The experience was very fullfilling and I cannot wait to see who's lives we touch this time around.
All in all I'm very excited for the trip, however, while I will be bringing my laptop along (because I am the official videographer for the mission!), I'm not at all sure if I will have any time to keep up with the week's news and/or write any posts. If anything big happens, I will try to at least write up something quick and maybe link to another site which had more time to cover the subject. Since I'm unsure of how much I'll be able to post, I've asked my good friend Evan Mayer to guest post for the week in my stead. This is his first time doing anything of the sort, but I can assure you that he is an excellent writer, and a very interesting person. I've given Evan no direction on what to post about except that it should probably be technology related, but I have full confidence that whatever he chooses to discuss will be interesting, and worth a read. I encourage you to give him a follow on App.net from the link above (he doesn't have a Twitter), but if my voucher isn't enough for you to do that, wait and read his posts throughout the week, I'm confident they will change your mind.
If time allows, I will post quick updates myself about the happenings in my trip during the week too, but if time does not allow, I'll be back next week with a recap of the whole thing, then things will return to business as usual. I hope you all have a great week, thanks for reading The Axx!
