Saturday, September 24, 2005

SPACE 9/24 Launch

Great day on our SPACE Launch. The experience today was centered around serving the homeless. So we started the day by having kids make a lunch. Along with the lunch they brought, they would enter the city with two lunches. The group then split up and went to two different localities in Baltimore - Fells Point and around the corner from City Hall. My group did the latter and found a small group of homeless people staying in a little park adjacent to an old church.

The goal of lunch was for our kids to eat with some people - not just give out the food and take off. We wanted them to have a chance to sit and talk with some people, to get to know them a little bit, to see behind the stimga of homelesness. I'm pretty sure we achieved that.

After lunch, my group was making our way to the next meeting point when we drove past the other group. We turned around and met up with them - they had organized a pick up football game with some homeless people. Everyone had a blast playing touch football for about 45 minutes. I think some of the homeless guys were really blessed by our kids just hanging out.

After that, we served at a thrift store that Helping Up Mission runs. We sorted and hung clothes, did some light cleaning and stuff like that. Very cool, a great combination of total exposure to homeless people as well as working with a local, indigenous ministry that serves the homeless day in and day out.

We had a ridiculous number of kids show up - most of them who had never been on a SPACE Launch before. That was very cool. They response we got was great, they all seemed to love it. The touch football game was truly classic.

Click on the link below to hear an audioblog post while on the Launch with the SPACEintern, a student named Tricia and myself. You can also click on the pictures in this post for full sizes.
this is an audio post - click to play

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