Begining of Week 4!

Week 3 was an amazing but stressful week. Sunday was especially crazy since we had to meet our volunteers at a park in Mountain City instead of our center and we held our GL meeting, dinner, and EG there. We started our Sunday night home visits much later than usual, but we finally had everyone settled back into the center. Our groups this week were from Wilmington, NC and New Jersey. The groups from Wilmington loved to cook for their families, something I had never experienced in my years of volunteering. I was fed every single day with something delicious including peach cobbler, biscuts, barbeque chicken, macaroni, and eastern style bbq pork. For fundraising this week we decided to add on to our weekly ice cream eating contest with the opportunity to pie staffers in the face for $200. George, one of the GLs, talked to me all week about all of the gross things he was going to add into my pie; lard, hot sauce, and spoilt milk were just a few of the ingredients. On Wednesday night, my fellow staffers as well as some GLs conspired to take me and a few other youth on a snipe hunt. Fortunately for me, the family at the house where the hunt was to take place was asleep. Our picnic went well on Thursday, but it was a little more work than usual since Jacob took his day off that day. As the operations coordinator one of his main responsibilities is the picnic, so it was a learning experience for all of us finding out how much work goes into it. After everyone has finished eating, I glanced over at one of the tables where a peach cobbler had magically appeared. Ms. Marie had brought some to share, and I was one of the lucky few able to get a bite :) As the week came to a close, I started to realize that we were finishing up on a few of our homes. This was a sad realization for me that I would no longer be able to see the families that I had gotten to know and love on a regular basis. On Friday, my parents arrived for a visit. I took them on runs on Friday so that they were able to see what my job is like. After dinner that day, Jen informed me that I was the only staffer that a pie had been paid for. I later discovered that my parents were the ones that had paid for it, and the other church hadn't even been planning on buying one for me; they had just been teasing me the whole week. Luckily, the pie wasn't quite as disgusting as George had threatened, but I am still smelling peanut butter 4 days later. We were all sad to see these volunteers leave, but our moods were lifted Saturday afternoon when we discovered we had been approved for a room addition. Torey and Jen had worked on the application all night Thursday night, pricing out every single detail of the construction of the new rooms. The family had already had someone build the continuous foundation, so we wouldn't have to start from the very beginning. Although getting approval was a great first step, we still will have to work very hard in order to finish before the end of the summer. The other difficulty will be raising the funds to complete the room addition, because it is much more expensive than our usual construction projects. For the rest of our Saturday we decided to have some 4th of July fun- first we went to a swimming hole near Boone, followed by a cookout and fireworks at our Construction Consultant, Red's house. Finally we went back to our center and had a bonfire and s'mores with our neighboring county, Carter. Our new group of volunteers arrived on Sunday from Pennsylvania and South Carolina, and I am currently taking my day off today. I drove to Yadkinville last night to spend the day today at Shelby's dad's house with Shelby and her little brother Ryder. It's been very relaxing so far, and I'll head back to Trade, TN tonight.