I am sitting in my apartment surrounded by what looks like the after affects of a tornado. Piles of clothes, books, and other personal effects are strewn across my apartment. My mother always said that procrastination was my strong point. It is my second last night in London, Ontario before I head out on the seven hour drive to Philadelphia. The drive that will start what I am considering my latest adventure.
It all started when I was about 15 years old. My youth group went on a mission trip to Philadelphia for a week to help a church in the inner-city with a renovation project, along with conducting some outreach. On the Wednesday evening of our time in Philly some members of the church, approximately 20 or so, sat around a table with our team and shared some of their personal stories. As I sat there listening to them I couldn't help but notice that they had each lost at least one family member to gang violence. I was shocked by this sad yet very real reality that these individuals experienced.
For me the clincher was when this one woman told her own personal story about how she had been sexually abused for many years as a young child by an individual that was boarding with her family. Years later when she had moved out of the home, gotten married and had a young daughter of her own, she received a phone call from this individual who used to abuse her. He said that he was coming for her daughter. She shared with us the terror filled ride to her daughter's school to pick her up. Not knowing whether this man had beaten her there. This story has stuck with me for so many years. As I sat there listening to this woman's story, I lost a piece of my heart to Philly and the people that called it home.
A few years later my family decided that we wanted to do something different with our summer vacations. Instead of going to the cottage and lying on the beach while getting a fantastic tan, we wanted to do something that impacted people's lives. Out of this desire we started taking our summer vacations at the same time and traveling to Philly for a week to teach vacation Bible school. The year before we came to run this program a drive-by shooting took place outside of the church, and one of the students who attended the VBS program was found dead in a dumpster.
This was the inner-city of Philly. Rough, raw, and full of gang and racial violence. And this is where a middle-class, Caucasian, Canadian family decided to spend their summer holidays; and we loved every minute of it.
This January the church that we worked with conducting the VBS program had a need for a program for their grade 1-6 youth. It didn't take me long to decide if I was interested in this opportunity or not.
Tomorrow I will head out for my next adventure; moving to Philly for three months to work in the inner-city. I write this blog partly as a way to update those who are interested, but also partly for me as I chronicle this experience in all its mountains and valleys.
