St. Paul’s Episcopal Church

By Steve Rucinski.

It is the final day, it is a little quieter as a few groups have headed for home this morning. We however have our most challenging day ahead of us of the whole week.

The photo to the left is one I took upon site arrival. Our task is to demolish as much of the remaining home as possible and salvage any wood, windows, tin or other materials we can and to scrap pile the rest.

We only allowed proper shoe’d adults on the house foundation to work and work it was. Much muscle was applied to tear down almost the entire remaining structure. The non-foundation workers had the very tough task of removing nails from reusable wood. Keep in mind that I think this house may have been over 80 years old and there was a HUGE quantity of nails used in the construction.

We had a chance to meet the owner and I think he shared the fact that his grandparents built the house and he himself is in his 60’s today. He was so thankful for our contribution of helping him get a new home. We had teammates on this project a group from Huntsville, AL who has been here 3 summers in a row working.

By mid-day the entire site was in the sun and it was 102 degrees here today. Our energy was draining fast and we wanted to finish strong, we worked hard until 3 pm, cleaned up the site and headed back to camp but not before gathering around a cross I assembled and saying a prayer for the owner and thanks for the great week we have had.

You can see the difference our work made from the first photo to the last, especially check out the size of the scrap pile, trust me, my shoulders are now reminding me how large that pile is.

Tonight there are only two groups in camp, aout 40 people in total enjoying the dining pleasure of chicken mcnuggets. A group of us after dinner are visiting a Sonic Drive-In which I guess is one of Mary’s favorites from her time living in Oklahoma.

Well we will be heading home early tomorrow morning and spending tomorrow night in at an Episcopal Church in Bowling Green, Kentucky. We will attend services with them Sunday morning and drive the final six hours back to Medina.

Thank God we all had a safe, productive and spiritual week here. Pray for our safe return, we can’t wait to get home and share our mission stories. Our thanks go out for all of your financial and spiritual support, we appreciate it.