This is my last mission trip as a youth of UPC, and that’s
pretty crazy. I feel like youth mission
trips have been a constant in my life in a way, but that’s not really
true. The reason why it feels like that
is because the mission trips I’ve been on have affected me in such a profound
way. Even though they have only been a
week a year for four years of my life, each one has contained so much life and
memories that I end up viewing four weeks as something like four years. This mission trip has been no different. Travelling is always a great thing to look
back on, and this makes it something that I end up looking forward to, but it
still is quite painful when it happens.
This trip combined two different forms of travel that I have experienced
before: plane flight with the youth and long car rides with the youth. Of the two, the latter is by far the more
uncomfortable because for this trip we were driving for close to seven and a
half hours each way. After our long and
arduous drive, we finally reached our destination, Chanku Waste Ranch. The place that we stayed is a beautiful place
that took my breath away every time I stepped outside. The outside sky was such a huge space that it
was always full of activity and interesting things happening at the same time
all across it. The nights were pitch
black and filled with stars, the sunrises lasted for hours and were complex
enough to stare at for as long as they occurred, the afternoons were either filled
with clouds that shifted in intricate patterns or were dominated with huge
rainstorms that could be seen from miles away, and the sunsets were my favorite
and something that cannot be expressed even in a picture. The weather shifted drastically from night to
day with temperatures typical of a Texas summer in the afternoons and one
typical of a Texas winter during the night.
When rain came, winds sprung up that were strong enough that we would
often run outside to experience the wildness in the air. Our campsite was made up of a number of
different buildings. There were two that
we generally used, though. The first was
our general building where we slept, ate, and had chapel. The other was our bathroom and showers and
this had an uncomfortable distance from the first. Our work was mostly construction and I worked
on a house owned by one of the families on the reservation. What my group and I worked on was completing
the roof and siding on one of their houses.
We finished the roofing in the first two days and got more than halfway
through the siding on the house by the end of our working. It was hard, fulfilling work. On Thursday, we transitioned from labor to
sight seeing. After working in the
morning, we headed to the heart of The Badlands. Similar to The Grand Canyon, this is an area
that is both transformative and deadly.
It was the most beautiful thing I had seen. After an afternoon of exploring and staring
about slack-jawed, we headed back and ended the day. At the end of every day that we had during
the week, we would have chapel and home group.
This was a time to hear about and discuss the mission of Team Effort and
the people we were here to assist.
Friday was the day we were going to see Mount Rushmore and The Crazy
Horse Monument. At Mount Rushmore, we
found a government-run place with impressive buildings and pricy restaurants
and gift shops leading up to a monument that seemed too small, and at The Crazy
Horse Monument, we found a compelling story of a man who stood up against
rampant racism against Native Americans and dedicated his life to building
something tangible to remind everyone of the true origins of The Black
Hills. The Crazy Horse Monument is a
project that goes much further than stone.
It is a project that is still in motion and it involves education
programs and opportunities for Native American artisans to have an outlet to
sell their art. The statue is a project
that is still in progress, but already contains so much meaning. This trip is something I will treasure for my
college years and for as long as I can remember. I know how much this has meant for me, and I
can see how much this trip as meant for the people around me. I can’t help but be sorry that I won’t be
going next year as well, but I can be quieted with the knowledge that a group
will go and more people will get the same experience that I will treasure for
the rest of my life.
-Isaac, UPC
