Tag: nomads mission volunteers

Start of our Spring 2025 Road Trip

Sunday, May 11, 2025

Tuesday, May 6 was the official beginning of our Spring Road Trip 2025.  If things go as planned, this will truly be a road trip.  There will be lots of driving, lots of miles covered and not as much moseying along at a casual pace as our recent vacations.  Tuesday, we drove to Asheville, NC to visit with the volunteer coordinator for the NOMADS disaster rebuilding project we will be leading in the fall.  We met with Hannah at the church that will be providing our parking sites.  The church is building camping sites on their property for people impacted by Hurricane Helene and will be including six sites for NOMADS to use.  This should be a great opportunity for us to serve in a beautiful location while working to get families back into their homes.

From Asheville, we drove to Barbourville, KY to visit the Constructors For Christ 2025 construction site.  We will be helping to build the East Barbourville Baptist Church’s new sanctuary and perhaps build out some Sunday School classrooms.  Since it was not too far off our route, we decided to take a quick look at the site and see the town.  We arrived too late to see anyone at the church but got to take some pictures, try one of the local diners, check out the grocery stores, and the RV park we will be using. We also boondocked at the local WalMart (with permission).  We are really looking forward to this project.  This will be the 50th  year Constructors has provided 5-6 weeks of labor to assist churches with their building needs.  What a great ministry this organization has led.  It’s an honor to work and serve with them and we look forward to seeing all our Constructor friends in June.  We traveled 336 miles today.

After a good night of sleep,  on May 7, we continued driving northwest.  We stopped at King Donut in London, KY for breakfast pastries and then continued to Big Bone Lick State Historic Park in Union, KY.  This is a smaller state park but is in a beautiful setting and bills itself as “the birthplace of American paleontology.” We would definitely stay here again.  The first sight we were assigned, we couldn’t get level.  So the very helpful, “off duty” camp host quickly changed our site to one that was level and located immediately behind Randy and Debra.  We spent the afternoon exploring the park and waiting for Randy and Debra to arrive.  Another 171 miles traveled.

Third Week At Sumatanga

Sunday, May 4, 2025

Our last post left us at Camp Sumatanga for Easter weekend.  Easter morning we were up at 4:00 am, on the road by 5:00 am and celebrated the resurrection of our Lord and Savior with our Lester Memorial family at 6:00 am on the mountain above Oneonta at Palisades Park.  It was a wonderful service and beautiful sunrise.  Such a great way to start Resurrection Sunday.

For our third week working at Camp Sumatanga we were so blessed!  Friday of Holy Week our good friends and fellow NOMADS Mariel and Shannon joined us.  On Sunday afternoon two more good friends and NOMADS, Rita and Dave, joined us. We also had great help from Barry and Donna and Emily.  First, there was NO water leak Monday morning!  We were able to resume work on Cabin 5 with Barry, Donna, Mariel, Anne, Max, and Rita worked on painting the exterior since Monday would be our only dry day.  Shannon and Dave did some framing work for the showers and vents, built some benches, and repaired drywall in the old section of the cabin.  On Thursday Dave, Shannon, Max, Anne, and Barry insulated the walls and ceilings. 

We also continued to work in the girl’s staff hut. By the end of the week Donna, Barry, Rita, Mariel, Anne and Emily had all six bedrooms ceiling, walls and closets painted along with the hallway and most of the trim.  The bathroom ceilings were also painted.  The old water heaters were removed.  Max and Anne rebuilt and insulated part of the front wall of the hut and finished the repair of  the damaged subfloor in the front room. Max and Barry also worked on rough-in electrical in Cabin 7.  It was a very busy week with a lot accomplished for the camp.  Most importantly, everyone stayed safe!  Big thank you to all who helped!!

We returned to Johnston, SC after church on Sunday and have spent the past week with Randy and Debra.  Randy received a great report from his oncologist on Wednesday so it’s been a great week for us.  If things go as planned we will be doing some westward travel with Randy and Debra this next week.

Uskichitto Week One

Saturday February 22, 2025

When we last posted, we had just arrived at Uskichitto Retreat Center (pronounced “Whiskey Chitto”) in LeBlanc, LA.  The retreat center has five cabins to house campers for summer camp season.  The cabins are also used during the off season by businesses, clubs and church groups for weekend retreats, meetings and work sessions. We have full hookup camp sites and laundry facilities.  This a three week NOMADS project, but we will only be working the first two weeks.  Mariel and Shannon are our leaders.  It’s so good to work with them again.  We haven’t seen them since the annual meeting last year.  We have team members, Pam and Dennis who we worked with at Camp Sumatanga last year and Lou and Gabriela who we just met.  They are relatively new members from Iowa.

There is lots of work to be done at the camp, but our highest priority is replacing the flooring at the pavilion.  Monday morning it was all hands-on deck to empty out the pavilion of all the sound equipment, furniture, etc. and remove the toilets and sinks from the restrooms and store everything in a nearby building.  That done, we began using various tools to remove the old flooring. Most of the tile actually came up fairly easily.  It was all the glue that remained on the floor that was the problem.  The camp director rented us a machine that made the job easier but there was still lots of time spent on our knees scraping. It was decided that we would be using epoxy paint with color chips to replace the old tile.  After scraping all the old glue up there was dust and dirt everywhere.  Then, we began the process of cleaning the concrete mopping numerous times to get it clean.  With that huge job completed, Thursday afternoon we etched the concrete and then mopped the concrete until clean again.  The mop water had to be clear.  That’s where we left it for the weekend. 

How we had fun all week

When there was a little down time throughout the week, a few of us were able to complete some smaller projects, the repair of some leaky faucets, replacement of some steps, repair of a “soft” spot in a bathroom and window cleaning in the cafeteria.  We worked hard this week and we were rewarded with a fantastic Cajun meal Thursday night prepared by some of the ladies from Squryes UMC. The weekend will bring rest, laundry and perhaps some sight seeing.

Congaree National Park and On To Our Next Project

February 16, 2025

We returned to the US from Antarctica on Tuesday, January 29.  We made the drive back to South Carolina and pretty much just collapsed.  So very thankful for our sweet Debra who fed us the next few days while we recouped, washed clothes and reorganized everything in Fred.  After about 3 nights of sleep we felt like we were back among the living.  We still aren’t caught up on everything but we rarely are.  The great news is that Randy is feeling better and once we had rested, we were able to help him and Debra with cutting down some additional trees.

February 6 the four of us visited Congaree National Park.  It’s the only National Park in South Carolina and none of us had ever visited.  It’s located close to Columbia and is basically a day use park with no RV parking or camping.  Congaree has the largest intact expanse of old growth bottomland hardwood forest remaining in the southeastern US. There are some really huge trees in the park.  There are several nice hiking trails.  We chose the boardwalk trail and enjoyed our time in the park.  Interesting how we travel such distances and sometimes miss gems so close to home.  Congaree is a little known gem.  We would recommend a visit.

Over the next few days, we spent most of our time preparing Fred and ourselves for our next NOMADS project.  We departed SC on Valentine’s Day in route to LeBlanc, Louisianna.  We stopped in Atmore, AL to do some shopping at Warehouse Market and Bakery.  It’s one of our favorite Amish stores and we stocked up on some goodies. (Recommend a stop if you are driving by Exit 54 on I-65 in Alabama.)  We will enjoy them while we are working at Uskichitto Retreat Center helping them make some repairs to their facilities and prepare for camping season.