A Week Down Yonder

While contemplating what to write for my next blog post, I happened to grab the school laptop labeled "Mississippi". How convenient. I recently spent a week down south in the Mississippi Delta area in Clarksdale, Mississippi on a habitat trip, so I'm going to accept this little prompt from the universe and take this opportunity to tell you about it.

I initially thought it was going to be pretty straightforward: go down to a really poor town in Mississippi and do some good and help build a house. It turned out to be so much more. Yes, we did help to build a house and got pretty far considering we only were there for a week, but we also got to experience a whole different side of how people live. The first thing that really struck me was how welcoming and nice everyone was to us. When a couple friends and I spent a morning volunteering at the Care Station, a soup kitchen, the head of the kitchen, a woman named Vern, hugged us all and told us she loved us when we were about to leave. That was so crazy and cool to me; she had only known us for four hours yet she treated us like we were practically family. It was hard not to be sucked into it all and start returning all the love you received to other people you would meet.

One of my favorite parts of the trip was playing with the neighborhood kids that would hang around the house. Even after we were all tired from working hard at the work site or just spent our entire day around kids while helping out at the school, we would still go out and play with them and let them climb on our backs and try to run as fast as we could around the house however many times they begged us. They were all too sweet and adorable to say no to. This one girl that came out to play with us on the third day we were there was my absolute favorite. Her name was Nateria, but she wanted to be called Coco (they all had their little nicknames), she was five and was the cutest of them all. During hide and seek games she would run up to me and grab my hand and say "Come hide with meee!", then we would run off to her favorite hiding spot behind the abandoned semi truck. She was so sweet and affectionate and wanted to be with us all and liked to do our hair and never got tired of riding on our backs. I kept asking her if she would remember me when I came back next year, and she invited me to her Justin Bieber themed birthday party. Though she probably won't remember me, I know I'll remember her.

Though we went to give, we inevitably took a lot away with us as well. Seeing all the poverty and the conditions of some of the houses that people actually live in really convicted me and made me feel grateful for what I have and where I live. Even the poorest neighborhood in Champaign is in better condition than  alot of the houses in Clarksdale. I felt really complete and happy in Clarksdale. They really let us into their community and treated us as their own and were so thankful to us even though we were only down there for a week before we went back into our own rich town, nice school, and luxurious homes. I was really sad to leave, but I know I'll be back. I can't wait to be back.

                                                  Nateria (aka Coco)