Charleston 3 — Homelessness (5)

Passing the half way mark of our week of service also meant getting past the cloudy weather this morning. All of us who don't wake up before the crack of dawn, which is everyone but Zach, woke up to beautiful weather this morning. The Palmetto state looks great in the gentle sunshine of the morning.

The beautiful weather also combined with a morning following a great session of reflection last night. We're having good insights of connecting our trip to MAB principles such as Communicate Love, and we are feeling comfortable together. When Cara complimented the way we don't have cliques, Radiance pointed out, "We are the clique." That means all twelve of us. 12 people out of 33,000 people getting along and interested in one another's own lives is something special.

But beautiful weather and coming off great reflection couldn't save us from complications that are out of our control. A cacophony of raw oysters and other fish of the sea didn't go down well for some of us. Our bellies reminded some of us of what we ate last night first thing in the morning.

           

With the entire fish population of the entire Atlantic Ocean in our bellies, we were then faced with morning traffic. Who would have guessed that Charleston traffic peaks on Thursday morning? But it did. Despite our efforts to find alternate routes with our not so savvy GPS skills, we arrived at the food bank close to an hour late.

          

But we didn't let this get us down. We applied another MAB principle, Be Gumby. We went to work on sorting food items with positive attitudes. Our positivity was further supplemented by getting to see Chris. He always brings a surplus of high spirits and gratefulness. He has shown compassion towards us the entire week and a positive attitude that keeps our mornings exciting.

           

At the conclusion of our visit to the food bank Cara pointed out the progress we had made. We went through an entire two stories of pallets all along the back wall of the room we work in. Maybe we should make ourselves sick with fried seafood before every morning! Before leaving the Food Bank, Clint continued to amaze us with his healthy eating habits by bringing a bag of frozen, expired peas that he managed to prepare in the Food Bank volunteer lounge.

           

After the food bank, we got to enjoy today's beautiful weather in a position other than the traffic jam we faced earlier. We returned once again to the park. Here we made some more friends, the mosquitos. There we enjoyed a calm lunch and played on a kick butt playground. Sami impressed us all by going all out on a spinning playground device that must have been infested with germs.

            

We arrived early to WINGS. This meant the opportunity to have a chat with the program's director, Ashley. Ashley expressed to us her sincere wish for us to have a great experience and wanted to know how WINGS compared to our expectations. She also let us know that living by the WINGS creed is a challenge even for her. Not only do the kid's strive to follow the creed's ideas of being emotionally aware and responsible, but the WINGS leaders themselves are constantly reminding themselves to stay on track. This is a great thing about WINGS. It's teaching both the kids and the WINGS leaders life lessons everyday. We all are starting to quote the  WINGS creed outside of our afternoons at Chicora.

           

            

After this talk, the swarm of the 156 kids started coming in the door and the music started beating, and we began another day at WINGS. As usual, this meant a splitting up of our MAB group to accommodate the various WINGS nests. There, we once again had a joyous time of bonding with children and gaining experience to turn into insights during our nightly reflection. The afternoon concluded with a hoola hoop contest that even we, the "Mizzou visitors" got to take part in.

            

After WINGS, the two awesome site leaders, Cara and Kayla, planned a special dinner for us. We barely came back to the house for a quarter of an hour before booking it to a campsite to grill some burgers, hotdogs, and S'mores. This involved plenty more of our mosquito friends, painful smoke in our eyes, and Zach proving to us that his cooking skills extend from the kitchen to the outdoors as he is involved in Boy Scouts. We also learned an interesting thing about Sami. He goes through jeans in about four months because he also gets a rip in the crotch area that is due to the way he walks.

            

Once cooking a ball of lettuce seemed in vain and the embers of the fire dimmed off, we headed back to Folly beach and our cozy house that we're staying in. We are scrubbing the campfire smoke off and preparing for another night of reflection. Tomorrow will be our last day of service. It's hard to believe how fast time has flown by and how soon we will be on the road again. But this calls for us to apply another MAB principle, This Is It. Tomorrow we will top off the great time we're having with Chris and his mice friends at the food bank and the opportunity we had to meet all the WINGS kids and leaders.

Charleston 3 - Homelessness (4)

Today didn't start as the usual day, we were expecting to have car troubles, but luckily for us everything worked in our favor. The most important aspect though was Marlee and Anna cooking us breakfast. The meal they prepared was French Toast, cheese hash browns, and cinnamon rolls. After eating all these delicious carbs and waking up earlier, let me just say it was well worth it.

After everybody got done eating themselves in a food coma, we loaded into Blue Ivy and North West and headed to our first site of the day, Low Country Food Bank. Low and behold not even 10 minutes into working, our furry friend "Mickey Mouse" returned and paid us a visit by jumping out of a box that was being unloaded. A frenzy of screams would sum up the fiasco that occurred. Once the mouse was seen again, everyone was able to improve their basketball skills tremendously. WE are all surprised that nobody has gotten pelted by a can of green beans, but it is sure to come by time the week is over. Our supervisor Chris wasn't there to laugh and talk about us being track stars or dancers, because he was busy helping a high school group that was also there on a mission trip from Indianapolis. We missed his witty remarks, but we dealt with his coworkers beeping his horn at us just fine. Chris we want you to come back NOW!

After finishing up at the food bank, we proceeded to River Front Park to eat our lunches. We all crowded around one picnic table like one big happy family and feasted on our brown bag lunches. Once we got done eating everyone found a nice cozy spot whether in one of the cars or a bench in the park and took a nice nap. Oh but wait, Taryn took some rad pictures to show everyone once we get back to CoMo.

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Following our nice lunch and nap in the sun, which is our first encountering of the sun since arriving in Charleston we went to our second site, WINGS. We were now refreshed and ready to deal with our hyper little humans. Today we got to better learn the prospective of kids and WINGS leader. It was a relief that we had finally started hitting our strides with where our roles are within WINGS for our week here. The kids in WINGS have some serious dance moves, to which we are trying learn as we type this blog from YouTube videos. Feel free to join along in the Dlow Shuffle, Part 2.

After coming home from hanging with some awesome little humans, we went to downtown Charleston for some souvenir shopping while waiting for a table for an amazing seafood dinner at Hyman's Seafood Restaurant. At the restaurant we ordered some raw oysters for the table, which some people did not enjoy as much as others, claiming they tasted as fishy as they smell. We all some awesome food, and Clint "the Vacuum" Shannon proceeded to clean up our leftovers and eat every fish in the sea. Literally EVERY FISH in the sea including: catfish, salmon, oysters, mussels, calamari, crab and probably some other stuff we missed. We then surprised Kayla with a "birthday" dessert. She had no idea the surprise was coming, mostly due to the fact that her birthday is in July. All in all, this was a wonderful ending to a wonderful hump day.

Charleston 3 — Homelessness (3)

Everyone left the house at 6:50 this morning. Yea, 6:50. Yea we're crazy, but for good reason. We decided to make the five-minute drive down to the beach to watch the sunrise. We walked the beach-Taryn taking pictures and the rest of us searching the sand for shells. Although it was unfortunately too cloudy to actually see the sunrise, we made the best of the experience. We came back with more shells than we can reasonably pack and if the South Carolina gods will bless us with some good weather, we want to go again later this week.

We returned to the food bank today to our good friend…Chris (not Lee-we have confirmed his name!) His positive, go-with-the-flow personality and good-hearted nature kept us in a good mood as we sorted through food and piled boxes again. That, and the fact that none of yesterday's furry friends came back to see us today! HALLELUJAH! We have become so efficient that Chris had to "give us a break" (he kicked us out) for 20 minutes so that he could catch up loading food for us to sort. Our job could have become monotonous, doing the same thing over and over again for 3 hours, but it flew by thanks to our trusty new favorite radio station that blasts the random mix of 80's/country/pop jams, shooting green been hoops and dodging each other's Butt Paste baskets. We finished volunteering tired and hungry, just as it should be.

After eating lunch, we spent an hour at Riverfront Park enjoying probably the only small amount of sunshine we will get all week. Riverfront Park is a Naval Memorial, which is respectfully highlighted with the sounds of Katy Perry's Firework playing on the speakers in the background. The group dispersed over the park grounds to chat, nap, and prepare for the "controlled chaos" that would be the second half of our day.

Each night, we go around the room and each MABer reflects on their day, sharing their highs and lows with the group. Last night, in particular, many of us discussed similar struggles we encountered at WINGS yesterday and tried to come up with ideas for how to make the rest of the week a more positive and impactful experience. Today, we put those thoughts into action and most everyone's experience improved. The kids were thrilled to have us back.

The group decided to continue the long-standing MAB Charleston tradition of taking a "family picture" on the beach. We figured today was our best chance to get it. So we braved the cold and heavy wind to attempt a cute, coordinated picture in jeans and white t-shirts. We somewhat succeeded with a semi-flattering group picture plus another nice shot of everyone doing the infamous "Sami squat."

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 Today concluded with our second trip to Wal-Mart to stock up on our fourth bag of "cuties" and the always-necessary Cosmic Brownies. Kanesha broke down and bought herself some Blue Bell ice cream, so we call the trip a success.

Pray for some good weather and another awesome day of MAB #CharlestonCrew style.

Anna and Katie

Charleston 3 - Homelessness (2)

Today's morning started off significantly earlier than our free day. Having to leave by 8 am, everyone was up at 7 (or in Zach's case, 6). After our daily struggle with the single shower we started our day of service.

Our first stop of the day was the Lowcountry Food Bank of Charleston, about 25 minutes away. Navigating through the rain we finally met with a man named Lee (we think), our wonderful host at the food bank. With a friendly and easy-going attitude, Lee showed us around the facility and what we were to do for the next three hours: sorting a massive jumble of foods and goods and putting like items into their respective boxes. As we moved between 2,000 and 15,000 pounds of food, we were paid a visit by some of Lee's little friends. Three different mice sprang from boxes and caused massive panic among our female MABers. It's too bad Guinness Book of World Records wasn't present because there's a good chance Radiance broke the 100 meter record and became the fastest woman in the world. We wrapped up our first day at the food bank with a nice sack lunch in the break room and again braved the torrential rain for our short trip to Chicora School of Communication for an orientation with WINGS. ​

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 WINGS is an emotional education program usually held after school (but apparently not an afterschool program). We went through a brief orientation, met Yancey, a colorful and probably crazy guy, and soon after the children started to dance into the cafeteria. There were 14 groups of at least ten kids, separated by grade and gender. Our trip members paired up and went with different groups to begin the afternoon. First off was a talk from Ashley, the leader of Chicora's WINGS program. This was followed up by an academic workshop where the WINGS leaders and our MABers helped kids with their homework and anything else they needed assistance with. We then had a discussion period where we covered the theme of the week, teamwork, and all the sports stories these writers could handle. After the kids had their dinner, they were dismissed and this group of MABers returned back home.

As Kanesha and Radiance discovered their love for ping pong, chef Zach and sous chef Katie were whipping up a legendary meal. Garlic breaded chicken, croissants, and a creamy portabella and asparagus risotto tested the bounds of our stomach. Our evening concluded with two games of Avalon, which only served to further prove Taryn's inability to lie. And now as we type, the American classic, Mistress Millionaire, is ringing through our heads. Highly recommended.

See you all tomorrow!​

Charleston 3 — Homelessness (1)

It's a long road to Charleston. 14 hours of diva face, Beyoncé playlists, and fried chicken was what it took to get our Charleston Crew to Folly Beach. Not only was making it to South Carolina from Missouri a great feat, but setting foot on a gorgeous beach after all was said and done trumped every playlist we made (and yes, that includes the guilty pleasure playlist).

After we watched the sun set on our first evening in Charleston, we headed to the local Walmart to stock up on our essentials. Five shopping carts full of food (and shower shoes) later, we were off to our little house down the road. We feasted on some frozen pizzas, coordinated our much needed shower schedule, and our inner beasts came out in a riveting Spoons tournament. If you follow us on twitter (@MAB_CharlesCrew), you'll see the toll the game took on us all, particularly our pal Sami, who may have taken the Spoons intensity to a whole new level. He figured that sitting in a squatting position was his best chance of grabbing a spoon each round, so he never quite changed his stance. He fought hard, but in the end, he was eliminated. In his honor, we do his signature "Sami Squat" from time to time, so keep your eyes peeled for the next one on our social media.

Today we got to sleep in until 10:30 when we headed into the beach town for brunch, and while we waited for our table we walked around to all the touristy gift shops in search of stickers and "the right shirt". Where did we eat? The Lost Dog Café. First let us say, this is the best place ever. We highly recommend it for people and canines alike. Although, if you decide to dine there we should warn you that there may not be anything left for you to eat seeing as we basically ate all of the food in Charleston #MABloated #CharleStuffed. After we finished eating, we loaded up our two trusty SUVs, North West and Blue Ivy (because they don't call her Queen B for nothing) and headed downtown to the City Market. The City Market is a wonderland consisting of everything you've ever wanted, and plenty of things you never knew you needed. We found more souvenir shops, a candy store, and we may or may not have lost Clint more than once (but we always find him!!!!!!).

After the City Market we booked it to Sonic for some happy hour snacks, and then decided to go see the Angel Oak Tree, the oldest oak tree in America. It was giant, and so beautiful. We had to do some Sami Squats to get the right picture angles! We met some nice folks from Kansas City to take our picture since the man who worked there just walked away when we asked him to do it…. #MAByeeeeeeee. So we left the tree and spent a small chunk of time driving through a residential neighborhood because we thought it was still an old plantation. Then we drove on back to the fishing pier on Folly Beach and enjoyed the scenery (dolphins and maybe a shark?!) while dodging THE BIRDS.

After a long day of adventure, we made a quick stop back at the gift shops so Cara could get her stickers, and Clint his froyo, and then headed home for the night. Sami and Rachel whipped us up a mean chicken, broccoli, and mushroom alfredo as our first family dinner, and now here we are; Blogging, playing Jenga, pondering our next chess move, and trying to keep Sami from the spoons.

Until tomorrow!
-Taryn and Marlee