We arose bright and early today to begin our work at the Reconciliation Outreach Center, a non-denominational Christian organization that works to enrich East Dallas. We arrived at 9 a.m. to be greeted by the amazing and very hospitable Dawn and her precious 3 year old daughter Alanna -- whose first word was "wedgie" and named her dog Crayon...yes, this is adorable. We got to learn all about the history of the organization we were helping and got a tour of this amazing place.
We learned since when the organization was first founded in 1986 it has been transformed into a very successful program that reaches out to many of the homeless people of Dallas-men, women, and children- and puts them through a step by step program to eventually get them to be a contributing member of society ("Jesus in the Hood"). Reconciliation provides housing, schooling, counseling, and guidance to get people back on their feet. We were all so impressed by the organization of the program and its success rate. Even one of the very nice ladies, Brenda, who was helping us with our work all day was one of their success stories. She had completed the program just the day before. We would of never even known she had previously been addicted to meth and had spent time in jail for it. Reconciliation had changed her life. We all very much agreed that a program just like this needs to be brought to St. Louis and we were very happy to be a part of such an amazing program.
After our hard work we came back to the Woodiel's lovely house. Most of the girls spent their time laying out by the pool while the others went on a walking tour of the neighborhood and came across peacocks walking around -- you never know what you'll find in Dallas. Later on Kate made us a delicious Italiano dinner that we all ate in the backyard by the pool in the beautiful 70 degree weather. We ended our night with a trip to Entertainmart, which had thousands of movies and CDs for outrageously low prices and then came back and watched Kristina's purchase of Multiplicity -- highly recommended. Overall it was a great day and we are all very excited to begin our day tomorrow working at the Resource Center and Dallas Life.
No comments:
Post a Comment