Louisiana Men, Women and Children

It has been since August when I last posted. A lot has happened since then!

We are still on the road and having fun but have made some decisions about where and when we will land and are in the midst of making the next phase come to be staring next spring.

In the meantime...

We have been back to CT twice. We have lived for over a month in Annapolis, MD and we spent Thanksgiving in Greenville, South Carolina and then one day in Mars Hill, NC, our winter home, before we headed up to Sevierville, Tennessee and the Great Smokey Mountain National Park before we left there last Thursday and headed south on a two day drive.

We made it the first night 450 miles from Tennessee into Meridian, Mississippi. This is one of those southern towns that we treasure for its hometownness. They next day though was to include one of our favorite eateries and a man, Arthur Davis, that I can proudly say has become our friend over our two visits to his town and his establishment, the "Old Country Store" in Lorman, Mississippi (which is by no coincidence, the place where he expresses his personal passion for life by greeting and meeting folks from all over the world). His fried chicken and assorted home cooked soul foods are great but they do not compare with his wonderful faith and sense of mission he experiences and follows in his daily life. He is an inspiration! He spent about a hour this time talking with us and sharing of his personal mission work with school kids and his new to begin prison ministry that will start on Dec. 13th.

We had our lunch and our chat time and then we were on our way to the final leg of our day as we made our way towards Lake Charles, Louisiana for our week long reunion gathering with the great folks who came down with us on our first trip way back in the spring of 2006. We are all here now and have selected another house and family to assists this time around. I will be posting some pictures as we go along but for now I just want to once again offer my heartfelt thanks to my buds from CT who make there way here out of the goodness of their hearts and from their desire to make life a little better for other human beings. You guys are absolutely the best friends and superior people for where you come from and what you offer in the way of hope and caring and love. It is my honor to be your friend and I thank you for accepting our invitation to come here and make a huge difference. Alex, Mike, Dave, Hilton, Megan and Jasper, you are the light of the world!

We will be here for one week and it that week we will collectively; completely remodel, expand and make accessible a new bathroom, Insulate and drywall a master bedroom and repair the drywall throughout the house, install new underlayment and finish floors through out the house, install new wiring and lighting throughout the house, install all new appliances, construct a new front porch and stairs off the front door, buy a communion dress for a 9 year old making her first holy communion and in effect make this house capable of being moved into by a family of four who has been living in a FEMA trailer for two years unable to move into their home sitting on their property. This is a real good thing that my friends have come here to do and it will change the lives of this family forever.