Spring Break 2017: East Durham

For spring break this year, we took a group of students from church to Durham for a mission trip. We partnered with a church plant in East Durham called Grace Park Church. A friend of ours from Summit RDU is on staff there and he and Stephen have stayed in touch over the years. We had a great time serving the East Durham community alongside Grace Park Church and showing our students where we're from!

We left Tuesday after Easter and headed to the Bull City! Tuesday evening we had dinner with Grace Park's staff and heard a little about East Durham and their church.

 Wednesday morning Perry gave us a tour of East Durham and we got to hear the vision and mission of Re-City. Re-City seeks to bring together non-profit organizations in the area to collaborate so they can work together, accomplishing more than they could on their own. 

 After our time in East Durham on Wednesday we got a tour of Duke's campus and ran into Grayson Allen. The kids loved tracking him down and asking for a picture.

Thursday, Friday, and Saturday were our work days. The church inherited a house in East Durham that used to be the Agape House, a boarding house for boys. It has been abandoned for a while and they haven't had the man power or funds to do the necessary renovations. As a result, it has become quite a nuisance in the community, being used as a drug house and called prostitute corner.

We didn't get a lot of before shots of the property, but you can get an idea of it from the picture above.

After picking up trash, mowing, weed eating, blowing off the property, killing weeds, removing rotten playground equipment and old limbs, raking, picking up leaves, mulching, painting, and cleaning out the shed you see in the background of the picture below, we were able to make the outside look a little better. We also helped board the house and shed up more than it already was to prevent all of the illegal activity that had been happening on a daily basis and rearranged some lighting on the property to help the neighbors have a better idea of who's on the property and know when they need to call law enforcement.

There's still a lot of work to be done, but we were honored to play a small part in beginning the process of turning this abandoned property back into a healthy location in East Durham.

The church also inherited the Agape School House. They use this building for their church offices and rent out the classrooms on the bottom level to a home school group. We did a little cleaning in there one afternoon as well.

Our evenings were spent exploring Durham with our students and showing them our roots.

One evening Re-City hosted a forum on racial tensions in the city. While we didn't agree with everything said, it was eye opening for us and the students.

We ate at International Delight on Ninth Street one night. So good!

 Wednesday evening we got to hang out with the students at Grace Park and have Bible Study with them.

 We had dinner at Stephen's mom's one night and my parents one night. I think this might have been one of the student's favorite part of the trip, getting to go to our homes and see our parents.

We went to Southpoint one night. The kids loved the "HUGE" mall!

Loco Pops was a favorite afternoon snack after working each day.

Sunday we went to church at Grace Park and had lunch with them before heading back to Mo-town!

We took 11 students. Nine of those students were girls, one high school guy, and one sixth grade boy. I went into the week a little nervous about all of the manual labor and yard work. I was SO impressed with how well they all worked! They never complained and even on the last days when there wasn't always enough jobs for everyone to working, they always jumped right up when called on.

It was a great trip and we loved introducing our Morganton people to our home!