The mission trip was just amazing. We stayed right on the bay in tents on a concrete slab. Mississippi is just beautiful... there are these live oaks hundreds of years old that are just gorgeous. Even a year after hurricane Katrina, however, there is still debris everywhere. Buildings are broken and shattered. Of course the casinos are in near perfect condition. They may yet save the economy. Black widows have taken over the place, nesting under the debris, making cleanup dangerous. The people are still living in trailors because the insurance won't pay them the money for various loophole reasons. Just spending a week there picking up gave me a taste of why it was still a mess. It just sucks the will out of you, toiling for hours and hours under the sun and barely putting a dent in the piles of timbers and house parts. And yet there is hope... the hospitality is touching. Citizens and volunteers would invite us to eat with them or stay in the shade they had for lunch. A woman who had just started her chemo for breast cancer when the hurricane hit encouraged us, "if you can beat cancer, you can beat this." I thank God for giving me the opportunity to go and learn from the people. God bless Mississippi and put volunteers with a heart for that place there.