Appalachia 2025 Mission Update #4 (Final)

Hello friends and family!

For our final week in Appalachia, we continued to work with Western North Carolina Disaster Ministries, but we had to move to another location for our housing. This meant we had to say goodbye to our friends at First Presbyterian Church. The new place we moved to was a VRBO in Linville Falls, which is about 20 miles from Spruce Pine.

We continued to have breakfast in the mornings at First Baptist Spruce Pine. We ended up growing fond of going there each morning because the food was pretty good and also because Pastor Rocky would give a devotional each morning. These devotionals usually included a terrible joke or two that made us laugh. Once we were done with breakfast, we would head over to Spruce Pine to figure out where we would be working.

This week required much more flexibility for our team than last week. Micah, CJ, Jamie, and Tayt spent the first two days of this week finishing a project that was started last week. Wednesday Paul and Earl joined them, and they spent the day painting at a different home. Thursday and Friday CJ, Caleb, Micah, Tayt, and Paul started work at a home putting in a new staircase. This house sat near a creek which overflowed and washed away most of the front yard along with the buildings there. The home is difficult to get to, the couple has mobility issues, and if (when) the creek floods again, they will need a way out. Wood was delivered, holes were dug, and two posts with concrete were put in, but the project didn't get finished. New volunteers who are constantly coming in will be completing the job.

Kevin (the project organizer for all of the work we were doing) commandeered Caleb and Adam to help deliver a camper to a guy who had been living in a tent since Hurricane Helene hit.

The rest of us (Austin, Earl, Peri, Paul) started at a new house. We would later be joined by Jamie and CJ while Earl and Paul went to the other home. This house just had the roof  replaced, and all of the old roofing (plywood, shingles, metal panels) needed to be placed in trash bags. This ended up being a lot of fun because Earl took some of the metal roof panels and lined them up so that we could slide the bags down the hill rather than carry them. Once we were done bagging the roofing, the next project on this house was to rebuild the wood stairs leading to the house. The stairs took significant damage from the hurricane, and it was falling apart at the seams. They would not have survived the moving of furniture out of the house. A man named Randall was the team lead for this project. He was very skilled and knowledgeable about building stairs, so we were grateful to work with him. The biggest challenge in building the stairs was trying not to slip on the mud. Thankfully, no one got hurt. It ended up being a source of laughter more than anything. While we were building the stairs, Peri was having a great time weed-eating the lawn which had grown quite tall.

We have had the privilege of eating really good food over the trip, and this week was no exception. We found a nice Italian restaurant not far from our VRBO, and we decided to go on Thursday to celebrate Juneteenth. On Friday, Kevin treated us to a place called The Tin Trout.

Our mission trip concluded on Saturday. We left at 3am to head back to Ruston, into the loving arms of The ACF community waiting for us. Now that we are home, that last act of our trip is to reflect on all the ways God has impacted us, and to use what we’ve experienced to continue our mission at Louisiana Tech.

Thank you for all your encouragement, support, and prayers for our mission trip. We ask you to join us in continuing to pray for the people that continue to be affected by the devastation of Hurricane Helene. May God bless you!