Part of the buzz...

Part of the buzz...

Sunday night I was telling my mother about the group from Jubilee Mennonite Church in Meridian, MS, that was visiting Goshen. The group had arrived Saturday to spend the week in town doing volunteer work in our community, and we had hosted a pot luck dinner for them that afternoon at our church.

I spent a week each January in 2006 and 2007 doing volunteer work with people from my church. You can see my blog posts from the 2007 trip here. We made our first trip to help clean up after Hurricane Katrina. This year the people from Meridian decided they wanted to help us out.

Mom suggested I contact the paper, so I wrote an email the next morning to HungryMarshall and told him to contact our pastor. This morning the story was on the front page of the Truth, and by noon two area TV stations had crews on the ground doing stories. One of them already ran tonight. I tried to embed it here, but it runs a car ad when the page loads and I didn't think you'd want that.

Interesting side note that Kevin told me about the first interview with the Truth: Apparently the reporter kept asking "So you heard about our economic crisis up here and decided to come help out?" "No. We just wanted to return the favor with the people we've come to know and appreciate so much." "So the economic crisis is what brought you here?" "No, we got to know this group from the Goshen church and this is were we wanted to volunteer." The story actually seemed to get it right, but Kevin said the reported really seemed to know how he wanted to frame the story.

Congrats to Mom for getting the ball rolling.