Thursday, July 17, 2008

Meet the Family....and Potter's Field

Finally a Roommate picture!!! This is Elyse the best roommate and friend to have pillow talk!
This is Greg on the long subway ride being silly
Oh Sarah you make me laugh so much!!!
The Family being silly
Fun times with the US-2 Family....dinner...
Sarah and Meg riding the dolphin
The group...L to R...Fawn, Greg, Meg, Me, Elyse, Bonnie, Carolyn, Krista, Alycia, Sarah
Krista and I on the subway


Today we started the day off speaking with Willie Baptist, a former homeless man who is part of the Poor People's Initiative from Union Theological Seminary. He was a great source of knowledge and a wonderful person to hear first hand about the struggle the poor and homeless face. He was challenging the church to MOVE to change this issue and he told us that all great change comes from the church initiating it. I will be writing more on this later. But I wanted to share about an experience we had this afternoon that correlated to this mornings discussion. The picture above is of a sign we left at Potter's Field in NYC on Heart Island. The sign says, "We have come to remember our brothers and sisters who have gone on before us. We recognize them as sacred, now and forever more. Amen". We went to this place because it is where the homeless and "unbefriended" people of NYC are sent each year to be buried. There have been over 600,000 buried there and over 8,000 a year and 1500 of those are infants. We know we need to address this problem, so we began by holding a service for the people buried on Heart Island. You cannot actually get to the island unless you are part of the department of corrections or with this organization that is working to bring justice to this issue http://www.picturethehomeless.org/ . I urge you all to learn more about the injustices that involve the homeless in the US. I have so much to say about this but I need some time to process.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I have a lot of tears in me about what we saw today, but I haven't shed them yet. I think they're just going to keep building up.

Look at this picture I found:
http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2006/11/12/nyregion/12homeCA01ready.html