And so dawns a new day

Just thought I would share this neat picture that I took from the plane of the sun rising somewhere over Ireland I believe. And a new day dawns indeed...quite fitting I felt.

I have now been on foreign soil for approximately 113 hours. When you measure that in hours it really does seems like quite a little amount doesn't it?

However, if my suspicions are correct, I believe that when you take the airflight speed of a Virgin Atlantic Airbus A340-300 multiplied by the coefficient of friction risen to the power of how many times I have thought about home, hours are actually longer to the east of the Prime Meridian. Hey, but I am not one of those -ologists folk.

So yeah, I miss home very much, but I do so with a healthly dose of desire to be here and the realization that this is good and the Lord is good and His plans are good.

Now that I have that out my system, let's recap shall we...

Got into town last Friday morning at 7 AM and a few other volunteers with the Simon Community picked me up from Heathrow. Though I didn't really sleep on the flight over, I made myself the promise that I would not crash as soon as I found something that resembled a bed. Well, I compromised with myself and decided that a few hours could be a good refresher. This did prove to be true but also allowed me to stay up fairly late on Friday night which in turn allowed me to sleep until 2 in the afternoon on Saturday. It was a glorious thing, but I felt a bit silly. By yesterday, though, I had pretty well shaken off the jetlag so I am on a fairly normal sleep schedule now (well, normal for me anyways).

I had originally thought I would be living in the "Simon House" which is located in North West bourough of London called Harlesden. The Simon House is sort of the flagship project of the Community and houses 9 volunteers and 10 or so homeless residents. This house is more of a short term living facility and is intended for 2 or 3 month stints by homeless residents.

The house that I am living in is in a North East bourough of London called Hackney. Simply called "Anton Street", after the name of the street that it is located on (duh), this project is smaller and currently houses 5 volunteers (me being one of them) and 3 homeless residents. Anton Street is intended to be longer term housing (I suppose somewhat like what we would call transitional housing in the States) and has an 18 month time limit. We actually have capacity for more homeless residents so hopefully there will be some more folks joining us soon. I believe that I will save introductions to my housemates and other community members until a later time, but suffice it to say that they are quite an eclectic crew.

Training started yesterday (or "Induction" as it is called which is funny because you can refer to the process as being induced...alright, anyways) by meeting with the Services Manager (essentially the VP) to get the low down on the Community, background, etc., etc., etc. It was good though, he is such a funny, quirky, Brit, but seems like a great fella and is definitly passionate.

Today I made it over to Simon House for the first time to meet with a couple of folks about certain aspects of our work. One of the guys, Matt, the House Manager (who by the way is one of the only 6 staff members), was really great to meet. I really dig his vision of further developing a theraputic community and he is just seems such a super-super-sharp fella. I am definitly looking forward to getting to know him better. The rest of the day consisted of meeting with the volunteers that have assumed certain coordination responsibilities of our key services to learn how they operate. I will definitly have my hands in a lot of different pots, but the general break down of our services is as follows:

Tea-Runs - preparing and handing out sandwiches and tea, very, very early on Sunday and Monday mornings
Soup-Runs - preparing and handing out sandwiches, soup, and tea on Wednsdays and Thursday evenings
Street Cafe - essentially we use the beautifal garden of a church downtown to operate a spot on Monday and Wednsdays where folks can come and have tea and read newspapers or talk
Street Work - every night of the week groups go out to meet folks who are living on the streets and build relationships
Drop-in Center - our main office operates as an informal drop-in center during operating hours where folks can drop in and use laundry and shower facilities, computers, etc. (I will probably assume the coordination of this as part of my responsibilities)
Operation of the Houses - day to day operation of the houses (shopping, cleaning, supporting the residents, etc.)

I believe that I have way over simplified a lot of this stuff but I just wanted to give a general impression of what our work looks like.

So there you have it, all the boring background stuff. I promise though that I will try to make my prose much less dry in the future. Oh also, I would love for you all to post replys on my blog too. It would be cool to get a kind of trans-Atlantic dialouge going on.

Grace and peace, Chris