Emilia Savini
@ESaviniCourant
Features Editor
While most students will be spending February break lounging on a tropical beach vacation or sitting home in the cold watching Netflix, a group of students will travel to Mobile, Alabama to rebuild homes as part of the Congregational Church’s Youth Group’s mission trip. The Youth Group Program, commonly known as YG, takes a mission trip like this to a different location each year with the objective of serving the less fortunate and creating friendships along the way.
This year’s trip’s objective is to restore houses in Mobile, Alabama, a town that struggles to support their largely impoverished population. “For this trip we are working with a program called Raise the Roof whose goal is to re-roof houses for the less fortunate,” junior Caroline Gordon said. “We are also refinishing an old church as well as fixing up a few bathrooms and kitchens.”
With around 120 “YGers” on this trip, participants are broken down into sub-groups to facilitate organization. “Typically we are all split up into teams of 16-20 kids with an even amount of kids from each grade,” senior Chase Williams said. “Each team is led by an advisor and senior leaders. Usually you have a friend or two on the team already, which eases the process of getting to know new people.”
Each team is uniquely themed with matching t-shirts for each member of the group. YG also incorporates all the teams with themed days throughout the week, which encourage team bonding. “Throughout the work week, we have different theme days where your team wears specific shirts to the worksite, like tie-dye,” junior Abigail Farley said. “This is a great way to feel unified it and makes the work day more fun as well.”
Senior Erik Burns finds the united environment on the YG trips to be very different from that of NCHS. “For me, YG is a very accepting environment during and after the trip,” he said. “At YG no one cares whether you’re a senior or a freshman and it doesn’t matter what people you hang out with or what sports team you play on.”
Caroline enjoys the balance between work and play on the YG trips and sees it as one of the many unique aspects of the YG service trips. “The environment on the mission trip is great because it’s a really good balance between hard work and fun,” she said. “It also allows you to meet a lot of new people and get to know them so well in such a short amount of time.”
According to Abigail, the restricted use of technology on the trip allows her to focus on bonding with her teammates. “ I really like the fact that you can’t bring phones on the trip,” she said. “Although I thought it sounded annoying at first, I realize now that it allows you to remove yourself from anything that might be happening at home, which gives you the opportunity to focus on the people whom you are working with on the trip.”
To kick-start the mission trip, YG’s annual sleepover on the night before the trip is a tradition that is cherished by many of the YG participants. “Every year before the trip we all gather to eat dinner and sleep at the church before we leave the next morning,” Caroline said. “As chaotic and uncomfortable as it is, it is a great way to bring everyone together and get everyone excited about the great trip we are about to go on.”
Junior Hannah Fox finds that the Guardian Angels tradition is a great way for people to get to know one another better on the trip. “On the first night of the mission trip, each person picks a name out of a hat and the person you pick is the person that you will watch over and take care of for the course of the trip,” she said. “You keep the name secret until the final night of the trip and each person reveals who they were guarding and tells the group how they got to know their person.”
While the trip fosters bonding opportunities for participants, the group as a whole maintains an underlying religious motive. However, Chase finds that although Youth Group is a religious program associated with the Congregational Church, religion does not play as big of a role in the trip as he had imagined. “I came into the program expecting to say the Lord’s Prayer every other hour but it really isn’t like that at all,” he said. “The religious aspect is not in your face at all and you can choose to partake in it or not.”
First year YG Advisor Emily MacKay notes that although religion is not an evident aspect of each activity on the trip, it is present in the overall theme and message of the mission. “While it isn’t always talked about in great detail, we are a Christian community doing Christian work,” she said. “We call ourselves mission fish and we are called to certain areas at certain times to do God’s work.”
Caroline hopes that this trip will be as fulfilling as the previous trips have been. “I have loved seeing how grateful the homeowners are that we chose to spend our break helping them,” she said. “And I hope that this year, like my previous years, I get to experience their joy and gratitude first hand, because for me that is the most rewarding part of the whole experience.”
**The Courant caught up with a handful of YGers after the mission trip and got the inside scoop on the trip’s highlights. Be sure to check out the wrap up article
