Updates

Just an update on the K.I.C.K. Starters (see article below dated 7/17) we have received most of the items for the pack. Mike the pastor of St. Lukes UMC emailed and asked about book bags. I am not aware of anyone in town giving away book bags, so after exchanging email thoughts we decided we would try to collect 150 book bags and place the hygiene items in it. An email went out to local churches yesterday morning by afternoon we had 20 bags delivered. God is so good. In our neighborhood the month of July is a bit too long. We have been blessed to help neighbors with what we have in the way of food but we have little. We are giving away cheese that was left from VBS, peanut butter, cranberry juice, a couple of cans of vegetables and a bag of chips. Bread does not come until tomorrow and food stamps start coming next Tuesday, depending on where you fall in the alphabet, food stamps are disturbed from the 1st-10th of each month. Some folks have about two weeks to wait.

Each day, we are distributing sack lunches to children under the age of 18. The school system was providing lunches with their program ending last Friday. We picked it up on Monday. The lunches are catered and are funded by IUK. When the school provided lunch the largest group ever served was 50 kids the average was 30. We received 50 lunches on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. We served 49 on Monday, 51 on Tuesday and had to turn 10 kids away and lock the door early on Wednesday. We upped the order to 70 starting today (Thursday). A stereotype of people living in government housing is that those folks don't work. That is untrue. Many do work. The welfare to work program provides mothers with two years of benefits and then helps them find jobs or mothers are required to work for local agencies to continue to receive government aid. Several of our neighbors have jobs in a meat processing plant in Logansport (about 30 miles away). Problem---gasoline is over $3.00 a gallon. It is becoming difficult to get back and forth to work. The Outreach nor the church has the funds to help with any kind of gas assistance and local agencies are running out of resources. Carpools are being organized and gas sharing is happening, pop cans are being collected to get people to work, those working in Logansport are becoming a community. That's cool.

Other mothers without cars walk to work, we are seeing a need for bikes. Several bikes have been donated and they are given to people with jobs who need them to get to work. Working bikes are scarce so we can only give bikes to those who need transportation to work. We have several broken bikes, that do us little good as we have no one right now who knows how to fix them nor the resources to purchase the parts. Enough rambling. Please keep everyone here in your prayers.