So I have been struggling to think of an idea for a blog post. So I was thinking of the blog posts that I did last year and my favorite one was my picture blog. So I am going to do the same thing here. Below are some pictures that from my year in New York, from August to January.
Thank you all for reading my blog. I will be better about doing more blogs in the future.
Hello everyone as this is a new YAV year and all that I am going to try to put out at least one new blog posts a month. So watch for more posts in the coming weeks and months. Also the picture above is one I took, it is the view from the window of my bedroom.
So as many of you know I am now living in New York city doing my second year as a Young Adult Volunteer or YAV for short. I have been in this amazing city for a little more then a month and it was been wonderful so far. New York city is like no other city in the world and I am blessed with the opportunity to leave here and do work which I love. I want to thank everyone who donated both this year and last year. You are the reason I can do this amazing journey of self discover and volunteer work. Thank you all from the bottom of my heart.
It has been a bit of a cultural shift in moving from the Big Easy of New Orleans all the way up north to Big Apple. Everything is different here. People are in such a hurry and here everyone walks where in New Orleans everyone walked and you got to where you are going when you got there, normally late. New Orleans is the biggest small town and New York is arguable the biggest city in the world. I miss New Orleans a lot, I miss the people I lived with and the ones I made friendships with though out the city, I miss the snowballs and the crawfish, I miss the kids that I worked with, I miss City Park and going to get beignets, I miss the Jazz music and Frenchman street, I miss the city that I feel in love with. I hope that this year in New York that I can learn to love the Big Apple just as much.
I am living in Manhattan in a neighborhood called Morningside Heights. It is right next to Harlem and Colombia University. I am about a ten minute walk to were I am working this year, so that is nice and is much easier for me to get to work then my housemates. This year I am living with two people instead of six. Maura is from North Carolina and is getting her own room. I am rooming with Simon, who is from Maryland and a second year YAV like me. He served last year in South Korea. This is the first time in my life that I will have to share a room with another human and though it has only been a month it has been going well. I get along very well with both of my housemates and I hope to get to know them better as the year progresses.
This year I will be working at Broadway Community, which runs many programs to work with the people experiencing homelessness. Broadway Community runs a soup kitchen every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, has a produce food pantry every Monday where any can come and get fresh produce and emergency food pantry for those in dire need, Monday and Wednesday while the soup kitchen is open, medical doctors and nurses come and serve those who come through our doors, and every night seven days a week hosts thirteen men who are experiencing homelessness and need a place to sleep. This is an amazing program and I am privileged to work there.
As for what I actually do there, I work at the soup kitchen, called the Four Star Soup Kitchen, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday from 9:00 – 3:00 where I work with the chef to cook to food, with the volunteers as they prep the food and make the salad and desert everyday, I serve the food some days and plate the food others, and I wash dishes tons and tons of dishes. As the name says we are a Four Star Soup Kitchen and we work hard to make that true. The Chef who is also called Chef, I have heard he has another name but have yet to meet someone brave enough to call him by it, makes absolutely amazing food for about 120 to 140 people. To give you an idea of the meals he normally prepares here is the menu from October 9th, 2017. The soup for the day was a cauliflower carrot creme made with coconut milk and fresh carrots, I should know I peeled 100 pounds of them, the entree was salmon fillets on a bed of fresh spinach and leeks with melted mozzarella, with a vegetarian alternative of tofu instead of fish, with a side of bi-color pasta with mixed vegetables and broccoli normandy. Also with the meal was a tatsoi and tomato salad and chips and Salsa with fresh cut tomato. For desert we served chocolate coverd banana parfait. After all the guest are served I normally sit down and eat with them and I am not kidding when I say I have an amazing lunch three days a week.
I am also working with Broadway Presbyterian Church which hosts and does a lot of work with Broadway Community and on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I mostly do some work in the office or help with anything around the church that needs to get done.
One of my favorite events that I have helped do is called Community Table. Community Table is once a month and its goal is to bring all the different communities of the local area together at one table. The pews are taken out of the sanctuary and tables are put in there place. The are set up are made to look like a fine dining restaurant and volunteers come to be the waiters. Chef makes a four course meal with three appetizer and three entree options for about 100 – 120 people. The meal is free for everyone and everyone is welcome to come in sit and eat an amazing meal. I was busy in the kitchen and running around making sure everything was working, but I got to to look in several times at the people eating and I saw a three men that I see everyday in the soup kitchen sitting with two older people from the church congregation and a student from Colombia sitting at a table and eating a meal together while they talked and laughed and got to know each other. If that is not the Kingdom of God then what is.
All in all I have loved my first month in New York City and I hope that this year I can grow as much as I did in my last year in New Orleans. I hope that I find a home in the Big Apple just like I did in the Big Easy.
Some of the picture of my Year in New Orleans. I hope you enjoy them.
Game Night!!!
My first year as a Young Adult Volunteer has changed me. It has changed the way I view people of color and how I see my own whiteness and privilege. Before this year I was blind and deaf to the struggle that has been going on around me and I feel like I woke up and now I can see the injustice all around the country and I want to fight it. It was lead to relationships with all of my housemates that I hope will last a lifetime. My YAV year has also caused me to grow. I have grown in my knowledge of the problems facing us. Like social justice, world hunger, and human rights. I have learned about myself in ways I couldn’t fathom before this year. When we started talking about the enneagram, a personality test that I highly recommend, I thought it was crazy and that I couldn’t be put into a box like that. A week later I am reading some papers about type Nine personalities and it could have been my life story. I now understand more about myself then I thought I could, like how I shape myself into each group, how I run full speed away from conflict, and many other things. This YAV year has pushed me in so many ways. It has pushed me to sit in the uncomfortable. It has pushed me to the edge of my comfort zone and then just kept going dragging me along behind it. It has pushed me to confront things about myself and my relationships that I would have rather not. But mostly this YAV year has pushed me to grow up. Living with six strangers in a completely new state and having no connections to anyone there is harder then it sounds. I love my community now, but living here in New Orleans has caused me grow up. I now cook, work two jobs, clean, do my own laundry, and I am not responsible to anyone but myself and my housemates. That has pushed me in ways I haven’t been pushed before and it is a good feeling.
The YAV program was everything that I was hoping for when I started looking at mission programs last year, and after actually doing the program I can say that it is was what I was hoping for. I wanted to go to a completely new place and learn about the culture and the people who lived there and I got that. New Orleans in an amazing city with a rich cultural full of life and happiness that is also full of darkness and pain. New Orleans is a city of duality. New Orleans is Mardi Gras, good food, better music, and life. New Orleans is gun violence, mass incarceration, highest homeless ratio in the country, and death. The city and people here have taught me a lot about myself and my faith. I wanted to grow in my faith and my understanding of God and his path for me. I wanted to live in intentional Christian community and see what that was like and though some days are harder than others it has been an incredible time. I want to change more. I want to grow more. I want to be pushed more. I want to go to a new city and explore. Not just explore the city, but explore the people and the culture that makes each place unique. That is why I applied for a second year as a YAV.
That is why I am so thrilled to announce that I am definitely going to be doing a second YAV, Young Adult Volunteer, year!!! I am going to be living and serving in the Big Apple, New York!!! I am so excited for this coming year. I don’t know exactly what I am going to be doing next year, but I am hoping to working with the homeless. I will be living in the Manhattan in the Upper West Side on the border of Harlem and Morning Side Heights. Right now I will be living with two other volunteers, one other guy and one girl, but that is subject to grow as we get closer to September. I will be starting my fundraising soon and I want to thank everyone who donated and Bayside Presbyterian Church for the money that they donated so I could go on this amazing adventure. I will be sending more information out soon about how to donate this year as it will be a little different than last year. I also want to apologize for not keeping up with my blog. It is one of the things I hope to better at as this year continues and to keep it going into next year. I have learned so much this year and I am hoping to learn and grow more in my second YAV year.
The beginning of my time in New Orleans has been wonderful!!! From my housemates that I am getting along with, to Frenchman Street where we go to have a little fun, to City Park where it’s nice just to relax with friends, to my work which has been brilliant; I am enjoying what I am doing. I feel that New Orleans has welcomed me with open arms and I am falling in love with it. I have met great people, seen many amazing and powerful things, and had even better food.
One of the places that I am working this year is Lakeview Presbyterian Church. It is an amazing church that has welcomed me into their church family. My main job at Lakeview throughout my year there is as the mission coordinator of LAMP, Lakeview Agape Mission Project, which is a project where mission trip groups come stay at Lakeview and do a wide range of activities around the city. Right now I am in more of a recruitment phase as I get groups to sign up to come in the summer, but as my year gets farther along I will start hosting groups and working with them as they come into the city. I also help out with worship and do other mission-based projects with the church around the city and in the Baton Rouge area. For the last six weeks every Saturday Lakeview, and I with them, have gone around the Baton Rouge area and handed out food to the flood victims. This is just one of the many projects that I am doing along with Lakeview.
The other placement that I am working at is Mid-City Ministries. It is a tutoring program that is run out of a local Church of Christ that tutors 1st to 4th graders on Monday and Tuesday and 5th to 7th on Wednesday. My average day is that I go to pick up the kids, about 20 on Monday and 13 on Wednesday, we walk back to the church and then go play on the playground that the church owns for about thirty minutes. After we tire them out, we take them inside to have snack and we work on their homework and play educational games till about 5:15 pm when their parents come and pick them up. On Wednesdays with the older kids we join the church for a dinner and bible study until about 8 pm. I am enjoying working here with the kids and I am happy and excited to be helping the kids learn and grow.
I am enjoying my time in New Orleans immensely, and I am excited for the rest of the year. I wish you all the best and go with God.
Peace be with you!
This is my first time doing anything like a blog so we will see how it goes together. The last few days have been intense—I just got back from our week of YAV orientation and it was a hard week. Not that it didn’t have its upsides because it did. I got to meet all the other first year YAVs. It was great to get to know them and just be with people who are all on this journey with me. It was hard, there were many hard conversations, a lot of hard realizations about myself and the world that we live in. It was hard to be away from my family and friends… it was hard. The first thing that we talked about when we got to the conference center, after about 13 hours of travel by car, plane, and train, was how we were not needed. Not needed. The places that we all are going to this year do not need us. If we all stopped and didn’t go, they would keep chugging along and keep doing the good work that they do so well. We are not needed. Hearing that was shocking—here I am about to go on a year of mission work and I am told we are not needed. If we are not needed, why am I going? The answer: even if I am not needed there, that does not mean that I still shouldn’t go. It was hard to hear that and that was only in the first hour of being there. Over the week we had long, hard talks about racism and sexism and privilege and institutional white privilege and many other hard topics that make you question the why’s and how’s of our country and world. And that was just Tuesday and Wednesday. On Thursday, we went into New York City in small groups and looked around and noticed. We noticed the visible and invisible boundaries throughout the city and that was hard and uncomfortable and that was the point. The point was to make us notice these things and to be uncomfortable in them as we should be. This week was hard and it was good. We laughed and we cried. We learned and we changed. We made bonds that will last a lifetime and we did all of this together as an intentional Christian community that pushes each of us to be better and to look inside and outside of ourselves for growth and change. It was a wonderful week, and I don’t think I will be able to look at things the same and that is important. I am now in New Orleans and all settled in and ready to start. Tomorrow I am meeting my new bosses and will learn exactly what I am doing this year and I can’t wait to get started.
Peace be with you
Patrick Long
