I’m going to write a lucid account of the trip to Mississippi, and sort into subjects or topics because I learned so much while there.  An organized account is in order.  For now, I just wrote a note to another friend and thought to send it on to you as a beginning.  Of course, we took tons of pictures.

I was 8 days on the ground in coastal Mississippi.  I miss it very much. Miss the people, first.  Miss the place, surprisingly to me.  It took me no time to feel the allure of the Deep South (not NC or SC or VA or Tennessee or Kentucky).  The communities of North Gulfport and Turkey Creek are vibrant (where we will be working); everyone we met was welcoming, engaging, interesting, easy to talk with and gracious.  And a few were downright larger than life such as Rose Johnson, a fearless native of North Gulfport who took on the good old boy developers who tried to commercialize parts of Turkey Creek and whose uncle was the last black man lynched in Waveland, Mississippi, and whose body they left in front of his mother’s (Rose’s grandmother’s) house in the early hours of the morning.

This past summer VISIONS took 26 students to the Mississippi Gulf Coast. The program enrollment was one more than our maximum limit of 25. In fact, VISIONS Mississippi was one of the first programs to fill last year, and as late as May we were turning away interested students. The desire to help Katrina recovery efforts says a lot about today's youth. So did reports coming back from the field in general last summer. The impression shared by VISIONS leaders across the board, especially seasoned staffers who've led many programs, was that their groups were as on board, ready to work and as open to learning as they possibly could have been. This uniformity of intent also is apparent in the program evaluations we’ve received from participants expressing high satisfaction with their experiences from Tanacross Village, Alaska, to Urubamba, Peru. Service in a cultural immersion setting is as relevant and rewarding now as it was in VISIONS first summer in 1989. We are privileged to be stewards of VISIONS, an endeavor that draws such great teens, such tremendously talented young adult leaders, and which involves such exceptional individuals with whom we work every season in all of our locations.