Amory, MS – Dec. 1-7, 2024

This week’s long-term volunteers continued from last week:  PD Fred Hershey (AL), CS David King (VA), Crew Leaders Ken and Suetta Hollinger (MI), Jon Stuckey (OH), and Joel Short (OH).  Also continuing were our head cook, Judy Schmidt (Manitoba), assistant cook Jenny Stuckey (OH), LT volunteer Millie Hershey (AL) and OM Stan Kauffman (MI).  We were joined by a group of lively and hard-working weekly volunteers from Lancaster County, PA.

Amory MDS crews continued tornado damage repairs on a total of 6 houses, completing two of those this week and adding one new job to our list.  Volunteers spent eighty percent of their efforts on three of the more extensive ongoing repair projects.  At the Rainey house, a crew of six worked consistently through the week to tape and mud drywall throughout the house, painted ceilings and nearly all the walls.  This coming weeks’ workers will focus on flooring, installing kitchen cabinets, and trimming out the house with ta goal of finishing the project by the end of the week.  Volunteers at Moore’s home went from scraping and leveling floors early in the week to completing all flooring, plumbing, painting trim and hanging interior doors by week’s end.  On Saturday, long-term volunteers unloaded kitchen cabinets, which arrived late Thursday at our Tupelo base, from the Kansas cabinet shop, at the Moore and Rainey projects, ready for installation this coming week.  At Marshall’s, workers installed extension jambs for windows, painted and installed interior trim and doors, finished installing flooring and electrical outlets.

After completing the finishing touches on one repair job and packing up to leave for the final day, crew leader Ken Hollinger led his group of volunteers in a prayer of blessing for the owner and her home.  And the owner, a prayer warrior herself, in turn offered a prayer of blessing for the volunteers, a fitting sign of all being on the same team in Christ.

Our cooks have made sure we suffer from no lack of calories to fuel our work and to keep us warm in an unusually cool early Southern December.  Assistant cook Jenny Stucky and her husband Jon, who has been a crew leader here the past three weeks, head north from this weekend to Lititz for a week of leadership training starting Monday – Jon for further crew leader training and Jenny for office manager training.

This coming week, Amory long-term volunteers will be joined by a large crew of 18 week-long volunteers from Pennsylvania.  We look forward to a busy week with the goal of completing two of our major repair projects before Amory MDS goes on Christmas hiatus December 14.  A new leadership team starts rolling in on January 6 to prepare for new weekly volunteers beginning January 12.