We're exhausted. It has been a long week culminating with a long day. I got up and was out of the house by 7 am this morning ... on a Saturday! Today was our youth Work-a-Thon. We started this event last year & had tremendous success with it. We spent the day (8a-3p) working at various locations around Coffeyville doing community service work. Today some of the things our youth did were working at the Brown Mansion (a local historical home), helping man a booth at the New Beginnings Festival downtown for Habitat for Humanity, and helping sort through clothes at the Salvation Army. It is a great experience - both for our youth & for the sites involved. Both this year and last we outperformed the expectations of these locations, who were extremely grateful for the time and hard work our youth put in. On their end the youth sent out support letters a few weeks back asking family & friends to sponsor the community service work they did. This was all in an effort to raise money for the youth to go to summer camp. Many youth raised enough money to pay for this year & next year's camp fees. The only downside is that I wish we could just do it instead of doing it as a fund-raiser. It is good to have one big emphasis like this & have our money needs taken care of, but I think it detracts a little from the work.

It might be nice to have a follow-up day ("Work-a-Thon2" or something like that) where we show back up at the same sites for another afternoon of service work without the money involved - maybe after camp is over. This would be a nice gesture & help the youth to focus on the work we are accomplishing sans the monetary rewards.

Anyway, I'm not 24 anymore (the age I was when we arrived here) and these type of events take it out of me a lot more than they used to. It will probably take me a few days to recover. For now Andrea & I are going to relax and watch an old movie together ("Magnificant Obsession" 1954 w/Jane Wyman & Rock Hudson - really go so far).