South Dakota and the Rez

It has been awhile...

I always have high hopes posting regularly... but it does not happen.

I am, however, making plans to post during my up coming trip to Guatemala (March 19th-April 5th). I will be in Antigua for 2 weeks. During the first week, I will be leading a team of 40 on a missions project. During the second week I will be on my own, studying Spanish and enjoying all that Central America has to offer. More on this subject when I am in country.

As the title of this post suggests I was in South Dakota last week. Coming up in June I will be leading 3 weeks of missions projects. Mission Discovery has been working in the Rapid City area for the past three years, and this will be our 4th summer of projects. Due to the border violence in Mexico more and more church groups want to stay in the United States to do missions projects. Although this is sad news for my friends in Mexico it means that I have more work available to do in South Dakota. So it is a good news bad news situation. My hope is that God will use this opportunity to spread grace and peace in South Dakota.
So last week I was scouting out project locations for our teams to work on. One notable location was a small village called Red Shirt. Located on the Pine Ridge reservation, Red Shirt consists of about 30 houses, a school, and a very messy trash dump. At the foot of the Badlands, wind whips through the vast treeless landscape and passes through Red Shirt in surprisingly strong gusts. After doing a little wikipedia research, I found that Red Shirt is located in Shannon County, which is the second poorest county in the United States. As if that simple fact doesn't make life hard enough, uranium mining in the area has left water virtually undrinkable and toxic. There are a string of cancer deaths that are most likely linked to the uranium mining but they are unconfirmed.
I look forward to this summer, and the possible good work to be done in Red Shirt and other locations near Rapid City.