Email: Charlotte Craxton

Friends,

Greetings from Atlanta! I hope your new year is off to a great start. Mine has been good so far. On the 12th my dad and his wife, Ann, came down to visit me as they were driving through to their condo in Florida. They took me out to some nice restaurants around town, and we went to see a Chinese acrobat show where we saw different contortionist acts. It was painful at times to watch, but it was definitely amazing. We also visited the Martin Luther King Center, which was packed because of his birthday. It was neat to see the church where he attended and preached. Then on Sunday they helped me at the Trinity Table (soup kitchen). You would think that I wouldn’t want to look at or eat another hot dog after preparing at least 800 hundred hotdogs a week, but I still enjoying having a couple for lunch every now and then. Maybe I’ll feel differently in August.

On the 15th, Martin Luther King Day, my house took some kids from my housemate Kim’s worksite, MITS (Moving In The Spirit), to a Hawks game. The Hawks are the professional basketball team in Atlanta, for those who aren’t pro basketball savvy (I had no idea who they were until I got here). Anyway, the Atlanta Youth Project provided us with lunch from Chick-fil-A, tee-shirts, posters, and free seats. We also got to enjoy the team warm up and we got to meet the announcers during that time. When the game got started, several mascots came up to our section and sat with us for a while. We were even shown on the jumbotron. We all had a great time. We even beat the Celtics!

Since we are more than one third into our year, Jeff (our supervisor) is having us read a book on community. For one of our Monday community days, we actually went to visit an intentional Christian community that helps refugees get settled in the United States and Canada. The community is called Jubilee Partners and is isolated by land and trees from a small town just outside of Athens. Together as a community they have made up a set of rules which they all have to follow in order to live there. They all have different jobs, which include teaching the refugees how to read and write in English. While we were there, we discussed the book we read and discovered that we need to do some things differently in our house in order to be closer as a community.

Well, it was my birthday this month on the 24th, so I am now officially 26. Where does the time go? My housemates were gracious enough to make me some peanut butter brownies with Reese Cup ice cream. Yum! Later on that night we took part in helping a program called “Pathways” to take a census of the homeless population. This included getting a map of a particular area and driving down every single street looking for people who were homeless. Every car had four people in it, and each one had a job. My car had me, two of my housemates (Alicia and Josh), and a man I had just met. I was the driver, Alicia was the map reader, Josh was counting the people, and the stranger was identifying who was homeless and who was not. It was quite the adventure. I never saw a landfill so close-up before.

My sister Robyn and my soon-to-be-brother-in-law Brad were kind enough to come down from Memphis and visit me for my birthday last weekend. They didn’t arrive until late Friday night, but we had a good time Saturday checking out places I’ve never been before in Atlanta and playing some Trivial Pursuit from the 1980s. They also helped out on Sunday at the Trinity Table.

I hope all is well with everybody and if you ever want to say hi you can email me using the link to my email at the top of this page. God bless and thanks for your support!

Charlotte