Mitakuye Oyasin

Our last week on the Reservation was nearly two weeks ago now, and Amy and I have since traveled back across the country and have landed back in Connecticut for a few weeks. Our last week in Eagle Butte was a very bittersweet one for us because we were excited to see our family and friends again, but we were also really saddened to leave our new family and friends... I mentioned in one of our earlier posts that we were honored to have been invited to participate in a number of sweat lodge ceremonies with Jerry and other members of the Tribe. At the end of every ceremony, as each person leaves the sweat lodge, they say "mitakuye oyasin", which means "We are all family" in the Lakota language and greet each other with a hug or handshake. In the six weeks that Amy and I were on the Reservation, we were taken in and treated as 'part of the family' by so many of the people that we met and we really felt a loss as our time to leave finally arrived.

During our last few days there, we were able to finish up replacing the windows in Marcella's home and get her home tightened up for the (out there) quickly approaching winter. We were also able to work on the home of another elderly woman (Charlie Anne) whose entire bathroom floor had rotted out due to water entering through the roof of her trailer. Amy and I didn't have enough time to finish work on her home before we left, but we have heard from Jerry that her bathroom has been completed since we left!

We also continued to hang out with our "adopted" kids from next door and a couple of days before we left, we threw a little pancake breakfast for them (and their dogs...). It was a really special time for Amy and I because we had really grown to love these kids....and for Roxie (the dog in the upper right hand corner of the picture) because she cleaned a couple of pancakes off of one of the kid's plates when she had her back turned!

And then there are the people that we became the closest to... Jerry and Rita, who completely took us into their family while we were there, invited us into their home, talked with us for hours, made meals for us and ate with us and became a true brother and sister to us. I know without a doubt that the friendships made out there will last for our lifetime.

The day after we left the Rez, Amy and I were in our now familiar stations heading towards home when we received an email from Jerry. At the conclusion of his email, he wrote "please read 1st John 3: 17 and 18" and then concluded by saying "Mitakuye Oyasin - Bless you both". Being the Bible scholars that we aren't, Amy grabbed our Bible from the compartment overhead and read this verse: "If anyone has material possessions and sees his brother in need and has no pity on him, how can the love of God be in him? Dear children, let us not love in words or in tongue, but with actions and in truth". We nearly wept as we rode along in silence for a few minutes collecting our thoughts from the past month and a half, seeing what we had seen and knowing what we now know.

Some of you had commented on our blog in the past and had asked what you could do. Here it is... There are 40 homes of elderly people on the Reservation that are in dire need of repair... much like what Amy and I did while we were out there... Fixing roofs, replacing windows and doors, replacing insulation, replacing siding - Really just making the homes more comfortable and liveable. The majority of these homes belong to widows who are living on as little as $350.00 per month. In the winter months, the energy bills to heat the trailers can consume most of that money, leaving almost nothing for the rest of their daily needs. Each trailer can be renovated for $2,500.00 each, which is an amazingly low figure when you think about it. Because we have been so moved and touched by what we have seen out there, Amy and I have set a personal goal to try and raise $100,000 which would fix every elederly person's home on the Reservation over a period of 4 years. That is only $25,000 per year which when you think about it in the grand scheme of things is not that much money which can make a HUGE difference in the lives of these elderly people who so desparately need help.

This past Sunday, we were at our home church talking to a few of our friends after the service about some of our experiences, and as we were talking, one of our friends reached into her pocketbook and pulled out a few dollars and said, "I'm living on Social Security and it's the end of the month, so I only have a few dollars left, but I want you to have this to start your fund. These are the first few seeds that I know you will water and will multiply when you tell your story". I was dumbfounded as I realized that I had just witnessed a real-life, modern day "widow's mite" story. Amy said to her, "I pray that God blesses you 100 fold for what you just gave", to which she replied, "I hope so too, because I'd give that right back to you"... Speechless... 1st John 3: 17 and 18 in practice...

I know this has been a long entry and hopefully you have stuck with it this far. If you are at all inclined to help us meet our goal, you can send a donation directly to Jerry at:

Okiciyapi Tipi Habitat for Humanity

PO Box 670

Eagle Butte, SD 57625

If you are sending a check, please put "Elderly Housing Renovation" on the check, and if it isn't too much trouble, please send us an email letting us know that you sent the check so we can sort of see where we are in our goal. Our email address is: ameliaanddavid@yahoo.com

Thank you so much for all of your prayers and support over the past few months and thank you in advance for your generosity to our brothers and sisters on the Cheyenne River Reservation. Mitakuye Oyasin... We are all brothers and sisters...

Love to you all, Dave and Amy

It made a difference to that one...

Over the course of the time since Amy and I left Connecticut to start our mission trip, a number of people that we have run across have said the same thing to us... "Why are you bothering to do this? The two of you aren't going to even begin to change anything..." I think these thoughts were part of what made our previous week kind of rough because we started to buy into them a little bit and we started to get discouraged when we became more aware of the extent of the need here on the Reservation. Before we ever started our trip, we heard a story about a couple of people who were walking on an ocean beach. A big storm had just passed and thousands of starfish had washed ashore as a result of the rough surf. As they walked, one of the people would occasionally reach down, pick up a starfish and toss it back into the water. After this had gone on for a while, the other person said, "Why are you bothering to do that? There are thousands of starfish washed in? What difference do you think you are going to make"? The other person reached down, picked up another one, tossed it back into the water and said, "It made a difference to that one". God is so good, because Amy and I were reminded of this story as Mary was thanking us for the work we had done to her home... It made a difference to that one...

So Amy and I were able to finish up Mary's home and start on the home of an 89 year old Lakota woman named Marcella who needed to have her windows replaced because the ones that she had couldn't be opened any more and they were leaking so much cold air in the winter that she needed to cover them with plastic. Marcella is an amazing woman who served in World War 2 as a combat nurse in Normandy on D-Day and the period of time that followed. She was decorated for her valor and service by both the US Government and the French Government. When she returned to the States, she went on to serve as the head of the nursing program on the Reservation. As we started talking with Marcella, we soon discovered that she is also an amazing quilter! Many of her quilts are on display in museums around the country. We were blessed enough to watch her creating the quilt above which is a part of a quilt that she was making for the Quilting Hall of Fame! We were also really excited because Brenda, (in the picture above) one of the volunteers that we met down in New Orleans is attending college in Nebraska and came to volunteer with us for a few days on the Reservation before she went to school! It was really great to see her and catch up with her again.

In our first entry after we made it to Eagle Butte, we mentioned that our RV is parked next to the Habitat volunteer house and at the entrance to the neighborhood that Jimmy Carter helped to build back in 1993. Living next door to us is a family with 5 children that we have sort of "adopted". These kids (and all of their puppies) have become a big part of our life out here and we have been able to spend a lot of time with them after our work day is done. Coloring is one of their favorite things to do, so we have been doing that with them quite a bit.

So Amy and I sincerely wanted to thank everyone for their thoughts and prayers over the past few weeks. We could really feel them and can't express how much we appreciate them. Please continue to keep us in your prayers. Love to you all!

~Dave and Amy