Thursday, January 11, 2018

Diocese rallies to assist stranded West Coast teens

From Newark-

It started with a Facebook post and a chance cross-country friendship. It turned into what became a very long email chain on the Newark list. By the time it was over, a bunch of Episcopalians in northern New Jersey had helped feed a group of high school kids from the West Coast, because the kids had left their shoes in a foreign country. There’s also a Connecticut angle.

Follow closely now.

Last Thursday, as a severe winter snow storm was creating brutal conditions for much of the East Coast, Selene Nesland and four other chaperones were leading a group of 20 kids from five high schools home to Vancouver, Washington, a suburb of Portland, Oregon. The group had traveled to the Dominican Republic with Courts for Kids, a nonprofit organization founded by Nesland and her husband, which brings volunteers to impoverished areas to build or repair courts used for sports.

The group spent more than a week in shirt-sleeve weather at Red Misericordia, a Christian orphanage in Santiago, whose name translates roughly as “Mercy Network.” They built an outdoor basketball/volleyball court – “just a simple, concrete structure, but something [the orphanage] wouldn’t have been able to do on their own,” Nesland said.


More here-

https://dioceseofnewark.org/content/diocese-rallies-assist-stranded-west-coast-teens

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