Wrapping up the Memphis Experience

Today we are cleaning and packing up our humble abode in preparation for heading back to Vicksburg bright and early tomorrow morning. It’s mostly sweet and only a little bit bitter this round, but we did have a wonderful send-off thank-you dinner last night put on by the 5 board members of ArkWings, and they also gave us free t-shirts, which made me happy to end on a good note J I haven’t been blogging much lately, so let me fill you in on what exciting events I haven’t shared yet: last weekend the team and I went to the National Civil Rights and Rock ‘N Soul Museums, which were really interesting and also kinda sad. We got to walk through the Lorraine Motel, where MLK Jr. was shot and killed, and see the hotel room he stayed in, and also another part across the street where the shooter was…and the most interesting part is that they don't actually know who the shooter was! 

It is still an ongoing investigation with a lot of conspiracy theories. There are a lot of “coincidences” that seem like if even one of them was different, MLK wouldn’t have been shot and killed on that day. For example, they changed his room to one on the balcony, when his original room number wouldn't have been visible from the shooter’s window across the street, and that morning, extra security teams were randomly called off…among other strange things, that I had never really known about. My team and I couldn't stop thinking about what had really happened and why, was it the FBI? The Military?

The weekend before last, we went to Elvis’ home, Graceland, and got to see his amazing house, the Jungle Room, collection of extravagant cars, his private planes, and his gravesite. I hadn’t realized just how huge of a star Elvis really was until I got the full experience at Graceland. He came from a poor family and worked really hard to give his mom and family money and nice things, because he knew they deserved them. He also gave a ton of money to charities and one day bought 24 Caddys and gave away 23 of them! I gained a huge appreciation for Elvis and the extravagant, intense, and charitable life he lived.

As far as work has gone, I planted a lot of flowers and flower bulbs over the past week…it was fun! I was never the gardener of the family (that was Aleena), so I really had no idea how to do any of it at first, but Neva and Mollie taught me well!

For our last day of work with the Wolf River Conservancy, one of our sponsors, Keith, took us out for a day-long canoe trip along the Ghost River portion of the Wolf River. 

There were 9 of us and 4 canoes, so I was the lucky one who got to ride in the middle of the canoe and not have to paddle! Keith was steering in the back, and Norah was paddling in the front. I felt safe until Keith kept having us stop so he could cut down tree limbs that where kind of in the way of the river trail…he was standing up for like 15 minutes at each tree, sawing limbs down right over my head! I was pretty nervous that they would hit me, but he said “they won’t hurt that bad if they hit you” so I then got even more nervous! Haha, none of them ended up hitting me, thank goodness! We also found a lot of floating trash and bottles along the way, so we stopped to pick them out of the water, almost tipping over a few times, and successfully filling our canoe to the brim with garbage…it was really gross sitting there, trying to enjoy the nature, but being surrounded by trash! A lot of the bottles had Bible verses in them, like it was a church group that purposely threw the bottles down the river! That’s crazy and pretty hypocritical, claiming to love God and your neighbors, and destroying His creation at the same time…Anyways, since we were picking up so much trash (it ended up being 5 garbage bags full/250lbs!!), we didn't get to stop to have lunch until 2:30, so everyone was starving! And of course, there were no bathrooms, so I was the only one who was anti-peeing in the wilderness, so I held my pee all day long…quite impressive, considering I probably have the smallest bladder on my team! And pretty unhealthy probably, but I think I’ll be okay! So we finished the 8 mile canoe trip around 6:30pm, and none of us fell out or even really got that wet, so it was quite a successful adventure! And we even got work hours for it since we cleaned up the river as we went J