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Chelsea Mixon, 21 year old member of East Hills Moravian Church, currently attends Misericordia University in Dallas, PA. While living in Bethlehem, Chelsea was active in the Sunday School and youth groups, participated in Habitat for Humanity trips to the Eastern Shore of Virginia and with the help of her church family, raised enough money to participate in a young adult mission team to Limon, Costa Rica facilitated by the Board of World Mission. She wrote the following regarding her mission serving the flood victims of Hurricane Irene in Pennsylvania.
As a senior social work major, I am doing my internship through Campus Ministry with a small town, Noxen, Pennsylvania. Through this internship I have concentrated mainly on helping the people in Noxen clean up from the flood waters from Hurricane Irene.
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This small town was hit particularly hard and left with a lot of devastation. In September, I organized several flood clean-up teams to help those in Noxen who were affected by the flood. As of late September, we sent five different teams and were able to clean close to 15 houses. The town of Noxen is mostly cleaned up from the flood, but there are still so many in the surrounding areas that are living in devastation.
One place that got particularly devastated is Myo Beach Road in a town called Tunkhannock. This town is about forty minutes away from Misericordia, and the devastation that has occurred there is almost unimaginable. This road in particular has left dozens of families without homes. The flood waters rose so fast that most people lost almost everything.
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Walking down this road, the aftermath of the flood is really heart wrenching. Seeing people’s homes completely washed away, their things scattered all along the street – it is really something that I have never seen before.
I organized and coordinated flood clean-up efforts through Misericordia Campus Ministry to help those affected on Myo Beach Road. So far, we have sent two different groups of students to help clean up. The group that I went with mainly spent the afternoon trying to clean out mud from people’s houses. In one house in particular, we were literally knee-deep in mud in the second story of their house.
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There is so much that still needs to be done and the truth is that the residents of Myo Beach Road cannot do it alone. Many of the residents are elderly and are physically unable to do the labor that needs to get done. They are relying upon others for aid, but with such devastation in the area, there are simply not enough people to help. As a University, we are working really hard to organize more cleaning efforts, because these people are in desperate need.
Please pray for our brothers and sisters in these areas