Christian Notte, Missionary

Thank you so much for doing so much to organize our Urban Mission Trip in Pittsburgh. It was an awesome experience to be a part of such a big group effort to do good and bring justice and love to our community. Before this trip, I had never done a service or mission trip organized by a church, so it was truly special to meet new people and build community within our parish while doing service in the surrounding community for the glory of Christ.

As I had mentioned during the trip, experiencing, I believe, is the best way that I learn; hearing stories and reading about things in books or watching things on TV or documentaries is great, but actually being there makes a huge difference. And so, working so intimately with and getting to know Light of Life through the three parts of their ministry that we got to experience (their main home, the donation center, and the street outreach) was a fantastic and eye-opening way to get to see how an organization like that operates. Within that, it was working alongside and talking with the staff, clients, and others they serve there that was my favorite part.

Homelessness, hunger, and poverty are social issues that I have really been interested in in the past few years (investigating their causes and striving to find solutions), and from this trip, I learned about them a lot more in-depth. It seems that the common denominator among those who are homeless is that they do not have a good, genuine relationship with anyone, and whatever difficulty or combination of difficulties they may be suffering from (mental illness, depression, bipolar disorder, alcoholism, drug addiction, etc.) gradually worsens to the point where they must live on the streets. And it seemed, from our experience, that hunger may not be that big of a problem in urban Pittsburgh at least because of the abundance of food and charities to distribute it; from Scott and John, hunger may be more of a problem in rural areas or for those living in urban Pittsburgh just suffering from poverty. As for trying to find ways to help to fix these problems, it seems like a daunting task, but maybe it just takes more and more organizations like Light of Life (within all of their aspects of charity) to continue to try to bring as much good and love to people in need as possible! And also groups like ours to reach out and serve our community! We can only hope that the goal of these efforts will someday be fully realized and that the wounds of society that are homelessness, hunger, and poverty will be healed, but perhaps, as Jesus said, we will always have the poor with us! I guess this just means we need to continue one of the central missions of our Catholic Church and the entire Christian Church to serve those in need.

—Christian Notte, Missionary