Our congregation has been able to send out two of our own youth this year to tell others the Good News of God's love for us in Jesus!

Amanda Tarntino, 23, left in September 2006 for a year in the the village of Ynysybwl (rhymes with "municipal") in Wales, part of post-Christian Europe. The village of 5000 people is in southern Wales above Cardiff.

She will serve as a mission intern alongside Alan & Carol Wert (and their three young children), missionaries with Eastern Mennonite Missions who have assisted the small chapels in the village of Ynysybwl for the past six years. She will be volunteering in the elementary school and possibly organizing an outdoor recreation program for the youth.

Why go to Wales? This part of Wales has many persons who either have no knowledge of God (unchurched) or have very negative memories or images of the church (dechurched) and would never even consider entering a church building. Many estimate the evangelical church attendance in the Welsh valley communities at less than 1% of the population (figures suggest 7-8% overall in Wales). Of the 1%, attendance by persons under 60 years of age is virtually non-existent. Mandy, focusing mainly on the youth, will concentrate on building relationships with them to promote spiritual knowledge.

Kevin Gallagher, 19, left in November 2006 for nine months to Guinea-Bissau, a small nation in West Africa, one of the world's ten poorest. He and his team members, a Youth Evangelism Service (YES) Team with Eastern Mennonite Missions, will live with no electricity and plumbing. After learning the skills of using traditional mud/adobe bricks, his team will introduce alternate building methods and sanitary toilet facilities.

Kevin will also be involved in teaching at local schools (Bible and English). There may be opportunities to play and organize sports activities. He will also spend a lot of time just in relational ministry with people in the village, building friendships, doing discipleship, and learning the language and culture.

Why go to Guinea-Bissau? A Muslim leader from Gambia befriended a retired Mennonite farmer who was working on a Mercy Ship (floating hospital), inviting him to move to the leader's community. The farmer set up a Non-Governmental Organization registered with the Gambian government and worked with the Muslim leader's community to develop a small farm resource center, an elementary school, a clinic, and job creation initiatives like a carpentry school. Thriving church fellowships also emerged among a large group of refugees in that community who had fled from neighboring Guinea-Bissau. Now the farmer and his Mennonite team are trying to answer urgent requests to reach out to the dire human need and deep spiritual hunger in Guinea-Bissau.

Raising the funds to send these two felt like a miracle for our small congregation. Read Eastern Mennonite Missions article about our "thrill of partnering with our unlimited God in his kingdom work!"

On February 20-22, 2006 twelve Corning youth and 4 adults took advantage of a school winter break and traveled to Ohio to volunteer for a day and a half at the Mennonite Central Committee material resource center in Kidron. Here are excerpts of Daniel Miller's description of their labors:
 
After watching a movie about health kits we started working on them. We had the entire process from checking to barreling; I’d guess that we went through somewhere around 600 health kits before lunch! After our lunch we split up into three groups. One went to the quilt area and knotted comforters and cut strips of jeans for rugs. The second group put toothbrush covers on opened toothbrushes and packaged them. My group took an entire skid of powered laundry detergent and double bagged it in 10 cup portions. It was hard work and quite messy, but extremely sanitary! After a break we split into groups again and had different tasks for another two hours.
 
The second day they had school kits for us to check and put in barrels. A few people left to knot comforters, but a majority stayed with the school kits. We finished 21 cases of Bud Light -- for some reason they had received a shipment of school kits from a Mennonite school in Bud Light boxes! But we couldn't finish all the kits they had. We worked right through break and went to lunch 20 minutes late, doing probably 800 or so kits; but there were at least 50 left when we had to begin our drive back to Corning.

Twenty-nine people on a mission!

On Sunday, February 15, 2004, twenty-nine people and their assorted suitcases, duffle bags, backpacks, sleeping bags, and air mattresses, as well as the food necessary to feed them were squeezed into four vans (one a fifteen passenger), a truck, and a station wagon. If that sounds confusing, well . . . it kinda was.

But we managed, and four hours and one rather lengthy pit stop later, these twenty-nine people (and sundry) arrived at the retreat center in Ephrata, Pennsylvania that was to be our home base for the next few days as we served at MCC’s Material Resource Center in Akron. The retreat center turned out to be one large (and rather chilly) room that served as rec room, sanctuary, sleeping quarters, and dining room–sometimes all at the same time–with a kitchen and bathrooms stuck on one end. It wasn’t bad. We ate and studied God’s Word and worshiped in that one big room, and at night we bundled up and put lots of padding under us and (more or less) slept. There were few complaints.

See, the reason we went through all this hassle and discomfort was because we wanted a chance to make a difference, a chance to help people, a chance to serve. And we did. On Monday and Tuesday, we went to the Material Resource Center and we worked. We heard stories about the people who received goods like those we were working on, we got to sport ever-so-stylish shirt sleeves on our heads (and a few of the youth had some fun with some funky dresses and a gold shirt), but mostly we worked. Some of us sorted clothing to be sent overseas, some cut T-shirts into rags, some scraped and packaged homemade soap, some bundled diapers in a tobacco bailer, some helped sew and quilt blankets. Oh, yes, we worked.

And when we climbed back into our assortment of vehicles Tuesday afternoon, we were tired. But it was a good tired, a fun tired, because God blessed us with the opportunity to serve–and I am so glad we took it.

--Rachel M. Miller