For one week every summer, the senior high youth at St. Michael’s Lutheran Church in Roseville drop everything to venture somewhere in the United States on a service learning trip. Since I happen to attend that church, and I just so happen to be a senior high youth, I have joined these trips for three years running. Usually, we help out in soup kitchens, do some yard work, or visit homeless shelters. However, our trip during the summer of my junior year was destined to be different from the very beginning. The two years previously, our group had traveled to densely-populated, urban and metropolitan areas of the country. Detroit, Michigan and Denver, Colorado, to be specific, where homeless populations are reaching their peak. That year, we would be traveling instead to the Rocky Boy Native American reservation in northern Montana. With confused expressions and doubtful whispers, the kids wondered why they chose a location in the middle of nowhere, and what we would be doing without a big city to entertain us. …show more content…
These people weren’t homeless, the government made sure of that, but they might as well have been. Their yards were littered with, quite literally, everything but the kitchen sink. The houses, if you could even call them that, were sagging and withered, small and cramped for the amount of people living in them. The only nice part about the town was their church and community area, coincidently the place we would be staying. The pastor of the church explained that it was extremely important to the community people. They used the space for all social gatherings, ceremonies, and special occasions, and it was the only place they had to house these different