Name: Mary Lansden Brewbaker
Year: 2nd
Major: Economics and Religious Studies
What motivated you to create a mission trip to Tuscaloosa?
     I am from Tuscaloosa, so when the tornado hit last semester I was sad that I couldn’t be home to help clean up and show support in the immediate aftermath. Over the summer, my sister interned with the Trinity Church Disaster Relief team and helped plan trips for other teams from all over the US who came in to help with clean up. I learned a lot about how this process worked and what teams did through her internship. When I attended the first Ministry Team meeting for RUF (Reformed University Fellowship) at UVa last fall, Shawn Slate, the campus minister, mentioned planning a trip of UVa students to travel to Tuscaloosa to help with clean up. I jumped at this opportunity and offered to be the team leader. With Slate’s support and my sister’s connections, the mission trip practically fell into my lap. Â
What was the most memorable part of the trip?
   This is a hard one. I was kind of annoyed on our third day of work because we were at a site that was almost finished, but, because we were waiting on sheetrock to be put in, we couldn’t really do much more to help. I like to get things done efficiently, so I felt like we were wasting time and could’ve been helpful elsewhere. All of the sudden the woman whose house we were working on came to the site and started filming literally EVERYTHING we were doing. Not only was her filming hilarious, it also made me realize that even though painting the side of a shed for the THIRD time felt like a waste of time to me, to her it was a new home and a new future that was being worked on and that nothing was a waste of time.Â
What did you learn from the trip?
   Initially I was worried about the mix of people signed up to go on the trip. Some attended RUF and some didn’t, some were in sororities or fraternities and some weren’t, some knew each other and there were one or two that I had never even met before. Looking back at the trip, however, I realize that this worry was ridiculous. There is no way that I could have predicted the relationships that formed or the commonalities that people discovered they had with each other. I realized how little I really know about people just by looking at them.