St. Michael's Church, Litchfield, CT

Marvelous Works Missioners, a ministry of St. Michaels, is offering a new opportunity to do environmental outreach in the spirit of Saint Francis, and in the context of our Christian community. This spring, we can get valuable training to assist in preserving our local resource – the Bantam River.

The Housatonic Valley Association is helping to coordinate volunteer efforts to monitor the water quality of all the tributaries of the Housatonic River. One way to do this is to take samples of tiny water creatures (microinvertebrates), identify and sort them, and preserve them for analysis (bioassessment) by water biologists.

The Shepaug River Association will offer its spring water quality monitoring event on Saturday, May 7th from 9:00am-12:00pm (Rain date: Sunday, May 8th), at Roxbury Town Hall. There will be a pizza party for volunteers around noon once the sorting and ID work has been completed. (Please note children under 16 are welcome but must be accompanied by a parent or legal guardian.)

For those who are new to this kind of work, there is a choice of two 2-hour training sessions the week before the event: Tuesday 5/3/11 in Washington (location TBD) and Thursday 5/5/11 in Roxbury (Town Hall). Both sessions will start at 6:30 and run about 2 hours. Volunteers only need to attend one of the two sessions – whichever is more convenient. (There is no cost for either the training or the event and all required equipment will be provided.)

Anyone interested in participating (in either the training or the event) is asked to email Meghan Ruta, Water Protection Manager of HVA, at mruta@hvatoday.org , in advance so that she can have enough food and materials for everyone.

This is a chance to join together as Christians, to get the training we need to monitor the health of our local waterways, to learn more about the natural systems in our immediate neighborhood, and to be part of a regional effort to protect the environmental quality of the whole Housatonic River watershed.

Please contact Barbara Putnam at 860-567-4465 or bdputnam@alum.mit.edu if you would like to join the Missioners in this effort.

Marvelous Works Missioners seeks to do outreach in the spirit of Saint Francis, with an ecological focus on the stewardship of God’s creation.

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Happy Canada Day everyone ! Your missioners spent the day with our good friend Rev.Ed, traveling by ferry to Bell Island. A beautiful and amazing island out in the middle of Conception Bay. It was formerly quite a thriving community during the days of surface mining for iron ore. But the company pulled out and now the island population has dwindled to only a few hundred, from it’s former glory of tens of thousands.

Ed first took us to visit the lighthouse which is perched atop the most astounding cliffs…then we went to a cove where there is an abandoned mining tunnel that leads from a very rocky shale like beach, to another incredible cove where the beach is covered in red and black sand and tons of rocks with fabulous fossils. The cave/tunnel was quite a thing in itself, very dark and wet, but they have somewhat maintained the safety of it with support beams…so we did go through! What an extraordinary sight those coves are !

Later in the day, we returned to the big island and launched ourselves into cleaning up a small beach, called “beachy cove”. From approximately a 120 foot by maybe 80 foot beach, we took 11 bags of garbage plus several piles of large plastic bins and broken objects. We endured the stench of a partially decomposed moose and a dead puffin…all part of the experience !
Tonight, we cooked ourselves a big dinner, the kids have been playing cards and we are quite cozy in our little home from home, here at the edge of our world…
Good night all !!!
Dana and the missioners

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Greetings from “Down Home”, the name the Newfie’s use for this amazing land ! So much has happened already, sorry for the delay in posting our latest blog, but there were some technical difficulties !
On Monday night, a large group from the Parish of St. Phillips met us at the airport, to escort us to our “home from home”. That night, they treated us to a beach bonfire and roasted “spider wieners” on the beach for dinner.(see photo)
Tuesday, the weather was iffy, so Rev. Ed took us on a day of sight seeing.We visited several of the older Anglican Churches along the coast of the Avalon Peninsula and then We went down to the Resurrection Parish, at the south end of Conception Bay where we ate lunch in their Emmaus cafe’. (hey dragon ladies…it’s a cool idea!! I’ll fill you in on the details when we get back!) Then we drove up to St. John’s and took a walking tour of the city, ate Newfoundland fish and chips for dinner and then had the hike of a lifetime at “Signal Hill”, the eastern most cliffs of North America !
Today, we worked at the Lien Farm for a group called the “Seed to Spoon Collective”, we planted hundreds of young plants, worked in the greenhouses, weeded and mulched beds, dug holes and trenches, peeled bark off spruce trees to use for building materials….ate a lunch including fresh sauteed greens (with a slug or two!)
Tonight, we were guests of the Anglican Church Men’s, Lobster and steak dinner here at St. Phillip’s.
Tomorrow is “Canada Day”…and we have big plans so stay tuned !!!!
Cheers,
Dana and all the missioners

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We are on our journey to Newfoundland! We have just gotten off of our second plane, and will board our third in a few hours. We stopped in Montreal and now we are in Halifax, and this evening we will arrive in Saint John’s where we will be met by Father Ed and drive to Portugal Cove. We have had two somewhat turbulent plane rides and it is raining sheets and is VERY grey here!

And!!!!! we just found out that the Queen of England herself will be landing here in Halifax in about 20 mintues!! We are VERY excited!!!!! We will try and get a picture to post later!

The plans for our Mission trip to Newfoundland and Labrador are heating up ! I just got an email today from Reverend Ed Bonnell, Deacon of our host Parish in Portugal Cove, NL. He is a facebook user and I have just created a link to some of his amazing photos of the glacier formed cliffs near his home, on my facebook profile ! So if you’re already a friend of mine on facebook, check them out! If not, feel free to friend me !

Also, he is setting up all kinds of good works for us around their area, including having us do a cleanup and cook a meal at a center for at-risk youth, called Choices for Youth. He and his son and Godson are also scoping out what beaches to target for our cleanup efforts.

On the Labrador side, our group has diminished a bit further than we thought, we are currently down to 5 missioners for this leg of the journey. But our work there will still be wonderful, offering a 3 day camp program for the children and youth of St. Timothy’s parish, as well as enjoying fellowship among the Inuit villagers there. The Reverend Julie Hiscock has been most encouraging and we look forward to this more rustic part of the journey too !

We are still fundraising for this trip and we will also be doing an art supplies drive, closer to our departure date, to bring as gifts to the Inuit children in Rigolet.

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This morning, Brett Figlewski and I attended the Missions Mini Conference hosted by Trinity, Branford. The keynote speaker was Bishop elect Ian Douglas. It was an inspiring morning ! We enjoyed so much, the talk goven by Bishop elect Douglas, he has had extensive mission experience and gave us a two hundred year history of the evolution of “mission” in about 20 minutes! The changes in the concept of mission, are really quite profound, from “the Churches Missions” to “missio Dei”…i.e., God’s work in the world.

We came away with a renewed sense of purpose, we have new questions to ask ourselves. We have a fresh sense of traction on our work and we even faced the first challenge to our mission with grace and acceptance…we got a flat tire on our way home!

With gratefulness for God’s purpose,

DanaR+++

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