Let’s go back a couple years. Picture a couple freshmen sitting in a college dorm room. Amidst piles of dirty laundry, a ripped-up $5 floral couch from Goodwill, and a few Disney princess posters, an idea was born late one evening. “Dude, we should get some guys to drive the PanAmerican Highway down to Patagonia when we graduate…” The rest is history. As we are less than a month away from our departure date, we could not be more excited about actually hitting the road. The vision casting, international networking, and local mentoring that have brought us to this point have reminded us over and over of the importance of building relationships. We have already had the pleasure of seeing Project:GoThere have a tangible impact on others. Take this story for example: The four of us have been grinding this summer to make enough money for Project:GoThere. Each of us are working multiple jobs including caddying at America’s oldest 18-hole golf course, drawing architectural blueprints around the midwest, painting houses, landscaping businesses, and bussing tables. I, (Caleb Krumsieg, who will primarily be referred to as “Krum”) spent several weeks working at a warehouse in the Chicagoland area as one of my jobs. One Friday, I was talking with a co-worker named Manny. Manny is roughly in his late-20s or early-30s and has one of the most inviting personalities of anyone I’ve ever known. He asked me why I was working in the warehouse and how I liked the job thus far. I explained that I was just working for the summer to earn enough money for Project:GoThere. That sparked a conversation about the importance of travel and broadening your view of the world to learn from other cultures. He told me that someday he longs to take his family on a trip to Mexico to meet his extended family that still live there. The following Monday, I arrived at work ready for another day of picking industrial kitchen parts and processing them for shipping. An excited Manny came up to me, gave me his daily signature fist-bump and said, “Waddup Caleb? So, I was thinking over the weekend more about our travel conversation that we had on Friday and just said ‘f*** it!’ and bought plane tickets to take my whole family on a fishing trip to Miami in November!” Obviously, this wasn’t a massive life-altering moment in Manny’s life. However, it’s an incredible encouragement to see other people get excited by the same love of communal travel that is one of the main focuses of Project:GoThere. We hope, trust, and pray that this is only one of countless similar conversations with people from the United States to Argentina that begin to scratch the surface of the things that truly matter in life. Please, join us in praying that God will continue to use the four of us as vessels to point others toward the beauty of this world that He created for us to explore. Ongoing PGT prayer requests:
Stay in touch! Krum
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PGT ThoughtsStories of experiences we have along the way. Archives
November 2017
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