New Opportunities on Crow Creek Reservation

“A few days ago, when we decided to do some cleaning at the community building, we discovered eight people sleeping there,” says Lisa Lengkeek. Lisa is an employee of the Crow Creek Tribe. She is a Dakota Indian.

We met with Lisa and Lori Traversie on our last trip to the Crow Creek Dakota Sioux Reservation. Lori is also Dakota and a Tribal employee. This was our first meeting with them and our first trip to Crow Creek.

Desiree Furman made these contacts possible. She sent an email to Kathleen asking for quilting fabric. In a later communication Desiree told us about Lisa and suggested that we contact her. To shorten a long story, we delivered a bag of fabric to Desiree’s home on the 9th and met Lisa and Lori on the 10th. We were disappointed that we didn’t get to meet Desiree. Although we made the delivery to her home, Desiree was ill and unable to meet with us. We did have a nice visit with her mother and her mother’s husband.

Back to the homeless people. Tribal officers suggested to Lisa that she ask us if we could provide cots for the homeless people. Tribal members do not normally become homeless because other family members make a place for them in their homes. It is not unusual for three or four families to live in the same house. “A three bedroom house will often have a different family living in each bedroom,” according to Lisa. Now that they have discovered some of their people homeless, the tribe is providing a shelter for them. “They have heat in the building, but they don’t have any beds,” Lisa says.

They will have beds soon, thanks to Together for Hope High Plains. On November 15th we ordered ten Coleman cot/beds to be delivered to the Crow Creek Tribal Office! We pray that God will use them as worthy expressions of Christ’s presence! Pray that Together for Hope will find other ways to be the presence of Christ to these wonderful people. We are exploring the possibility of helping the tribe begin a combination food pantry/soup kitchen as our next project.