Our first day on site

On Monday morning we were up at the crack of dawn and we grabbed, bagels, toast, cereal and coffee to get us up and going for the day. At 8:00 a.m. we went next door for morning devotions and instructions on the day. There were two other churches in camp for the day and the group of forty plus volunteers were dived up to work on six different homes in the community. Most of the folks were elderly and had lived in the community for most of their lives. Some were retired coal miners. One couple were self proclaimed evangelists. There was a widow and another elderly woman who never married. All of them were living on the edge of poverty and just getting by. Their homes were very modest and in need of painting, roofing, and in some state of disrepair.

We were sent off as a group to work on the home of an elderly disabled man named Don. He had recently given his life to Christ. He grew up a Baptist but over time had just stopped going to church. Over the last several weeks he got to know some of the short term missionaries and their loving actions touched him and moved him to express his faith in a new way.
A new roof had been added to Don’s house and it had been primed fo painting. Our job was to give it two coats of paint and to do the trim around the windows and on the foundation. Because my dad as there for a couple of days, we were also charged with repairing floor in the bathroom that had rotted through and to replace the steps and parts of a bridge that spanned a small stream between the house and the road. The women did the painting and Roger, Clayton and Chris got to work on the bathroom floor that first day. The team also got to know Don. He was a delightful gentleman and very pleasant.

The only real adventure on that first day was the discovery of a copperhead snake behind the house. Roger was called on to dispose of it. He was told by Don’s neighbor, Wayne, that all he had to do was hit it and it would die. We found out that wasn’t true because it returned the next day. None-the-less it made for a good story when we got back to camp with the other groups.







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