Christ Lutheran Church -- conyngham, pa

The following was written by Kent Jackson on last year's Mission Trip to Brockton, Mass.

The devotional booklet stuffed into my pack with an electric drill and extra socks looked as rumpled as my friends and I did after spending five days in basements damaged by flooding and five nights sleeping in a church hall six hours from home.
An entry about King Solomon in the booklet summarized what we were doing in Brockton, Massachusetts.
“Today, you and I can offer God our praise, prayer, time, talent, gifts (by) doing good. For example, we might volunteer …,” the writer in “A Word in Season” wrote in a commentary about a story in II Chronicles.
Written as a devotional for Friday, August 20, 2010 the last day of our trip, the message seemed appropriate for us. We were volunteers, I thought as I read the words while sitting alone on a pew in Prince of Peace Evangelical Lutheran Church where we stayed in Brockton,
Some people can spare an hour to visit a lonely friend or deliver food. We had the luxury of spending a week away from our own agendas and troubles. We focused on helping people whose troubles began in March with a flood that, Bobby, the owner of a home where we worked, said came along every thousand years.
To the people of the flooded area we made an offering of free labor.
And God blessed what we offered. In two days, for example, we re-insulated Bobby’s cellar in Billerica, Massachusetts, built two walls, covered one room in drywall and paneled another. All that brought Bobby and his family closer to being able to again use their dining room, which was stuffed with items salvaged from the basement, including memorabilia of the Boston Red Sox for whom he works as an usher.
Humorist Garrison Keilor had us pegged when he wrote that Lutherans don’t take vacations, except to go on work trips.
But at times, the trip seemed like a vacation.
Our group – Pastor Chip Fairchild, Patt Derr, Will Weeks, Marv Keck, Frank Gaval, Ken Ikeda, Rick Walck, Jeremy Thorne and Rob Andrews and I – got to know each other better. Before the trip, we were pretty well acquainted from talking after church, getting into discussions at Sunday school or helping set up the Living Nativity scenery every December. But the trip offered us a chance to share jokes, meals, stories about one another. Many of the group traveled together previously on other trips to flooded areas on the Gulf Coast, North Carolina and Indiana. Newcomers like me, and the recent high school and college graduates from Americorps who helped at all the houses where we worked, learned construction skills from the more experienced workers.
Like the first disciples of Christ who packed light and left home, we lacked for nothing..
From the moment we arrived at Prince of Peace Church after dark on Sunday, August 15 and saw Pastor Beatrice Michals-Brown waiving our van into a parking space, we were looked after.
Pastor Beatrice showed us around the church and brought us boxes of Dunkin Donuts coffee the next morning to go with cereal, muffins and fruit that she stocked ahead of time for our breakfast.
On Thursday, August 19, the last night we stayed at Prince of Peace, people from the congregation made us dinner and spent the evening with us. They ranged from a Korean War vet to the children that the pastor and her husband had adopted. They told us about Brockton “City of Champions” where boxing titlists Rocky Marciano and Marvin Hagler were born.
Tough guys.
And Brockton seemed like a tough town to me. In walking and driving around Brockton, I didn’t find a neighborhood where I wanted to live. There were the usual shopping strips on the outskirts, a gorgeous, gated park, arts and crafts museum and a colorful, new elementary school but plenty of houses in disrepair, shuttered warehouses and empty lots with weeds bursting through the old pavement.
Our waitress at an Italian restaurant that was so good we ate there two nights in a row, told us about two of her relatives who had been killed in shootings related to drugs.
She worked at a restaurant and a bank to support her family and was a descendant of Cape Verdeans, the latest immigrants to arrive in Brockton. The Cape Verdi Islands are off the coast of Senegal in West Africa and a former Portuguese colony. Before the Cape Verdeans, the Portuguese settled in Brockton, as did other seafaring peoples. Prince of Peace has an anchor in its front lawn and some of its founders were Swedes.
As I walked along the buffet table bearing Swedish meatballs and other dishes during our dinner at Prince of Peace, one woman told me that some of the streets of Brockton had been flooded when the heavy rains came in March.
We knew from reading the Brockton Enterprise before our trip that the flooding hit three counties in Massachusetts and part of Rhode Island. The federal Emergency Management Agency paid $58 million to flood victims.
As of July 31, 100 homes still needed repairs.
Christopher Thatcher, the disaster relief coordinator for Lutheran Social Services who sent our group to homes that needed work, told me that 80,000 homeowners filed claims after the floods struck in parts of Massachusetts and Rhode Island.
At the first house we went to, the basement still stank from the flood. A sump pump house snaked up the steps that we descended when carrying sheets of drywall and tools into the basement.
A grandmother, teenage girl and two young boys, perhaps 4 and 6 were home. While we worked, the grandmother washed clothes in a plastic bucket and hung them on the line.
By the time we left after spending parts of three days there, the basement had new electrical outlets and insulation. Fire-rated drywall covered the ceiling and we also finished hanging drywall on all but part of one wall.
During a trip to carry drywall from a stack in the driveway to the basement, Rob and I saw a football in the yard. We showed the boys how to rest the laces across their fingers and toss a spiral. After the catching a few, we left the boys playing quarterback and wide receiver and went back to work.
That night, Rob said to me: “Playing catch with those kids – that was fun.”
I thought so too. It was among my favorite moments in a trip full of great times.
Other moments just happened when, for instance, riding in the van.
Frank, who I knew as the dean of runners and race organizers around Conyngham, showed his sense of humor – frequently off-beat remarks he delivered without cracking a smile. On the drive to Bobby’s house, we read an article in the Lowell Sun about college students digging artifacts of early Irish immigrants to Massachusetts. The talk turned to sites of archaeological interest around our homes in Conyngham, like the site of the Sugarloaf massacre. Frank suggested that Patt, our choir director, could write a play about it: Sugarloaf Masscre: the Musical.
After our drive to Brockton when everyone else settled down to sleep, Rick, who is usually the first person I strike up a conversation with at church dinners or before Sunday School class, decided to read in the dining room away from everyone else. I had a book, and Rich had opened his Sierra Club magazine. But we started talking, and our conversation was so engrossing that neither of us had read a word by the time we turned in, about an hour later.
A few days later when I finally did start reading the novel I brought, Trinkets, I came across this description that author Paul Harding gives of his main character, that just as easily could have described Rick, our construction foreman: “He had built the house himself – poured the foundation, raised the frame, joined the pipes, run the wires plastered the walls, and painted the rooms.”
“Lightning struck once,” the novelist writes of his hero, “when he was in the open foundation, soldering the last joint of the hot-water tank. I threw him to the opposite wall. He got up and finished the joint.”
On our trip, the lightning that struck was an alternate form of electricity. In our first house, in Brockton where the boys tossed a football, water rose in the basement above the outlets. As a precaution, we installed new outlets. After disconnecting the circuit breaker, Will – who in his career has dealt with devices such as mass spectrometers that are more sophisticated than household wiring – showed me how to insert a meter into the plug of each outlet to make sure there was no current. Then he explained how to unscrew and disconnect the wires before rewiring and inserting a new outlet into the wall.
After Will and I had changed eight of the 12 outlets, Chip offered to help. I tested an outlet with a meter for him. As he unscrewed the meter, Chip – who most of us think is usually tapped into a higher power – felt a 110-volt tingle. Chip was OK after the jolt. Will realized the outlet had been on a second circuit, and the meter we had been using didn’t work.
Later, at Bobby’s house, Will installed an extender to bring an outlet even with a new sheet of drywall that Patt and I had just cut around it. Aware that power still flowed to the outlet, Will knew he had to avoid he wires. He inserted a screwdriver carefully, but nevertheless heard a bang. Will jumped as he would have if the household current crossed into his central nervous system. He had reason to be startled, but the shock wasn’t electrical. At the same time as he touched the outlet box, Rick triggered a tool that shoots a nail through cement with the smoke and noise of a .22-caliber cartridge.
Ken was more used to the bark of a gun from hearing a starter’s pistol while working as an official at track meets, which is only one of the things I found out about him during the trip. I heard that Ken was a retired high school teacher, so when we had some time, I asked what subjects he taught. Science, social science and physical education, he said. That began to show me the breadth of his knowledge, which extends to construction.
On one house where Christopher and the others from Americorps puzzled over how to level a ceiling where the joists and cross-beams were off, Ken and Rick devised a solution. Our group had split that day, so I was working on another house and didn’t see the repairs that Ken and Rick’s team made to the ceiling, using, I was told, shims and notches. But they finished the job that we expected to be the thorniest construction problem on our trip in time to help us drywall at a different house that afternoon.
As the trip progressed, I learned that Ken had advised leading marathoners. He also played college lacrosse at Rutgers. And if you watch the video of the 1979 Final Four featuring Magic Johnson and Larry Bird, you will see Ken sitting on the end of the bench for Indiana State, where he was sports trainer while earning an advanced degree.
Jeremy isn’t a sports trainer, but he let us know that he had a date with one scheduled for Saturday after we returned from our trip.
At 24, Jeremy was the youngest on the trip, and it was he who brought Americorps to our attention by asking what the corps was all about when we arrived at our first house.
Thinking he was interested in joining, I went into a long-winded explanation about the federal program, which is sort of a domestic Peace Corps that offers young men and women a stipend and a chance to work in needy areas of the country.
Jeremy interrupted to say, well, there weres some good-looking girls from there in the basement.
An expert at operating heavy equipment who has already run his own landscaping business and worked for construction and landscaping firms of others, Jeremy told the Americorps group about the building trades. He demonstrated exotic tools such as the gun that shot nails with a .22-caliber cartridge and an air compressor that he bought to impale lumber with nails. But there might have been other reasons why the young women from Americorps seemed to be leaning on him for instruction throughout the week.
Jeremy, meanwhile, was so determined to see Boston he threatened to take a cab there. It wasn’t necessary. On Wednesday, August 18, after a three-hour roundtrip to Bobby’s house in Ballerica from Brockton,, we piled into the van for the 20-mile trip to Boston for supper. More than an hour later after poking through traffic, we saw what tied-up the roads. Boston Landmark’s Orchestra was playing a free concert of Beethoven’s 4th Symphony at the bandshell on the Esplanade along the Charles River. We saw the crowd and rolled down our windows to hear a few notes as we drove past.
Heading into a garage where we had planned to park beneath the Boston Commons, we got worried because our van was too tall to fit.
Unsure what to do, we drove past the Commons and the gold-domed State House and soon found someone who told us where we could park. We found a place to park on the street in the financial district that, in what I saw as an example of God looking after us, was free and closer to where we wanted to go: Quincy Market, a cluster of restaurants and shops built around Faneuil Hall, a 250-year-old marketplace.
As we walked toward Quincy Market along Congress Street, we passed the spot where British regulators once trained deadly fire on a crowd that pelted them with snowballs. That could be Patt’s sequel, Frank said. The Boston Massacre: The Musical.
We ate at Durgin Park, a restaurant just a few year younger than our historic congregation in Conyngham. Jeremy ordered one of the slabs of prime rib and insisted on paying toward it even though the church’s funds covered our meals during the trip. After dinner, he treated me to a Guinness Stout at an Irish Pub.
Jeremy plans to go back to Boston on his own. But during dinner with the congregation from Prince of Peace, when people asked how he liked the city, he said ‘If I lived in Boston, I’d be broke.”
Except for the night into Boston, we were pretty frugal during our trip, sleeping on the church floor and showering wherever Pastor Beatrice could arrange for us to clean up. After the first night, she took us to a YMCA where she had obtained permission three weeks in advance for us to use the lockerrooms. No one at the desk knew anything about us when we arrived, so Beatrice told the attendants that we came from Pennsylvania to help clean out cellars ruined in the flood. One young man at the desk made an executive decision and led us through pickup games in the gym to the shower room.
The next day, Beatrice checked with the YMCA early, but couldn’t reach a supervisor and ensure we would have access again, prompting some of us to wonder whether the “C” in YMCA still stood for Christian.. As an alternative, she found two empty apartments where we could shower in a Lutheran nursing home.
Will, one of three septuagenarians on our crew, worried that once he entered the nursing home for a shower, he wouldn’t be allowed to leave.
More likely, once the attendants got a whiff of us after we had worked all day in the summer sun and dank cellars, they couldn’t get rid of us fast enough.
But the staff was pleasant.
A security official, who jammed into the same elevator with us on the ride to the apartments, even thanked us for our service.
-- Kent Jackson