The campfire’s sharp-scented wood smoke rises in a silvery cloud into a night sky pinpricked by starlight and washed by a pale half of an early spring moon. “God’s fingernail,” someone jokes below, one of forty students gathered about the fire in the basin of a bowl in the Kentucky mountains.
“Nurse Steve,” a homegrown Delawarean and a senior Nursing major at the university, has found a tattered straw hat to accompany his paint-stained overalls. He beams with pride under its brim, and I begin to feel much better about my purple gardening gloves—the only ones I could find as I rushed to pack for the trip.
Of the forty others, I know only a handful: Lauren is a junior from inner-city Baltimore. She tells me she had difficulty getting to sleep when she first came to college—the absence of wailing sirens throughout the night kept her awake—and I wonder what she thinks of the still mountain dark.
Seated on the log bench, beside her is my friend Karyn. A floor-mate of mine, Karyn invited me to go on the mission trip twenty-four hours prior to its departure from the university. A freshman, like me, she is new to this, and neither of us is sure what to expect.
This group of forty traveled six hundred miles from Newark, Delaware, to Harlan County, Kentucky, in a five-van caravan of rambling ten-seaters and jam-packed Suburbans, striking out first west and then south, winding its way through the blue-misted Appalachians under thick gray clouds. We are all students—in some way or another—from the University of Delaware, on a mission trip sponsored by Intervarsity Christian Fellowship. Some are veterans who bring their own drills and jigsaws, and some, like Karyn and I, are brand-new to it, with nothing but a few tools and my grandmother’s purple gardening gloves. When we ask the old-timers what to expect, they shrug and say that every trip is different but that we should have packed a lot of socks. I have three pairs for a week. Strike two.
Though predominantly Christian, our group is diverse, comprising agnostics and atheists, Baptists, Lutherans, Methodists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, and one purple-gloved Catholic. Among us, we represent ten different states, from California to Maine, and almost every department at the University of Delaware. Some of us can quote their favorite Bible passages by heart while others know that the Bible is a book with other, smaller books in it. Some of the group can trace their ancestry back to The Mayflower; others are first-generation Americans, English by no means their first language.
We are encouraged to get to bed early on this, the first night of spring break 2007. We will rise early, “suit up” (as Nurse Steve says, thumbs tucked proudly in the corners of his overalls), eat, gather our tools, and be at our work sites by eight a.m. the following morning. After washing the last of the Kraft macaroni and cheese dinner from our plastic bowls, we gather about the fire’s dying embers for a brief Bible reading and a soft prayer for good work the coming week. Cell phone reception being nonexistent in our little canyon, we lie in the dusty bunks of the camp cabins and share jokes—the late Mitch Hedberg is a favorite—and drop, one by one, to sleep.
Our work site lies nestled deep in the blue hills of Appalachia. In mid-March, the buds on the trees are just beginning to open; tiny splashes of vibrant pink and bright violet on cool, gray bark. Columns of mist rise from the valleys in the wake of a strong spring rain that came sometime in the night. Between these ridges, our work crew’s van follows a strip of asphalt called Route 1274, which winds its way up and down and around the mountains. The road is an artery of commerce feeding a thin tissue of local businesses and residential areas (shanty houses and worn-out homes) that cluster closely alongside. Nearly a third of the county’s ten thousand families live below the poverty line.
This land, one of the few designated impoverished areas of the United States, is poor. Lyndon Johnson had places like Harlan County in mind when he planned his war on poverty over forty years ago. From the looks of things, the end to that war is nowhere in sight.
Karyn and I are in the same crew for the week and our job detail appears to be light work: put in some new windows and paint the house. I’m almost disappointed. Nurse Steve’s group is assigned to build a house. Our project is a leaning one-story structure, set not more than twenty feet back from an offshoot of the main highway. It is early morning when we first meet the owner of the place, and it is around that time that I begin to feel the change.
Miss Loretta has a face that has seen much of the hard side of life. Her forehead and cheekbones are etched with many lines, and her pointy, defiant nose and jaw seem worn down by the passage of time. Yet hers is a strong face, with stern, piercing eyes, and I know I have met only a few people in my life as tough and vital as this thin, old woman from the back hills of Kentucky. Loretta lives with her older sister—a tiny bundle of a human being, bedridden inside in the dark of the old house, wrapped tightly in blankets. Loretta’s sister (we never learned her name) has lost her sight recently due to illness and cannot walk by herself. She is totally dependent upon Miss Loretta.
Our first meeting is awkward. We are an alien sight, strangers almost to each other, in eclectic outfits of old clothes, work boots, and overalls, standing before a proud woman three times our age. Miss Loretta does not say much, other than to thank us for the work we will do. She relaxes visibly when she sees the carpenter assigned to lead our work crew, a local Harlan County man named Johnny.
Johnny is part of the Christian Outreach for the Appalachian People (COAP), the organization that invited us down for the week, and the point of contact between the students and the families we’re here to serve. A native Kentuckian and a resident of Harlan County, Johnny is someone Loretta knows. It is up to him to be the bridge between Loretta and her sister, and the gangly crew of students on their front porch.
“Those some mighty pretty gloves you got there,” he says, looking at me. Abracadabra.
Tall with sun-browned skin and a short, dark beard, Johnny is soft-spoken with a fantastically dry sense of humor. His gibes about my purple gardening gloves are delivered in a thick Kentuckian accent, and soon our group is comfortable and relaxed. The best thing about Kentucky, he tells us, is the road leading into it from Tennessee.
“Gonna fix your house up, Loretta,” Johnny tells the old woman. She thanks him, and says their last winter was a cold one. The drafty windows no longer keep the little house warm. Overhearing this, and with the image of Miss Loretta’s disabled, bundled sister freshly in mind, we become aware of the purpose to our work. With renewed vigor and under Johnny’s direction, we break into teams to scrape off the old, flaking coat of paint as Loretta returns inside to take care of her sister.
As we prep for painting, Johnny sets about taking measurements for the new windows, his calloused fingers making quick, precise marks on the siding with a battered pencil. We talk while we work, and slowly, cautiously, our group gets to know itself. Rebecca is a senior, preparing to graduate and go into the “real world.” She’s anxious about finding work. Karyn and I are freshmen, with only one full semester behind us. Justin, a sophomore, plays the yo-yo professionally. After much pleading, he agrees to treat us to a world-class performance over lunch.
Becoming more comfortable with each other, we take on other subjects, gingerly at first, then more and more freely: family, politics, and faith. What began as a medley of philosophy and theology then moves into the more serious business of movies and music. Yes, the gangsters in The Godfather are supposed to be Catholic. Natasha Beding-field’s music video for “Unwritten” was kind of weird, but she won her Grammy Award for the song, not the video.
Lunch comes and we break to eat, with one freshly painted wall of the house shining brightly in the afternoon sun. The four windows have been prepped for evac, the new ones leaning up against Johnny’s mud-splattered truck. Justin’s yo-yo performance is well received, and afterward we trade stories. I tell the one about the time Granddad blew up his birdfeeder with dynamite while trying to scare off crows. It’s a big hit.
Johnny talks too, answering our questions about his family and life in Harlan County. We are surprised to learn that he is in his early forties, and married with four children. He looks much younger. His brother, “the last man to let you down,” works at the local cemetery. We can’t tell if he’s joking. Full of adages and witticisms, Johnny also tells us that it takes two to lie: one to speak it, another to listen.
Regarding Harlan County, Johnny says there is serious trouble with alcohol, a problem that seems endemic to a region where coal mines are giving out and work scarce. But alcoholism and drug abuse are only symptoms of the real problem, which is lack of work. And in the meantime, people’s most basic needs—like housing—aren’t being met.
This is why COAP got started, and Johnny has worked with them for sixteen years. The organization’s local carpenters and builders not only coordinate college groups like ours in the spring, summer, and fall, but also negotiate delivery and donation of housing materials from local construction companies and lumberyards. There is a whole network of men and women in this region, working across different sectors and industries to meet the needs of the community, and COAP appears to be the central nervous system of the whole operation.
After lunch, Johnny focuses on getting the day’s work done, but he quietly ensures that we students are the ones to do it. Karyn makes the final measurements for the new window. Justin and I handle the electric saw that makes the final cut. For the next six days, our crew repaints the whole of Miss Loretta’s house and installs four new windows. The worst of it comes when we need to replace a part of the wall, but this proves to be the work of a single afternoon. At week’s end, there is no denying that we are friends. My purple gloves have become our group’s unofficial mascot. In the evenings, we share our stories with the others from Delaware back at our campsite, and we see that they too have come together. Nurse Steve, in his overalls and wide-brimmed hat, has even been given a new nickname: “Tater Farmer.”
This community in Harlan County, though impoverished and isolated, possessed the power and the ability to rebuild itself, as Miss Loretta’s devotion to her family and COAP’s commitment to the two of them clearly demonstrated. While we forty college students came in to do the heavy lifting, the real, true power to alleviate these conditions came from the people who lived there, people moved to such action by their faith.
Coordinating with local businesses, charities, and churches, men and women like Johnny organized work details, arranged lodging for student workers, and secured the resources and materials for the construction projects. We college students simply implemented their vision. Looking at COAP and the experience of Harlan County through an organizational model, we see an effective process of highly democratic mass collaboration, and it arose naturally from within. No politician or officeholder in Kentucky’s state government or in Washington, DC, led the effort, and no legislation mandated its creation.
COAP was at once both intimate and open. Miss Loretta didn’t know us from Adam, but she knew Johnny, a member of her own community, and it was through him that she came to know us. Instead of an outside force of strangers sweeping in for a week to fix her home, Loretta’s neighbors met her needs, acting in concert with students and volunteers from the outside. Through the men and women of COAP, the concept of mass collaboration, which currently has much of the economic and commercial world abuzz, has been in full effect in rural Appalachia for the past two decades in service of the needy.
COAP also achieved a natural diversity of participants—students and volunteers of varying interests and backgrounds, young and old, Christian (Protestant and Catholic) and nonreligious, from Kentucky, Delaware, and across the country—all without quotas, regulations, or central planning. In striking contrast to government-sponsored programs, COAP efficiently managed and allocated resources. (At the end of the week, our crew had installed four new windows and put two coats of paint on Loretta’s house, at which point we packed up and drove to Nurse Steve’s site to help his crew finish their house.) It is difficult to imagine any government program achieving the same results as quickly and efficiently, or with as diverse a group of participants, as COAP did.
For some, it is incredibly hard to believe that ordinary, average Americans, if empowered and unencumbered by excessive regulations or financial disincentives, can coalesce and make meaningful changes to better serve the needs of their communities. It seems that only “official,” as in government-sponsored and government-driven, initiatives can bring about long-term changes. This mentality is not only misguided, as COAP and the case of Harlan County can attest, but also at odds with over two centuries of our national experience.
Imagine where the world’s wealthiest, safest, and freest society would be if, in 1776, its Founders had waited for the ruling government—then the British Empire—to effect change on behalf of the colonists. Was it the federal government that started the civil rights movement in the 1950s? Or was it the efforts of countless nongovernmental actors, some of whom were great leaders like Dr. King, but a vast majority of which were regular Americans from across the country, agitating and laboring courageously through their own organizations? Yet for all that we are told to forge new paths and make our own way (which necessarily includes the ability to choose to work with others), the very recent attitude that only government can improve people’s lives persists.
There seems to be a distrust of the average, ordinary person to have any stake in doing good works. The idea goes that in the nonpublic realm, if people can’t make money off of a venture then no one is going to do it. And since we can’t leave people’s lives and futures to the whims of the profit motive, government must be the foundation upon which any such activities must take place.
In answer to this charge, the importance of religious faith and its inherent message of service cannot be stated enough. Just as it was in the American Revolution and the civil rights movement, faith was instrumental in bringing change to the people living in the mountains of Kentucky. Faith was the motivation for starting COAP, an organization that opened itself to people of all faiths and backgrounds. Faith created a venue for the kind of mass collaboration that brings real, true change. The same was true of Dr. King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference in the 1960s. Faith then, and now, is a force multiplier that no government program can hope to rival.
Consider the University of Delaware students who journeyed to Kentucky over spring break 2007—hardly a uniform crowd. There were many different motivations for the individuals who went on the trip. Some were simply looking for a change of scenery, some wanted to try something new. Some did indeed have religious reasons behind their desire to serve, but in the end, all were looking to make contact with each other and others. The current generation, constantly capable of getting in touch, longs fiercely to be in touch and COAP, as an organization of people living out their faith, allowed them to do just that.
Through COAP, these forty incredibly diverse college students came to know the paradox of greatness through humble service. In the process, they told their own stories, shared their own hopes and dreams, debating all manner of issues—everything from music to faith—and in so doing, forged new friendships with each other and people living six hundred miles away, whom they might otherwise never have met. The faith-born willingness to serve then is one of society’s most precious resources and it can truly work wonders—if we let it.
The mentality that only government can achieve lasting good works removes the opportunity for these kinds of connections and relationships to come to pass. People lose the chance to find themselves and others through service of one another. On top of this, government seldom performs with the efficiency and adaptability of community-inspired programs. In the end, government is simply no replacement for strong, vibrant communities composed of families and willing friends. This is not to say that government plays no role in processes such as these, but its focus should be on unleashing the inherent power of communities.
By laboring to meet Miss Loretta’s corporeal needs, we students from the University of Delaware were given an opportunity to nurture our spiritual needs. It is now our responsibility not only to continue to help people like Miss Loretta and her sister wherever we may find them, but also to ensure that others have the chance to do so as well, for their own sakes as much as for those of the people they may come to serve. In the end, it is our responsibility to ensure that people remain free to serve.