When I arrived at the scene of the last week’s World Changers project in Steens, my first thought was that no licensed contractor would touch it. It was simply too far gone for human habitation.
It was a beat up old house trailer stuck in the middle of some pasture land along a two-lane strip of asphalt road somewhere between two highways on the east side of Lowndes County.
I had arrived to do a feature story on the World Changers group, which for the past 27 summers has sent out groups of young people to do work on the homes of the poor, elderly or disabled who find themselves in desperate need.
This summer, the Tennessee-based Christian youth ministry is sending out approximately 10,000 kids to do these kinds of jobs in states throughout the country as well as Puerto Rico. Teams have been coming to Lowndes County each summer for the past four years now.
The group works in conjunction with local churches – who identify projects and provide funds for the repairs – sent 139 young people to Lowndes County to work on 14 homes during a single week. World Changers arranged for me to visit a project site near Steens.
I am not sure why this site was selected for me to visit, but if it was representative of all of the projects the groups worked on, suffice to say there are at least 14 families living in terrible conditions.
It was worth noting that, as pitiful as the trailer appeared from the road, most of the work performed was on the interior of the trailer – refitting windows, replacing ceilings that sagged from unattended leaks, replacing drywall where gaping, uninsulated holes protected the home from neither heat nor cold, repairing leaking pipes and faucets and exposed wiring.
The workers seemed not to be horrified by what they found. Instead, they turned eagerly to their work.
By Friday, they had finished. They left Saturday morning, with a sense of satisfaction that comes with a job well done.
Even so, the lives of the five souls – a single mom and four young children – who live in a now not-quite-so-tumble-down trailer remain difficult.
This is no knock on World Changers. From the looks of it, they did more in a week for this poor family than anybody else has bothered to do in the other 51 weeks of the year.
The family was chosen by a local pastor for the project. He said one of his church members mentioned their plight and the pastor paid a visit to the mom to hear her story – which was predictably awful. She had escaped from an abusive relationship with her four young children to this trailer, which her father had managed to provide. The pastor said one of the children was disabled and that he suspected the mom, too, has “issues,” most likely of the mental healthy variety.
She may have managed to escape the physical abuse, but poverty is a big world, too big a world to run away from, especially with four kids clinging to your skirt. You can run your whole life and never get much beyond a broken down trailer stuck in a pasture somewhere.
The World Changers came for a week and did what they could to help.
Now what?
It is fashionable in some quarters to suggest that one of the biggest problems we have is the “welfare state” and the dependence it presumably creates. The theory goes that it should not be the government’s role to provide for the hopelessly poor, that it only prevents them from accepting personal responsibility. And if there are needs they cannot meet, those needs should be addressed by private citizens on a voluntary basis.
But to suggest that is to grossly underestimate the suffering of millions of Americans who are being ground into the dust under the impossible burden of poverty. And I wonder, too: How much personal responsibility should those four little children bear?
So stand out in front of that trailer, as I did, and think about what it would take to alter the trajectory of the lives of the children who live there. It’s not a one-week job. That would take years and even then the outcome is not certain. I doubt one church, even a mega-church, would be willing to take on that sort of commitment.
Then consider the millions whose circumstances are very similar.
The richest county in the world has the ability to be world changers for many, though not all.
What it doesn’t have is the will.
The tumble-down house trailer nears Steens will mock anyone who suggests otherwise.
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
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