North America Southeast Day of Service

On Saturday, my son Stephen and I participated in the North America Southeast Area Day of Service organized by the Church. Our Branch was assigned to go to Bainbridge, Georgia to work on several rather large cleanup projects. When we arrived at the Bainbridge chapel I saw that there were a number of orange roadcrew looking vests and some of those grabbing poles you use to pick up trash. I walked over to the Branch President and asked him in my best Kip voice "is there some kind of vest that I can wear or something?" It wasn't a gold bracelet, but as soon as I put my vest on I certainly felt official.

The "Crackhouse"
Along with me and Stephen, there were four young women, another young man and their parents in our group. Our first project was to clean up the yard around a "crackhouse." I wish I could say it only looked like a "crackhouse," but this was indeed a "crackhouse." The house was vacant. The ground around the house was littered with what must have been 3,000 beer bottles, smoking and drug paraphernalia, dirty diapers thrown into trees (possibly for decorative purposes) and other signs of certain acts of violations of the law of chastity. I'll let the adults figure the last one out.

I knew the location was dangerous when they assigned a deputy sheriff to take us to the house; and then again when he decided to stay and stand guard until the cleanup was complete. But the kids and parents worked hard and we were able to fill up around 28 large, black garbage bags in just about an hour. While we were working on the cleanup several black guys walked over to a nearby street corner and stared at us as we cleaned. One of them held a leash attached to a pitbull. I don’t know if he meant to be menacing, but the pitbull certainly got my attention.

I thought how strange it must look to them to have 15 or 20 white folks come into a predominantly black neighborhood to clean up a "crackhouse." I mean, what are those crazy white folks thinking? I also thought, "I hope the guy holding onto that leash has a good grip."

Then the thought crossed my mind that we might actually be offending them by coming into their neighborhood to clean up. I mean, what an insult it would have been to me if someone came into my home and just started doing my laundry or washing my dishes. Well, maybe not. But you get my meaning.

Before leaving the church we had been given a dozen or so fliers to pass out around the city to encourage people to keep Bainbridge clean. I walked over to the van, pulled out the fliers and started walking toward the three onlookers. As I walked toward one of them his face began to look puzzled. I walked up to the guy holding the leash and asked if he wouldn’t mind passing out the fliers to his neighbors. The puzzled look I had seen on his face earlier was replaced with a softer look as he responded, "Sure. We'll pass them out." During the next half hour as we cleaned, I watched them go from door to door passing out the fliers. In fact, I am convinced that if we had more official orange vests they would have joined us in the cleanup effort.

After we finished cleaning the “crackhouse” we went to our next project. But this post is getting too long so check out the post following this one if you want to read about it. Here’s a little teaser. It involved a boat landing, emu eggs and lots of mosquitos.