Give us your eyes and your heart

Do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with your God. (Micah 6:8)

October 2010
Harlan, Kentucky

Harlan County, Kentucky. Coal is still king here. And while coal still provides a lot of jobs in this community, the unemployment rate is more than 20%. More than one-third of the population lives below the poverty line. Just over half graduate from high school.

When I was in this town for the MCC Great Lakes board meeting, I got to meet with several homeowners that have been assisted by the SWAP program (Sharing With Appalachian People). During a typical summer, 1200 youth and adults spend a week working on dozens of home repair projects and learning to know the folks who live here and in three other communities.

Most of the homeowners are white, but coal has brought a rainbow of people of other colors into this community, too. Though some folks are critical of the current strip mining practices, they're also grateful for meaningful work and are quick to point out that almost 50% of electricity in the United States is still provided by coal.

Mennonites came to this valley after the floods of 1977. MDS organized disaster relief, but some of the volunteers realized challenges were much deeper than the floods and stayed to help. Other churches in the community are also trying to respond to the widespread economic poverty in this community.

"Do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with your God," the prophet Micah reminds us. One of the SWAP coordinators says she puts it this way to the volunteers who come to work and learn - Give us your eyes and your heart.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

They welcomed us

Image
One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see. (John 9:25) She was addicted to drugs for 20 years. She was in prison and her family broke apart. Her child was in an orphanage and her husband died. Because of her substance abuse, she eventually lost her one arm below her elbow. She saw no way out. She had hit the very bottom. When she came to know God, Natalia says everything changed. She found she had a deep desire to help people like herself and she discovered that her life experiences helped her understand others. “I remember what God did in my life and I have hope that God can touch other peoples’ lives and give them new life, too,” Natalia tells me. In Nikopol, Ukraine, she and Olga and Valodya, both of whom have similar stories to tell of their own, began New Life Charitable Fund a half dozen years ago to help people in prison, or who have drug or alcohol addictions, are HIV positive, homeless or for some other reason need a helping hand. Ukraine has ...
Read more

God multiplies our efforts

Image
Sister Zita at the La Posada shelter with baby Emmanuel and members of our border learning tour. Photo courtesy of Janae Rempel The jar of meal will not be emptied and the jug of oil will not fail. – I Kings 17:14 Ana Hinojosa remembers growing up on the Texas-Mexico border near Brownsville in the late 80s. Her family’s house was a mile from the border wall and she remembers the extended family gatherings in her back yard. Ana, an MCC immigration staff person, says border patrol agents would rest in the shade of the trees near the front of her house and, in the same day, it would be possible for a family from Mexico to knock on her front door to ask for food or directions. Her family turned no one away. Life on the border can look quite different today. When we enter the Catholic Charities respite center in McAllen, Texas, it is startling to see the contrast from the serenity of the neighborhood outside to the chaos inside. Cesar Matta tells us that, today, the cente...
Read more

A river of love

Image
For it is out of the abundance of the heart that the mouth speaks. – Matthew 25:40 “We are happy you are here to see this with your own eyes,” the leader of the Islamic Charities organization in Deir Attieh, Syria tells us, a group of MCC people visiting partner organizations in Syria. “We can’t express enough our heartfelt thanks to you.” Islamic Charities works with 3,000 at risk families affected by the war in the region and relies heavily on the work of volunteers. MCC provides food boxes to Islamic Charities as part of our humanitarian assistance in Syria. When I visit five families who received these food boxes, I recall the heartfelt thanks but feel mostly heart broken.    We visit two families living in a partially constructed apartment complex that stalled when the war began. The first family lives in a small two-room apartment, the mother and her five children and the woman’s father. Her husband is serving in the army. The second family inclu...
Read more