Reports & Reflections 
from Pineville, West Virginia
by the Rev. John Gantt

In June 2002, UCC volunteers from Maine, Wisconsin, Indiana and Ohio were organized through the Ohio Conference Disaster Response Team to travel to West Virginia to help with the flood recovery effort that is ongoing in that area.

The volunteers were greeted by John Gantt, a retired UCC minister and member of Garfield Park UCC in Indianapolis.  Rev. Gantt volunteered to spend six weeks in June and July living in a small apartment over the Wyoming County West Virginia Long Term Recovery Office and acting as host to the Ohio Conference volunteers.  "Host," however, doesn’t accurately convey what he did.

According to Jim Ditzler, Director of the Ohio Conference Disaster Response Team, Gantt’s contribution was invaluable. "John coordinated work groups, work projects and housing opportunities for the groups.  When we had more volunteers than expected, he arranged to house and feed them and find work for them to do," Ditzler explained.

Gantt was the on-the-spot, daily problem solver for the volunteers, providing help ranging from first aid to building materials to advice about where to find a phone to mediation of disagreements.  "John hosted and coordinated," says Jim Ditzler, "but he also mopped floors.  There was nothing that needed to be done that was beneath this man.  All of the volunteer groups sang his praises."

When Rev. Gantt wasn’t helping the volunteers, he was writing a journal about the groups’ experiences in West Virginia.  Click on the links at the right to follow the days' events.

The first day is over already.  Seventy-four teenagers and adults arrived here in West Virginia’s  Wyoming County seat of Pineville between 2:45 and 10:30 pm Sunday (yesterday evening) and settled into third floor classrooms of a decommissioned junior high school building donated by the Wyoming County Board of Education for volunteer lodging.  Many had driven as long as 11 hours for the privilege of bunking in on small cots or air mattresses and the floor.  

Monday’s hot breakfast was served too early for some, at 7 a.m. but got us started on our adventure in a part of the Midwest relatively foreign to most of us.  

This evening after dinner, we told “stories”  about our day.  One group tore up rotten flooring and laid new – then discovered they left a circular saw under the new flooring. We all voted not to hire them as our surgeons!  Another group worked in a basement with three feet of mud left from flooding, and found an old axle and 16 chain saws.  

Still another group spent the day on their backs in a low muddy crawl space –tacking up 30 rolls of new insulation.  They itched mightily from the fiberglass and dirt.  That’s the bad news; the good news was how the owner joined them at lunchtime in a cabana around the swimming pool and treated them to ice cold drinks.

Perhaps the biggest challenge of the day came early, when our drivers tried to follow directions and/or local guides to the various work sites.  A couple of discoveries were made right away.  First, there is no straight road in these mountains, and local drivers take the curves a whole lot faster than us upper Midwesterners do; and, second, following local directions is a trip in itself.  

One group was told to “go up that road you came in on, go past the rock crusher (we know it as a quarry) and right across from there you’ll see a white house with red trim and wagon wheels in the yard.  Turn in the dirt road beside the house and follow it around to the tan and green double wide.”  Now, “right across the road” is 1.6 miles farther north.  One can barely see the wagon wheels which are down over a brim of the road, the “red trim” looks more brown than burgundy, and the dirt road is a rocky straight up lane that would challenge a mountain goat.  

As for mobile – well, it is not just a trailer home.  This one has rooms built on the side, on the front and on the back.  Water and mud cascaded off the steep hillside in back of it and broke out a picture window, washed underneath and pushed supporting piers sideways, soaked the flooring, made gullies in the yard, and gave our volunteer crew plenty of work to do.

This rugged southwestern corner of  West Virginia is beautiful.  But the best part of our first day was the smiles.  It is quite a sight – all those smiles, especially so, because most of the time, we would all agree that conditions we found would be considered “trying.”

The rooms we sleep in are not clean; the school corridors are filled with computer equipment waiting to be junked and other debris; air conditioners work sometimes but not when it is the hottest, and nothing that we were told to expect has happened that way!

There were too many people in a room because too many rooms are not available us.  It’s hotter than we expected, we don’t have a good routine established yet, and having 9 showers for all 74 folks from eleven Indiana-Kentucky congregations and 2 Ohio congregations made the getting-acquainted process “an interesting experience!”

But there were smiles.  They were born of a desire to do a godly thing.  These folks took time off work, or time away from family summer activities, or time from their summer vacations; they raised money to pay for the trip, pay for their meals, and on top of all that agreed to endure dirt, heat, mold, sore muscles, ticks and other creepy crawly things which make the day interesting. 

In return for that effort, as many as 20 families in a county considered a federal disaster area will be helped to overcome their losses of the past year or so.  And their smiles and our smiles brighten this corner of God’s West Virginia.

This first evening’s devotions featured musical accompaniment on a handmade, homemade dulcimer fashioned by one of our volunteers, and a great sermon-story about servant-hood.  

The staff of the Wyoming County Long Term Flood Recovery Office in Pineville is almost overwhelmed. This is the first major invasion of a sizable corps of volunteers.  We dropped in on them in unusual numbers with unstoppable energy and enthusiasm for the task.  

But all the niceties and logistical cleverness that volunteers find in more established volunteer work programs have to be learned from scratch here.  This is not a typical work camp destination – and just getting the “troops” fed, watered and bedded down has been a major challenge in itself.  

Then it is another monumental task to certify enough job sites to keep us all busy at the same time, and get equipment and materials delivered at the right time to the right places.  

Testimony to the observation that it doesn’t always happen just the way it should comes from the group that drove up, unloaded tools, shook out their tired-from-riding-so-long muscles, and started to tear off a porch.  When the surprised homeowner came to the door to ask what in the world they thought they were doing, they realized they were expected at the mobile home down the road about two houses!  

We’ve realized quickly that we’ll finish some jobs and find a moment of justifiable pleasure in that accomplishment. But many other jobs are so extensive we’ll just get them started, gather the materials and tools, and prepare them to be finished by the next wave of volunteers.  

Next week another 58 UCC volunteers will arrive from Ohio, Indiana, Maine and Wisconsin. Unlike this week, they will share the junior high school with perhaps 70 non-UCC volunteers, all stretching out on the luxuriously soft tiled classroom floors, eating in the same cafeteria, showering in the same poorly draining and ventilated rest rooms, and trying to get direction and supervision from the same harried recovery staff coordinators.

The recovery effort in this place, however, is bowing-down grateful to the Ohio Conference and Jim Ditzler for enormous gifts of love and effort.  The Indiana volunteers are piggy-backing on the wonderful work started and designed by the Ohio Conference, which has accepted a responsibility for this ravaged area of West Virginia.  

A wonderfully well-equipped tool trailer has been brought in for our use, and tons of supplies and donations have been delivered by Jim Ditzler personally, or by his team members.  Everyone we speak to seems to know Jim – and bids us embrace him with their sincere thanks.

Well, that’s the first day.  Marked by smiles.  Tomorrow we’ll do it all over again - under threat of heavy rain showers moving into the area.  That may wet down our projects, but it will not dampen our spirit nor our will to be a servant people.  

We expect to leave Pineville and Wyoming County a good bit better off because we were here.  We’ll also leave behind a community loved by the people of the United Church of Christ whom we represent.

Thanks be to God for the opportunity to do this good thing.  Shalom.

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Tuesday, June 11, 2002 

  
The clerk at the 7-Eleven store wondered why we wanted 320 pounds of ice.  Because we looked so harmless, she believed us (but only for a couple of minutes) when we told her our car air conditioner was broken.  Finally seeing through our tease, she added her own by saying,  “I bet you’re just going to cool off your swimming pool.”

Today’s record-setting heat for this valley, combined with window a/c’s that don’t work or don’t work very well, combined to send us scurrying for ice – lots of it – for freshly cooled drinks at Tuesday’s supper.  Our consensus after a hard hot day of work was that tacos never tasted better, and cold lemonade was God’s own elixir!  

Evening reports reflected that we had no more floored-over saws, but would you believe it?  The same group left a flashlight under the floor this time. They explained that the homeowner would always have a reminder about not hiding your light under a…..   oh well….

People are warming up to us – and we to them.  They’ve started to share their stories.  Tears were shared, too – as folks wanted – needed - to tell us about their experiences.  One volunteer spent two days reading 400 case files and said her head spins from case report after report detailing how fast the flood waters came up and how much of the damage came from above as water sheeted off the mountains.  She realized that even people who have lived here for years and who are used to the risks of flooding – could not believe what was happening.  They had to sprint up the hills to safety only to turn around and watch their houses disappear under muddy waters in mere minutes, then within a couple of hours see them reappear as waters receded, leaving behind the destruction of a life-time’s treasures.

Some carried older family members and neighbors in their arms, with their oxygen tanks dangling, or their dialysis equipment trailing in the muddy swirling waters.  Businesses in a town next to us had 37 feet of water in the downtown.  Another town suffered flooding of 62 of its 65 town business establishments.

We find the mushy floor boards where rot has set in; the spongy rafters and floor joists; the still-wet insulation up behind paneled walls; and we are discovering many folks who are ill from all the mold.  There are mushrooms growing on these walls and along the floor joists!

Today a stout group of teenagers and their adult advisors ripped off a laundry room, paneled in the end eaves of a trailer-house; repainted the exterior, set up some footers to support the decking on which the new laundry room and porch cover will be built later; and donated several hundred dollars for building supplies when they discovered that the divorced owner-mother had mis-estimated what she needed for this project, and had run out of money.

We listened to her story- a 28-year old who has already had 15 surgeries.  Her saga began at nine years old when a doctor broke off a syringe needle in her neck. Even after 18 years it is not regarded as operable, although it is slowly moving toward her shoulder.   She’s had cancer surgery, gall bladder and liver problems; a problematic pregnancy which nearly cost her only sons’ life until he was retrieved by cesarean section and his heart was restarted electrically – and the story goes on with heart-wrenching stories of an extremely violent domestic assault and a life-long depression.  She’s a survivor – and we’re helping her make a better home for her son and herself – but we wonder as we work how much longer the tree stumps which were used as piers to support her hillside trailer-house would have lasted!

Some others, including a woman with recent experience in El Salvador and Kenya, laid up three courses of cinder block for the foundation of a house that had to be lifted by a crane some 4-5 feet above the high watermark.  Their backs, shoulders and fingers are pretty sore tonight from working on a scaffold to lay the blocks, but they feel good about what they accomplished.

Each of our crews this week are benefiting from the expertise of Tim Rowles.  He is a colleague and friend of Jim Ditzler, comes from the N. Canton, OH area where he has been a teacher of industrial arts in public schools for over 30 years.  His practical suggestions and engaging teaching style have helped us this week more than we can describe, and we are grateful for his volunteer time, also.

Our devotions for the day focused on being good workers in Christ’s name, reminded us of the losses suffered nine months ago this date by terrorist victims in New York and Pennsylvania, and included an interpretive dance by four young people, along with four “testimonies” about what this experience means to the group.

Tomorrow is Wednesday, the middle day.  A couple groups will work half days – and Thursday a group will go rafting at the scenic and world-famous New River Gorge north of this area.  

Lest we forget to mention it, we are not the only show in town.  A UCC group from Columbus, OH is working north of us around WV Tech Institute.  Earlier in the year small groups came from Milan and  N. Lima, OH to work on projects.  During spring break, a delegation of internationally experienced UCC volunteers from Indianapolis , including the son of the conference minister, worked in the adjoining McDowell County. Sadly, a month after their visit, that county was incredibly devastated again – even worse than before – and is still only in the clean up and relief mode.

The conference minister’s son, who had traveled with his father the year before to a work project in  Nicaragua, told him that many of the conditions and resources he saw in West Virginia seemed similar to what they found in Central America! 

Every day – and throughout the night -  heavily-loaded coal trucks rumble through the town, rattling windows, shifting up and down to manage the hills,  and belching diesel exhaust which clouds the beauty and tranquility of this place.  Their annoying passage is rivaled only by the screeching thunder of coal trains moving slowly throughout the valley all night long. One doubts that the wheel carriages and braking systems could make any more noise than they do now.  

It all reminds us of the impact of mining practices in the past, the importance of coal to fire huge generators for industrial and domestic electricity, and the struggle to find the precarious balance between satisfying the lumber thirsts of our country yet not leaving behind hillsides that can no longer slow down rushing waters in heavy rainstorms.  We’re getting good lessons about the interplay of commerce and environment that are hard to learn in our safe and carefully planned suburban areas back home.

The grown ups tell me they are so proud of their kids – who aren’t even complaining (very much!) about food, dirt, heat, smell, no water pressure in the showers, and too little a/c at night – all vexing problems that are not vexing enough to dampen our determination to give a good account of ourselves, to represent our United Church of Christ conferences faithfully, and to leave smiles behind us when we finally head back north.

Today began with a tasty breakfast further graced by 8 quarts of homegrown strawberries brought by one of our volunteers.  

As the day progressed, we got a primer on gabion baskets, how to wire them, fill them, install them and anchor them to serve as retaining walls where river banks are eroding.  But most of all, the day provided many lessons about cooperation, giving and taking gently and respectfully, about praising and lifting up each other, about having a good laugh which helps make nasty conditions fall victim to our undiminished joy at being a servant community for this week. 

Oh yes – we learned the difference between a “holler” and a “bottom” while visiting “a camp” (a little neighborhood of homes formerly built and owned by the coal companies, presided over by a much much larger and more splendid superintendent’s house!). 

There will be more to learn tomorrow. 

Shalom. 

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