Mission 2012: Teens focus on home

There are always sto­ries, via a local church, hos­pi­tal, or char­ity, of car­ing peo­ple head­ing to the dusty deprived areas of Africa or Asia to do some form of mis­sion­ary work.

But what about the peo­ple that need assis­tance who are liv­ing in your own backyard?

“We’ve gone to dif­fer­ent places to do mis­sion work over the years, and we’ve seen groups do char­ity work in their own areas, so a cou­ple of years ago we brought that idea back to Welling­ton,” said Lee White, one of the super­vi­sors for the mis­sion work program.

Four area churches, the Assem­bly of God, Brighton, Rochester and Welling­ton United Methodist churches came together to form Welling­ton Mis­sion 2012.

“Welling­ton Mis­sion 2012 is ready to go with sev­eral thou­sand dol­lars in fund­ing and over 40 vol­un­teers ready to go,” said orga­nizer Rick Hatton.

Res­i­dents around town in need of ser­vice were asked to send in requests for work they would like to have done on the exte­rior of their homes.

“My wife, who’s a mem­ber of the church, heard about what was going on and called Rick so we could get help with some things I just can’t do,” said home­owner John Repko on Row­ell Road.

“Mr. Hat­ton assigned teams, and each vol­un­teer would go to a cer­tain job,” said youth group vol­un­teer Jeaven Wal­ters, who was work­ing on paint­ing a barn on Row­ell Road last week.

“The teams were bro­ken up into four parts: break­maker, who is in charge of prepar­ing lunch, quar­ter­mas­ter, who’s in charge of tools and report­ing to Mr. Hat­ton, devo­tions, the per­son who reads the devo­tions at lunch, and a fore­man,” Wal­ters said.

Although there were adult super­vi­sors and helpers, “The kids are in charge,” said Dave Coley.

At a High Street loca­tion, the mis­sion work­ers were installing a wheel­chair ramp for a res­i­dent that, every­day, has dif­fi­culty sim­ply enter­ing the home.

“We are get­ting a lot more done this year. Some­one came out to prep the ramp so we could get right to work,” said Janell Poe.

“This ramp will change her whole life, she’s con­fined to a wheel­chair,” said White.

A res­i­dent of Orchard Lane was elated to finally have his garage painted, as it had con­tin­ued to dete­ri­o­rate and he was phys­i­cally unable to fix it.

“I really appre­ci­ate it. I can’t do it myself, I’m almost 91. Really, I’m too old to even be around any­more,” joked home­owner Adam Barwinski.

“He has been really great to us, gave us cook­ies, juice, and milk while we worked,” said vol­un­teer Holly Archer.

The work­ers had gone to lunch at the Burs­ley Road site, and home­owner Bud Wright was stand­ing alone admir­ing at the newly-constructed wheel­chair ramp.

“Talked to my wife and she set it up. It’s a shame to get old. Never thought we’d need this. Don’t plan on stuff in life. Nice bunch of kids,” said Wright.

Six­teen projects were done through­out last week.

“We hope and pray that all involved will be blessed,” said Hatton.

by ADAM FOX

Enter­prise reporter

Posted by Adam Fox on Aug 2 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.