Appalachian Mission Trip 2011 Reflection

by Stephanie Gregory

I’ve been singing “If I Had a Hammer” since I learned about the Eastern Kentucky mission trip.  I thought I would pick up my hammer and fix all those houses in Hazard that needed fixing, talk to others about mountain-top removal, and be on my merry way.  On Monday morning after only a few hours of being on our worksite demolishing a porch and a roof and finishing a deck at one site and making a floor and framing walls of a new house at the other site, all of us realized we were not the ones doing the fixing.  Yes, we were working.  We had great carpenters who were patient, kind, informative, and had a great sense of humor (they had to have a sense of humor watching us work), but the sense of accomplishment that all of us felt was tremendous.  God was at work. Mountaintop.

We were surrounded by hills and early morning fog.  We were able to watch baby birds being fed by their protective mother.  We were out of our air-conditioned, video gaming comfort-zone and we were DOING something for someone else.  Wednesday, our day off, we learned from Truman and McKinley about the complexities of coal and mountain-top removal.  Jobs, families, water, environment, economy, and health all play a role in mountain-top removal.  It is not an easy answer of doing the right thing.  Coal isn’t necessarily the enemy; our greed for money and electricity are really at fault.  When I plug in my laptop in my air-conditioned living room while the radio plays, dishwasher runs, and pizza bakes in the oven, I am the problem.  I have been to the mountain-top in Eastern Kentucky and found it isn’t always there because of me. 

This mission trip may have helped fix more than houses.  The carpenters, Matt, Josh, Jesse Ray, Steve, and Anthony, at Housing Development Alliance led us in our work, but opened our eyes to poverty caused by greed and neglect from the outside world.  Perry County is rich with minerals but plagued by poverty.  We can build and remodel houses but, we also need to review how we use the resources of Eastern Kentucky judiciously.  I now will sing “If I Had a Hammer” and remember that I am singing about the hammer of justice.