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Friday, July 25, 2008

Feel the Exotic Close to Home

By Jim Belshaw
Of the Journal
      There's something to be said for exotic — alien, alluring, mysterious, romantic.
    Throw in altruism, and the next thing you know you're hauling away flood-swollen debris in New Orleans; or re-building lives in hurricane-ravaged Mississippi; or someone's snapping your picture on the roof of a house you just built in Mexico.
    That last one caught the attention of Nicole Stansifer's mother.
    "It was a house building trip," the University of New Mexico senior said. "It was hard work, too. We built a house, a small one, in three days. It was really neat. You do stuff you don't normally do. We did the roofing and it scared my mother. She'd look at the photos and, you know, it was like, `Oh, I can't believe you're on that roof.' "
    So there's something to said for doing a good deed in a faraway place. But there's something to be said for doing the same thing closer to home, too. Something maybe even exotic.
    Last year, I wrote about young people from the Covenant Presbyterian Church in Albuquerque. Nearly every summer, the church's youth group does a mission trip, alternating the trips between out of town (or out of state) and something closer to home.
    This summer, it was close to home, and the Rev. Dr. Catherine Robinson, Covenant Presbyterian's pastor, said the experience resonated in a way she'd not seen before.
    They set out to help those hurt in the Trigo fire, but after running into problems finding the information they sought, they finally talked to a Torrance County official who mentioned two families who lost everything in another fire — Ojo Peak.
    Not officially designated a "disaster" because of its limited scope, "disaster" lost none of its significance for those in the fire's path, Gilbert and Ursula Torres and Mike and Susan Walters.
    "Gilbert and Ursula are in their 70s," Robinson said. "The police knocked on the door and said they had three minutes to leave. In the other house, Mike Walters got up in the night to use the bathroom and his skylight was red. They had to fight their way out of the fire."
    The families lost everything. When the Covenant youth group showed up, they helped the Walters clear the dead, burned wood so a manufactured house could go up in early August. A house had already been installed for Gilbert and Ursula Torres, but high on their wish list was a ramp and sturdier steps leading to the front entrance.
    A church member who is a contractor planned it. The youth group built it. Then came the garden and moving 10 cords of wood away from the propane tank and the house.
    Catherine Robinson remembers one of the kids remarking that working so close to home was far different from New Orleans.
    "He said those were big disasters and there were people all over the place, but these were smaller disasters and we were the only ones there," she said. "It was so interesting for them to see someone in their own back yard who had lost everything. This was New Mexico. This was home. And they were needed. It made quite an impact on the kids."
    Nicole Stansifer, who headed the youth group, said the closeness changed the experience for everyone.
    "They got to know the people they worked with and for," she said. "Everyone was there every day and they got to know one another well."
    Catherine Robinson's son, George, worked, too, picking up a sledge hammer and a pick ax and a power screwdriver, all of them exotic in their own right. He has mild spastic cerebral palsy and "intractable epilepsy." Robinson stayed with him one night, a member of the church who is a nurse who works with medically fragile children stayed the next night to help him through the inevitable seizures. It was only the second night the Robinsons had spent without him since adopting him 14 years ago.
    But for a few days, he was just another crew member, another kid finding some hard work to do in his own back yard.
    "It was a big week last week," Catherine Robinson said. "It's was really amazing watching these kids,."
    Write to Jim Belshaw at The Albuquerque Journal, P.O. Drawer J, Albuquerque, NM 87103; telephone — 823-3930; e-mail — jbelshaw@ abqjournal.com