THEIR MISSION: HARD WORK
Christian youth group helps elderly city residents with home projects
WOONSOCKET – Hobbled by complications of diabetes and heart disease, Richard Dufresne was in desperate need of a wheelchair ramp.
But when a group of young volunteers showed up from out of town to build it this week, they brought something else he needed just as badly. Company. “I love this,” said the once-active 64-year-old as he watched the young carpenters from his living room window. “They’re good conversation. We don’t get too many visitors.’
The wheelchair ramp at Dufresne’s 700 Manville Road home is just one of dozens of home improvement projects around the city that will be finished today – at no cost to the property owners. The projects are a joint venture of NeighborWorks
Blackstone River Valley and a Colorado-based Christian group that organizes humanitarian projects for teenagers around the world.
About 380 teenagers and adult chaperones, from churches all over the country, were deployed throughout the city by Group Mission Trips to complete roughly 60 residential fix-ups.
“It’s really a good place for me to come and connect with people around me,” said Maddie Labrake, 17, of Wirtz, Va. “And it’s a way for me to feel like I’m helping people.”
Labrake says she could have chosen to travel with a work group to another part of the country, but she chose the so-called Thundermist Mission Trip because “I’d never been this far north before. I’d never been to Rhode Island.”
Labrake says she was unexpectedly delighted by the historic look of the old mill buildings and the striking array of churches in the area. During a bit of free time, she and her campmates lunched at River Falls Restaurant – overlooking a picturesque twist of the Blackstone River in what was originally a stone textile mill.
“That was pretty, too,” she says.
Cameron Edgemond, also 17 and from Virginia, has been participating in Group Mission Trips for three years. He says “it’s kind of a place you can come and be who you really are.”
Edgemond has also enjoyed meeting Dufresne and doing something that’s likely to improve the quality of his life for years to come.
“He hasn’t been able to come outside in a long time,” says Edgemond. “And he used to be a real outdoorsy guy.”
Group Mission Trips is an arm of Colorado-based Group Cares, which got into the nonprofit business of organizing volunteers more than 40 years ago after the Thompson River in that state overspilled its banks, causing widespread flood damage.
Volunteers are toiling away at more than 40 “work camps” in communities across America this summer, according to Camp Leader Jeff Bettinger, a skilled contractor who drove up from Maryland to oversee the Thundermist venture.
Most of the local projects are paint jobs and porch repairs, but a few – like Dufresne’s wheelchair ramp – require extra hands. A typical work crew consists of about half a dozen youngsters and an adult supervisor, but some of the more complicated projects require two crews.
Youngsters actually pay to participate in the work camps. Group Mission Trips serves as a clearinghouse for a wide network of churches to provide some meaningful volunteer work for their teenage members when school lets out for the summer.
“They learn by doing for each other and God that they can do anything,” says Bettinger. “We all have to learn how to give back and this is a way of doing it.”
Sometimes, the most satisfying things that happen during a workcamp project don’t involve hammers and nails, says Bettinger. Often, visitors and hosts end up engaging each other in ways that are as unexpected as they are inspiring. Homeowners will bake cookies and cakes for the youngsters working on their properties, share stories, or even pull out a musical instrument and strike up a singalong.
“It’s fascinating the interactions they have with them,” he says.
Meagan Rego, a spokeswoman for NeighborWorks Blackstone River Valley, said this is the second year the nonprofit redevelopment organization has partnered with Group Mission Trips to do housing repairs. Some folks, including Dufresne, have been waiting for more than a year to have some work done because NeighborWorks received so many worthy requests for help that there was a backlog.
NeighborWorks accepted applications from the disabled, the poor, military veterans and senior citizens and prioritized them on the basis of need, according to Rego.
“It may seem like a lot of what we do is about affordable housing, but it’s really much more than that,” says Rego. “To me this gets down to the heart of what it really means to be a community development organization. It’s one of my favorite weeks on the job.”
By making even some modest repairs on the homes of people who would otherwise be unable to do so themselves, Group Mission Trips is helping improve the appearance of neighborhoods and boost property values, according to Rego.
The work crews will be leaving today after spending five days in the city. As it did last year, the Woonsocket Education Department is putting them up at the Woonsocket Middle School at Hamlet, where they sleep on classroom floors in camping gear.
A longtime foreman at a Bellingham air filter factory, Dufresne says he had to retire nearly a decade ago after struggling with heart disease that eventually caused him to require a triple bypass. Diabetes nearly cost him leg a couple of years ago, he says, displaying the scars of hard-to-heal sores that opened on his shins.
He can still get around the house with a walker or a cane, but except for doctors’ visits he hasn’t really left the house much during the last couple of years because he needs a wheelchair.
His sister, Kathleen Mailhot, comes to visit once a week and helps with the groceries, but it’s clear the chores around the house are getting ahead of him. There’s “a jungle” of overgrown vegetation the backyard that needs to be cut down, and a tumbledown, weathered porch affixed to the backdoor that needs shoring up.
It’s too much for the helping hands of Group Mission Trips to do in just a week.
“I’m hoping they can come back again next year,” says Dufresne.