Friday May 27, 2022

One of the high points in the week for me has always been signing the sign we post on the wall before we leave.  The dorm walls and ceiling are covered with plaques, framed t-shirts, wooden constructions of all sorts, and other momentos of trips different groups have made down here.  They are written on wood, cloth, drywall, siding, and sometimes even paper.  One of he more noticeable ones is the toaster one group hung upside-down from the ceiling.  

Since we are down here year after year, and since frankly we have one of the more talented teams, our signs tend to stand out and take over lots of space.  The first year I was here, all of the Sheil signs from previous years were on one wall next to the men's bathroom in no particular order.  A couple people spent Sunday before we got started working rearranging them in chronological order.  There are several that were skillfully wood-burned, a few others that were painted.  In more recent years, the task of designing and creating them has fallen to the multi-talented Andy.  His contribution from 2015 is a beautiful picture of a dove and a rainbow.  I have always thought it gets less attention than it deserves, as it is on the very bottom of the wall, only about a foot off the ground.  

(and besides, I wrote my name in orange because nobody else had picked that color, and while it looks great from eye level, it disappears at the bottom of the wall.)

After 2015, we ran out of room on that wall and started looking around for a new place.  We moved a few t-shirts from the next wall, only to find to our dismay the next year that someone had moved our sign and put the t-shirts back! Well, we could not stand for that, so we moved a few contributions of others (to be fair, we moved the more recent offering from the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine to the ceiling, next to several their others,) and took over a new wall.    

Here is Andy's latest artistic contribution.

JD was quick to hang it up, and it now takes its place among the others.

We still have enough room on this wall to accommodate a few more years, God willing, and then we will come up with some other idea.  Among the group, we have acquired some significant building skills over the years.  Perhaps we will build a new wall or something.  Of course, by that time it will be time for someone else to do it.  Throughout the week you will see many of our veterans stop to look over the plaques and remember past years and the people who came along.  Many have moved to other parts of the country or decided due to age or some other reason that it was time to hang up their cordless drills.  A few have passed away, and we remembered them in the plaque last year.  We will talk and laugh and marvel at their contributions for years to come.

So we have reached the end of the week for another year. Once again, we have accomplished a lot of work.  Once again, we leave a lot of work undone.  We will have made contributions to the lives of some people.  Some of those we will know about, some we will not.  Other accomplishments that we celebrate today may well be washed away or forgotten in the future.  

Personally, I have spent lots of money and countless hours sending books and DVDs to the library.  I started because Marie, one of our former regulars, worked at the Evanston library and used to dig among the books the library was discarding and bringing the ones she thought might be useful down here.  I visited the library with her and her husband Jan one year, and the librarian mentioned that at least they were still open.  She also mentioned that the library had a couple dozen DVDs and the local patrons had seen them all.  So I started collecting them.  I was delighted to visit the library the following year and see a patron returning a couple DVDs so that she could check out some more.  Over the ensuing years, I have sent thousands of DVDs and books, and sometimes tried the patience of my teammates, as one year we had to transport about twenty boxes of books.  I have gotten far more selective in recent years, sending only DVDs that the locals are sure to like and books that I thought the library had to have.  I used to be in regular contact with the librarian, who then got promoted to take over both branches of the library in Tallahatchie County. 

Since then, Roshella has resigned and moved on to other things.  The Tutwiler branch is currently closed.  It seems it was not getting much use during the Covid pandemic, and it always takes effort to encourage people to use it.  People have a different attitude toward libraries in the Mississippi Delta than they do in the comfortable northern suburbs of Chicago.  So all those books and DVDs are locked up and available to nobody.   

Last year ten days after we left, Tutwiler got hit with a masive flood.

Every one of those houses is one we have helped build.  If you look right past the red house, you can see one where the paneling was not finished.  That was the house we worked on last year, and the water came right up to the side of it.  Fortunately, no significant damage was done to that one.  But it often seems that progress around here is two steps forward and one step back, or sometimes the reverse.

Still we keep returning.  Some years back, I missed the blessing that Fr. Kevin gave the group before our trip down, so I caught up with him after 5 o'clock Mass and asked for his blessing then.  He was happy to oblige, and turned to the priest who had celebrated the Mass and said, "This is one of our missionaries."  That was a new thought to me.  I always thought of missionaries as those people who travel to far-off places to convert the unlettered natives.  Actually, upon further reflection, Tallahatchie County is as poor as many of the places people often consider missionary territory, so maybe the thought is not so far off.  But the point of missionary activity, at least from a Catholic point of view, is not to turn the locals into people like you.  It is to be with them.  And we have done that.  We have met longterm friends down here.  We have made our contributions, some long-lasting, some not.  We have celebrated the successes of the community and mourned its losses.  As Fr. Kevin mentioned once, the people of Tutwiler have become part of the Sheil community, and we have become part of theirs.  If you doubt that, just look at the videos of Dino and his pictures.

Among ourselves, we have developed a community of our own.  Many of us feel blessed to be part of this group.  In the tradition of Sheil, we always try to be open and welcoming to whoever wants to come along (ANOTHER HINT:   SOME OF YOU MIGHT WANT TO COME ALONG.) Inevitably you become close with people who you have worked with, sweated with, eaten with, laughed with, and prayed with.  We have developed friendships, shared each other's joys and sufferings, and mourned each other's deaths.  Despite setbacks and seemingly unsolvable problems, God is at work here, both in Tutwiler and in our group. Indeed, God works in strange and mysterious ways His wonders to perform.

It is Friday and it is encouraging to see all the progress we have made this week.  You can see it for yourself.  This is the room we were working on yesterday.

One of the downsides of progress is that it is harder to see in a room where the walls are actually constructed but the lighting in the ceiling is not.  It is also harder to walk from one room to another when there are walls in the way.  But lots of naked beams in the house are now covered with drywall

The team has gotten downright efficient in getting drywall up, even on the ceilings.

Wallls are a little easier and the crew has gotten really efficient.  We can get a piece of drywall measured, cut, up on the wall and screwed up in no time.

We had a few problems.  A fuse blew when I bumped into these switches that someone carelessly left hanging around attached to a stud.  It wasn't my fault!

As noted, we worked on this house last year.  The owner Dana and her mother dropped in to do some work and her mother wrote her name on one of the studs.    It still has some work before the new owner can move in.  Some people have had to wait a couple years for their houses to be ready.

Dino and his trusty sidekick Lorenzo got pretty speedy at using a dremel to cut out the windows.  Dino thinks this is the funnest toy in the world, and we have a good idea what he is getting for Christmas.  While he is at it, he has used it for new forms of artistic expression.

We end the week with a potluck dinner with the homeowners.  It is usually held at the community center, but this is graduation weekend, so most of the staff is busy celebrating one graduation or another, so this year the potluck was at the HFH dorm.  We had a respectable turn-out.  The homeowner waiting to move into House 47, the owner of one of the houses we helped finish a couple years ago, and a homeowner who brought a bunch of her grandchildren.  We got some beautiful pictures of them, but the Archdiocese of Chicago won't let us show them to you.  But you might find them on my Facebook page.  

So here are the ones we can show you.  

This is Dana, who is waiting to move into House 47.  We did our best to speed up the process.  So if you want to see the ones with Natalie and all the kids or program director Sherri and her grandson, you will have to look on my Facebook page.   

As work was a bit slow and I found myself standing around with nothing to do, I returned to the dorm to work on this blog.  Thus I missed the visit to the house from the Tutwiler police chief and did not get to appear in the group picture with him.  Oh, well.  On the bright side, he did not have a occasion to check my driving record.

BOUNCE!