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BIG SANDY, W. Va. — “You won’t forget it. You’ll never forget it.”
Gordon Peacock’s voice is bleak.
He’s one of 11 members of St. Matthew’s Lutheran Church who went to West Virginia last weekend with the Sharing Shepherds of Salem Lutheran, taking Christmas to 50 families, 50 invisible families hidden by rutted roads and deep woods around Big Sandy, 50 families, invisible and mired in poverty.
They went with 23 trucks, utility vehicles, station wagons, cars and trailers loaded with food, vouchers for fuel to cut the cold, coats for the kids, blankets and toys.
And Christmas.
But he’ll never forget the 16-year-old who couldn’t get his breath. He’d just had surgery for lung cancer, but he struggled to help carry in the packages.
“And he hugged us when we left — a 16-year-old.”
Or the little lady down the road, “watching us unload that stuff. She called me over and wanted to know if we had anything left over, just any groceries or anything she could get.
“It really gets you. I cried two or three times. They’re bad conditions, and you know tomorrow is not going to be any better.
“You won’t forget it ...”
They won’t forget the family of six who slept in one room in a cinder block building that had once been a garage, in the darkness of a single bulb hanging unfastened from a low ceiling.
They won’t forget the burned out houses, left to crumble beside others where people lived, the space between them littered with garbage.
Or the crippled 20-year-old mother of three under 4 years old, sitting on a sofa with her crutches and so proud of her week-old baby.
“I just wanted to cry thinking about what that baby had to look forward to,” says Donna Prunkl, who has been on mission trips to Romania and Honduras and was surprised to find the third poorest county in the United States is worse.
They won’t forget the child so excited about getting a bottle of water she hugged it.
Or the 8-year-old who had never opened a gift before and hadn’t a clue about what to do.
Or the people who asked if they could keep those big cardboard boxes the gifts were piled in to put across broken out windows, cracks in the walls, holes in the floor.
They won’t forget the little boy standing outside, waiting, and how, when he caught sight of them, he jumped up and down, shouting, “I knew God would let us have Christmas!”
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We know one thing always leads to another.
The Sharing Shepherds and their friends took Christmas to Big Sandy in McDowell County, W.Va., because men in the church wanted to have a sing-a-long at a Sunday morning breakfast nearly seven years ago.
They had such a good time, they formed a men’s chorus, talked Sue Petrea into being director, and are still astonished at how it mushroomed.
Read music? It doesn’t matter if you can sing.
Age? Forget it. All ages sing — teens to 80s.
Schedule? They just sing wherever anyone wants them to sing, at nursing homes, churches, family reunions, dinners. A couple of years ago they sponsored a barbecue to help pay half the cost of a new sound system. By the time it was put in, it was paid for.
Two years ago they decided they wanted to get involved in a charity program, and Charles Guignard of Huntersville, who sings with the chorus, told them about Hearts for the Appalachian People in Harlan County, Ky. The next Christmas 23 people from Salem worked with them.
But last year they wanted to do their own thing, so where was the need greatest?
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By then , Dennis Redfern had found a name in Isaiah 40:11:
He will feed his flock like a shepherd,
he will gather the lambs in his arms ...
Sharing Shepherds — that’s what they wanted to be.
But where?
Dennis’ wife, Ingrid, and Betty Goodnight talked to social workers and learned North Carolina counties help their own.
Now Sue is convinced God was leading them to West Virginia and Big Sandy where 97 percent of the children in the elementary school are on free and reduced price lunch.
But they didn’t know it until she and Buddy took a week’s vacation to visit West Virginia.
“We had worked with the ministry in Harlan two Christmases ago. We wanted to do a ministry similar to that, so we took the vacation, prayed about it and let God guide us, and I honestly believe we’re at Big Sandy now by the grace of God.”
Economically the two communities are alike.
“Harlan depended on coal mines, and they’re gone. Big Sandy depended on coal mines, too, and they’re gone.”
Local people still work a few small strip mines, but there’s no Pocohantas, once a big presence in the area, no U.S. Steel, no Allied Chemical.
When Buddy and Sue got to Big Sandy, they knew they’d found the place God wanted them to go.
A few little saw mills were operating. But the only jobs in Big Sandy were selling alcohol (with no visible signs) or groceries. Beyond that, people had to go somewhere else to find work — and to shop.
Other small communities are fighting the same fate. And Welch, the county seat, isn’t what it was.
When Debbie Mays began to teach at Fall River in 1978, Welch had a JCPenney, Sears, Cato’s, three movie theaters, men’s stores, shoe stores, jewelry stores.
“Now we have to go out of the county to shop,” she says, “and this used to be the biggest county in West Virginia. But it all declined. Schools consolidated.”
People move, the county loses schools, the schools lose children and hard times get harder for those who are left.
Buddy is assistant maintenance director and Sue works in payroll for the Rowan-Salisbury Schools. They knew they could find out what they needed to know from the school system, so they visited the superintendent and the principal of Fall River Elementary School on the edge of Big Sandy. It served 500 to 600 children in four small unincorporated communities in a 10-mile area when it opened about 30 years ago.
Today it has about 230.
The Petreas knew they were where they needed to be, and in no time met with volunteers from the schools and explained their church wanted to give a handup not a handout to people in the greatest need.
The planning had begun.
The volunteers identified 28 families who needed everything and seven others who got some government help but not enough.
Then the Sharing Shepherds put their names, ages, sizes and what they needed — and wanted — on cards, attached them to an 8-foot shepherd’s staff in the church narthex — and members of the church “adopted” all 35 families.
Other churches heard about their plans and joined in. More gave money. And a week before Christmas they took it all to Big Sandy and came home with images in their heads they’ll never be able to erase — and started making plans for this Christmas.
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Last summer Sue and Buddy went back to plan this year’s trip.
“And it felt right being there,” Sue says, like visiting family — and would help them solve some problems.
“I can’t believe we’ve got such situations as that within hours of our nation’s capital,” she says.
The school gets a lot of federal funds, says Buddy, “but they’re lacking maintenance,” which he knows and can judge beyond the obvious — and tragic — conditions anyone who walks into the school can see — a library the size of a small closet, doors off toilet stalls, faucets that don’t work, books from the ’50s and ’60s.
“Funds literally go to buy bottled water because there’s barium in the water there,” he says. “Two schools are totally on bottled water, so that eats up the maintenance budget. They have no painters or anything like that.” Last summer parents and volunteers painted the school — and bought the paint themselves.
By autumn the Fall River staff members who know the children — and the condition of their families — had created a list, and the Sharing Shepherds chose 50 for “adoption.”
They’d go to Big Sandy on Friday, Dec. 15, unpack the $3,700 worth of food they’d bought at Aldi’s along with toys, clothing and household and toilet articles donated by those who adopted the families. The Sharing Shepherds filled each family’s individual needs and desires.
Did that boy want a bike? He’d get it.
That girl a doll? Santa — and Salem Church — try to fill all requests.
On Dec. 16, they’d reload their vehicles and — guided by volunteers — drive deep into the woods and up the mountains and down into the bottom land and deliver Christmas.
But the trip would be a little different.
Those 50 families were adopted so fast, says Billy Joe Fesperman, “and then teachers up there found out that so many Head Start students didn’t have coats that we put 36 children’s names on our shepherd’s staff and people adopted coats.”
And still there was more.
Kenny Jones, a Salem youth group leader, is in construction and doing a job for Jeremy Mayfield’s race team in Mooresville.
One day the two men talked about the Sharing Shepherds and their West Virginia project — and Mayfield Motor Sports gave them $500.
And the Shepherds decided to use it to fill a shoebox with gloves and hats and toys and tooth brushes and whatever else would go in for each child getting a coat, says Billy Joe.
“Our youth wrapped those presents,” he adds, “and when the Head Start people found out, they invited them to lunch with the children.”
So the first wave of trucks would leave at 7 to be there in time; the second and largest, in time to get there when school closed so they could begin unloading in their “distribution center,” the school gym: and the third, when people finished work.
But before any of that could happen, Buddy and Sue and B.J. and his wife, Carolyn, had to make one more day trip to Big Sandy.
“We’ve raised over $18,000 in money,” Sue explains. “And it was awe-inspiring. You don’t have to push at all to do it. People are hungry to help, I don’t know if we feel guilty because we have so much or what, but all you have to do is ask.”
So they asked — and they received.
And they had to go buy $220 heat vouchers for each of the 50 families.
The people who donated that money, Billy Joe says, “are having a ball. They’re buying something for someone less fortunate than they are — and it’s going to something they need. We met with a propane company, an electric company and a man who hauls the coal.”
That hauler was Wilburn Newbill, a black man retired from the coal mines. Now he has his own little business, buying and delivering coal and even shoveling it on and off.
“We met him at McDonald’s,” Billy Joe says.
“We sat there,” Sue adds, “and gave him his copy of vouchers and a check for $11,400, and we thanked him for helping us, and he said, ‘Oh, no! You will never know what you did for me when you gave me that check and trusted me with that money.’ ”
“He told us,” Billy Joe adds “that, ‘You really don’t know what you did for me last year. You came up here, met a black guy and you trusted me.’ But we didn’t see color. We saw a man, a family man. He has seven kids.”
And the four of them will never forget the desperate need in Big Sandy — or a man who valued the gift of trust.
COMINGTUESDAY: How do you pick who to help?
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