I can’t break away for a fresh beginning,
It don’t matter what I say
It makes no difference how I try to fight it
I just can’t break away ...

BIG SANDY, W.Va. — It was raining on that Saturday morning a week ago when all those Sharing Shepherds from Salem Lutheran Church rubbed the sleep out of their eyes and stretched sore muscles after a night at Fall River Elementary School.

But it was time to get up and play Santa Claus to 50 of the poorest families in the United States.

They’d slept on Army cots in the halls and classrooms and the gym at Fall River School but no one had expected to sleep in the gym.

That was where they’d unloaded everything they brought from Rowan County the day before — about $50,000 worth of food, clothing and gifts — and fuel vouchers that didn’t take up much space.

They’d marked the gym off with placards designating each family by number — 1, 2, 3 and so on up to 50, totaling 171 individuals — and then distributed everything to the family that was to get it.

This morning they’d reload the trucks and deliver the right things to meet the needs and wish lists of the people who’d get them.

But about bedtime Friday they got word that people knew what was in that gym and wanted it. A break-in was possible, so four guys slept there to guard Santa’s sack.

Nobody broke in, and everything was intact.

And the Sharing Shepherds’ second annual Christmas trip to West Virginia was moving along on schedule.

An excited small caravan of Shepherds — the name the men’s chorus adopted when they added charity to their singing agenda — and wives and children went early Friday to get there in time to eat turkey and mashed potatoes with 38 Head Start children, read them Bible stories and give them new coats and Christmas-wrapped shoeboxes stuffed with gloves and hats and toys.

Watching them open those shoeboxes was reward enough for getting up long before dawn.

“I feel like Santa Claus,” said Tim Darnell, who felt it personally. He grew up in West Virginia.

And everybody who saw little Dominique will never forget the intensity on her face as she worked to open her box and spied the little bear.

“Ohhh,” she breathed, cuddling it close in her arms and rocking it gently, her eyes closed.

“Is that your Teddy Bear?” someone asked.

“No,” she said, “my Susie Bear!”

And she rocked on and on.

Even the rain cooperated Saturday morning. It stopped during breakfast.

“There was no ice or anything,” says Billy Joe Fesperman. “It wasn’t even very cold. I started out wearing a flannel shirt with a lining, but I took it off and loaded the trucks in my shirt sleeves.”

And that was a blessing for people not used to driving on dirt roads that often are more like paths winding up mountains, aiming straight at heaven and then precipitously plunging into valleys far below — and leading to poverty none of them can believe.

“When I pulled up to the house where I made my first delivery,” Billy Joe says, “I thought I can’t believe people live like this. It was ... ”

The word spurts out.

“A dump! That was their home! It had debris all around it. They don’t have garbage pails. They just throw it out.” They have no garbage pick up either. No landfill. And garbage pails cost money.

At another home a woman they helped last year proudly showed Tim Darnell the “running water” to her wringer washing machine — created with a 50-foot hose.

Billy Joe felt humbled.

“When you see what you’ve got and you see what they’ve got, you realize how fortunate you are and how unfortunate they are. It’s sad. Very sad. It’s not God’s making. It’s man’s making.

“One lady said if it hadn’t been for what we brought last year, they wouldn’t have had anything to eat. She said, ‘You fed us. We couldn’t get out.’ We don’t realize our roads are super. We don’t have pig paths. We can get to the grocery store most of the time.”

The hopelessness hit Donna and Pete Prunkl.

“The house inhabited by someone would literally be within a few feet of another house that was collapsing,” Pete says.

“The houses had windows all broken out — in this cold,” Donna adds. “And it was everywhere you turned. Just deprivation. Sad. And the thought of children growing up in this ... ”

“Two teachers who went along — Frances Justus from Rockwell and Teresa Stoner of St. John’s kindergarten — just cried,” says Sue Petrea.

Sue directs the men’s chorus. She and her husband, Buddy, found Big Sandy and McDowell County in West Virginia when the group wanted to take on some charitable projects.

McDowell is the third poorest in the country and its need has outgrown the chorus.

“It’s not our project any more,” Sue says. “It’s a project of the Sharing Shepherds, and there are over 100 from last year. This year, it’s grown bigger,” including people from many churches.

But it’s also about 200 miles away.

And that prompts questions, Sue says. “People ask us, ‘Can’t you find poor people here?’ A lot think we’re misguided to go so far. But here the pockets of poverty are watch pocket size. Up there, they’re very deep pockets. It’s so widespread and it doesn’t have easy or quick solutions.

“Here we’ve had a couple of closings that have affected a lot of people, but here we have opportunities for people who want to work. Up there, there just aren’t any opportunities.”

June Goode, who was born in Big Sandy, disagrees.

She drove about 10 miles to work at JCPenney in Welch for 18 years before she became postmistress in Big Sandy, and now, at 75, she still has a thriving business in ceramics.

“I’ve been here all these years,” she says, “and among my friends and the people I grew up with, I haven’t seen anybody who wouldn’t give anything to come back. There’s something special about this place. I’ve always had everything I’ve needed — but I’ve worked.

“My neighbors all work or they’re retired. It’s not the bleak thing that everybody paints. I read it in the newspaper, and it infuriates me because they don’t know what they’re talking about. The man who lives across the street drives 34, 35 miles to work every day.”

Other neighbors are still coal miners. She’s not sure where they work, but Virginia Crews at Iaeger, she says, works six days a week 24 hours a day.

But on this day a security guard, the only one on duty, says it’s not a mine. It’s a company that operates five days a week, sometimes less, buys coal and loads it into coal cars — and he doesn’t know how many it employs.

Big Sandy was once a coal camp, June Goode says, owned by an offshoot of Allied Chemical. It had a company store, post office, doctor’s office, a couple hundred people and elementary and junior high schools. Students went to Welch for high school. The mines closed when she was a small child. The company tore all the houses down, and the railroad changed the river and moved the post office and school.

It has no empty houses now, and she should know. She handles the finances for the water system. Once it had 400 houses; now, 99. And 103 mail boxes. That should mean about 300 residents.

About half of them, June Goode says, are retired, drawing government checks (which includes herself and her husband, who also worked for the post office in Welch). A lot of the other half are “just lazy. If they wanted a job, they could get one.”

But not in Big Sandy. It offers no jobs.

“But,” she says, “this is almost heaven as far as I’m concerned. If we could just get some of the people in the county to do a better job around their homes.”

Other people see the situation differently.

“Needs here are great,” says Dr. Kenneth Roberts, superintendent of McDowell County’s 19 schools. A whopping 97 percent of the children at Fall River Elementary School my qualify for the federal government’s free and reduced price lunch program, but that’s not so far off from the 83.6 percent of the 4,800 students in the enter McDowell County system who qualify.

The county, he says, suffers from “poor infrastructure, a lack of highways, sewage and water and it fails to bring in business.”

Population has dropped from about 50,000 in 1980 to 25,000 now.

But he hopes that’s about to improve. A couple of projects — an electrical energy producing company and a new prison — and road improvements are being discussed.

The schools are the biggest employer in the county — and school employees are probably the biggest mission force, not only in official capacities but in many unseen ways. A cook, who knows a hungry child when she sees one, was first to identify the most needy children for the Sharing Shepherds, and 15 teachers volunteered to guide them to the houses they needed to find in the mountains.

Debbie King, teacher of a pre-school special needs class, wife of a judge and resident of neighboring War, a community of about 1,000 people, has worked closely with the Sharing Shepherds.

“They’re God-sent,” she says. “They’ve touched many lives.”

One was a woman who moved here from Detroit.

“Last year they brought her a coal stove and showed her how to use it,” she says, “and now she has a part-time job. They saved her.”

She understands, too, why Jack Riffe, a truck driver who can’t find work, stays in Big Sandy, while his family struggles on small checks his wife gets for her sons from a previous marriage.

“This is home,” he says. “All our family is here.”

And that’s the vital ingredient, says Debbie. “What they’ve got is each other, the family network.

“That’s clearer now,” she says, since Fall River Principal Bill Campbell brought a workshop on “Understanding Poverty” to his school.

“It really explained some things for us,” she says. “Truly poor people value the relationships even though they bicker and feud with their loved ones, because that’s all they’ve got.”

What people have creates values.

After a meal, the question for the truly poor is always: Did we get enough? For the middle class, it’s: How did it taste? For the wealthy: Did it have the proper garnish? Or maybe: How was it served?

“It clicked with me why these children and the adults come back and cling so to grandma and cousins.”

Follow-up books have put her to work organizing a TEAM Center. TEAM stands for “Together Everyone Accom-plishes More.”

“I feel like everybody is called here to do something, and we have to get busy or we’re going to miss our opportunities,” she says, “and I wasn’t getting it done,” even though she’s busy in Bible School, Sunday School, the whole nine yards.

Neither were the 42 churches in her district.

But the churches have come together in the TEAM Center, and things are happening. Good things. Kids gather to play board games, not video games. They’re coming for after school tutoring. Parent volunteers are working in the schools.

And Sharing Shepherds are showing them what can happen when people give — their time and sweat and energy.

“These were our friends who came,” she says, “and we were so impressed.”

Sharing Shepherds are impressed by TEAM — and the teachers.

“The teachers,” says Buddy Petrea, “are God’s angels on this earth because they’re trying so hard to change the future for the children.”

And the children are why the Sharing Shepherds go so far. They want to put something for them in that deep, deep pocket of poverty.

“They’re suffering,” Sue Petrea says. “They’re cold. They’re hungry. But they’re human, too.”

She can prove it.

“One of the fellows in our mens’ chorus lost his house to fire,” Sue says, “and he told one of the volunteers” who was helping the Shepherds find the families Saturday.

“And the volunteer and two of the families got together a Care package — a laundry basket, towels, a toaster, sheets.

“It moved me to tears that they were able to do that,” Sue says. “The two families didn’t have an extra $5 between them, but they wanted to be part of it.

“If you can change ‘Every-body needs to give to me’ to ‘What can I give to somebody else?’ I think you’ve turned a corner.”

“If I was living there and didn’t have an automobile or some way to get out,” says Gerald Peeler, who went to West Virginia this year and last, “I would take my family and get on the road and walk out. There’s nothing there to support a family.”

And he was thrilled this year to find out that one man has done that since they took him help last year. He was the son of a cafeteria worker, and he’d been laid off.

“He told us he’d move out if his wife would leave but she wouldn’t. Somehow he got her out. They moved to Statesville where he got a job.”

He’d found a way to break away and make his new beginning.

And the trip to Big Sandy made Gerald Peeler‘s Christmas even if he knows things won’t be much different when they go again next year.

“I’ve got everything I need,” he says. “Warm clothes, a warm house. If I can help anybody else, I want to do it. It makes you feel so much better. You can’t go up there and try to educate them overnight, and tell them they can do better somewhere else. You’ve just got to go and wish them merry Christmas — and bless them.”

And Matthew’s account of Jesus’ words echoed in his thought.

For inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these, my brethren, ye have done it unto me.