When I was sixteen going on seventeen, our church youth group learned about the Appalachia Service Project (ASP), a Christian nonprofit ministry focused on the “eradication of substandard housing in Central Appalachia.” Growing up, I was aware that there were families who didn’t have the same standard of living we did, but participating in ASP exposed me to an American poverty beyond anything I had ever encountered, even in movies or on TV.
Later, I understood why this uncomfortable truth isn’t something you see on HGTV, and why there will never be a Real Housewives of Appalachia, Detroit, or Newark. Our culture worships a materialistic mirage that tries to enslave us with superfluous stuff, leaving us utterly uninterested in people who lack life’s basic necessities. An uncomfortable truth indeed.
After months of fundraising activities, none of which included working the recycling center, we had enough money to cover our travel expenses and to purchase the requisite building supplies for the house we’d be remodeling for our preselected family. As a teenager, I was looking forward to being away from my family and spending time with my church friends, not necessarily performing manual labor.
My construction background consisted of Scouting projects using popsicle sticks or blocks of pine, and of course I brought with me the essential skill of basket weaving, acquired at Owasippe. In Scouts I had carefully avoided working toward any skilled labor merit badges like electricity, home repairs, and woodwork. My skills as a craftsman went as far as going to Sears with my dad. I laugh now when I look back at the ASP photos of me carrying or holding wood: I’m the only person, male or female, wearing work gloves.
Several chaperones escorted us for the round-trip drive between Kentucky and Chicagoland. Riding in the comfort and convenience of a chaperone’s motor home was a first for
me. We had plenty of space to sit and talk, listen to music, play games, and use the bathroom between required fuel fills.
Our sleeping and dining accommodations for the week were at a local school. We bunked out in the different classrooms with our sleeping bags and ate breakfast and dinner in the cafeteria. After dinner, we shared stories from our day. Our chaperones looked forward to sleep after a long day of work, and we looked forward to our chaperones sleeping. During the first few nights, we played the game of cat and mouse; we were your normal, social, nocturnal teenagers.
Our assigned family, like their neighbors, lived in one of the many “hollers” among the mountainous Kentucky landscape. Their house was located off a dirt, country road. Forensic evidence indicated gravel was dumped on this strip of earth at some point distant in time. It wasn’t at all like the streets we had back home, paved and brightly illuminated to ensure everyone’s well-being and safety.
The family we came to serve lived in a sparsely furnished four-room house lacking proper installation and roofing, which we would address. Their night-lights were bare bulbs mounted on the ceiling with a chain hanging down to turn them on or off. Unadorned of any carpeting or tile, the wood floor was discolored—even after a daily sweep and a weekly scrub—from the many passing seasons.
The kitchen included a small stove, refrigerator, and a sink. There were a few cabinets, none overflowing with food or stuff. The family we helped was grateful for the home improvement
work we did to insulate the walls and repair the roof.
Their home lacked the many conveniences we were accustomed to enjoying: dishwasher, microwave, washer, dryer, color TV, phonograph, 8-track player. They had no garage full of tools requiring power, or equipment needed to maintain a four-season lawn. Their focus was sustenance on the inside, not style on the outside.
My family had two cars, multiple drawers of clothing for every member of the Young household, plenty of furniture, and we each had our own bed. Plus, more stuff. What I observed in Appalachia was real material poverty, something I had never seen in my life. What has stayed with me after forty years wasn’t the abject poverty I witnessed in the wealthiest nation in the history of the world: It was the appreciation expressed by the family we served.
They knew they weren’t well-off economically, but I never sensed any resentment or bitterness when we interacted, just genuine gratitude. It would take me forty years drowning in stuff before I would begin to understand and know genuine gratitude. Stuff became my life’s purpose, stuff I never needed.
As we made our way back home, it seemed morally peculiar we had a mobile bathroom when we just left a family whose bathroom was outside of their house. But I was becoming an expert at compartmentalizing uncomfortable realities in my life, and I did the same with this experience by aligning my identity with what I owned or valued in this world. I immersed myself in idyllic ignorance and turned my eyes away from the reality of economic injustice.
Peace. God loves you.
This story is an excerpt from Finding God in Vegas: A Gen X Spiritual Awakening, available on Amazon and across all platforms in print or electronic.