Dan Irwin
New Castle News
NEW CASTLE —
A coat of paint can do more than embellish a piece of wood.
Apparently, it also can seal a friendship.
Just ask Nicole Watkins and Shelby Brown, youth group members at First Assembly of God and Bethel Presbyterian Church, respectively. The two had never met before Monday, when they showed up to participate in His Hands Ministries.
Yesterday, though, they were talking and joking like lifelong pals.
“I met her the first day,” Brown said. “We worked together on Monday, and we just became best friends.
“We work well together, we get paint on each other. Well, we did that Monday. We’re good now.”
His Hands, an annual faith-based outreach coordinated through Lawrence County Community Action Partnership, uses volunteers from local churches to help financially strapped homeowners with needed repairs.
About 130 teens and 20 adults fanned out to tackle nearly three dozen projects around the county this week. Watkins and Brown were among a dozen or so kids plus Jon Pickens, First Baptist pastor of student ministry, who were painting the home of Mary Camargo at 335 Laurel Blvd.
Watkins is a first-timer with His Hands who admitted the work was “harder than I thought; we’ve painted a lot of stuff.” Brown participated two years ago, but worked then with other teens from her own church.
This year, though, the youth groups were more diverse.
“One of the goals we’re trying to do is to build a community of Christians,” explained Joe Wright, a His Hands volunteer and member of Lawrence County Youth Ministries.
“We don’t want it to be me and my eight kids from my youth group. It’s me and 120 other kids. So we mixed up the youth groups and mixed up the leaders.”
The number of teens participating continues to grow, Wright said, and was about 50 percent higher this year than last.
What’s down, though, is the adult skilled labor volunteers — the people “who could confidently take a project and say, ‘I have the tools, I know exactly how to level this, and I will need a No. 8 nail,’” Wright said.
“So we had some skilled things (projects such as building a handicapped ramp or a sidewalk) that we couldn’t tackle this year. But we had no shortage of hands overall. We actually had to come up with some extra projects to put people on.”
And, as Brown observed, the paint from those projects didn’t always stay on the house.
“Sometimes its unexplainable,” said Lisa Herbert of New Creation United Methodist. “The first day I came home with brown paint on me — and I never touched brown paint.”
Angel Stouwie, also of New Creation, added, “The first house we worked on, Lisa and I painted statues, and we had paint all over us. We looked like the statues.”
Yesterday, though, the paint was going on Camargo’s Laurel Boulevard home, which also had been visited last week by teens with Group Workcamps. Those youths came from towns from all over the eastern U.S.
Camargo praised the efforts of both groups. Her only concern was that, like last week’s team, the His Hands crew might not have tall enough ladders — or the adults to scale them — so that her entire second floor would get painted.
She was not sure who she’d get to finish the job if that were the case.
“It’s hard to own your own home,” she said. “I also have a porch that’s falling in, it needs replaced. You have this and that, and also our large taxes.
“It gets down to who needs it the worst. Taxes may lose out this year. I’ve always been down there before the deadline with my check to pay everybody, but I don’t think I’m going to make it this year. I’m just very grateful that these groups have been able to come out. Otherwise, it would never have gotten done.”
