{"id":439377,"date":"2010-03-17T15:13:13","date_gmt":"2010-03-17T19:13:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/?p=40851"},"modified":"2010-03-17T15:13:13","modified_gmt":"2010-03-17T19:13:13","slug":"a-church-rises-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/439377","title":{"rendered":"A church rises again"},"content":{"rendered":"

HAYNEVILLE, Ala. \u2014 One afternoon this week, George Thampy \u201910, a chemistry concentrator, joined four other Harvard undergraduates on a low scaffold at a nearly completed church in this small south-central Alabama town. Their task was to screw a heavy wood panel onto the rafters.<\/p>\n

Thampy stretched both arms wide. When the board still wobbled, he did what any good Harvard student would: He used his head.<\/p>\n

The Mather House senior won\u2019t always be working on scaffolds. After graduation, he plans a career in finance. But this week he is one of 22 Harvard undergraduates using their Alternative Spring Break to do finishing work on a new Hayneville Church of Christ. The original burned down, an arson target, in 2008. Said Thampy, \u201cI\u2019m irrepressibly happy to be here.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Marcel Moran '11 (from left), George Thampy '10, Nworah Ayogu '10, Rachael Goldberg '12, and Kennedy Mukuna '12 offer numerous helping hands.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

The Harvard workers are along on one of 10 domestic public service trips sponsored this year by the Phillips Brooks House Association<\/a> (PBHA). They made the 21-hour drive to Alabama in three PBHA vans.<\/p>\n

Along the way, Emmett Kistler \u201911 stopped in his native New Jersey to renew his license so he could help with the driving. \u201cFor us, this is grounding,\u201d said the Eliot House junior. \u201cYou get down here, and it\u2019s revitalizing.\u201d<\/p>\n

There\u2019s more, too. \u201cBefore I got here, I didn\u2019t know how to swing a hammer,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s fun to do something tangible,\u201d said Marcel Moran \u201911, one of four co-leaders on the Hayneville trip. \u201cIt\u2019s using your brain in a whole new way.\u201d<\/p>\n

This week, students are tackling a wide range of construction work, painting, staining, tiling, putting up sheet rock, installing siding, and building scaffolds. \u201cWe\u2019re at the finishing steps of this church,\u201d said Moran, a pre-med student on his third service trip. \u201cSo precision is the key.\u201d<\/p>\n

There were three volunteer experts on site Tuesday (March 16). \u201cWe do the work,\u201d said Moran, \u201cbut they\u2019re showing us how to do it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Standing nearby in the carport was William \u201cBill\u201d Gorsline, an Illinois information technology consultant and volunteer carpenter. \u201cThey send us pretty talented kids,\u201d he said of the PBHA workers. \u201cThey can\u2019t get enough of this. They want to learn it all.\u201d He was working with two other experienced construction mentors, Joe Piekos and George Holtz.<\/p>\n

Gorsline, who volunteers on behalf of St. Isidore Parish in Bloomingdale, recognizes that other kinds of learning are going on too. He took his own children on a work trip to the Gulf Coast following Hurricane Katrina. \u201cThey were in tears for the whole week, \u201c he said.<\/p>\n

Joseph Gaspard \u201912, a government concentrator, was cutting tile on a wet saw. It buzzed and whined, and a cloud of mist shot from the back. \u201cThis is more hands-on than I\u2019m ever going to get,\u201d he said. Careful and intent at the saw, Gaspard wore an Adams House T-shirt, old jeans cinched with kneepads, safety glasses, and a dust mask.<\/p>\n

This is better than a standard break, he said, because, \u201cI\u2019ve done the whole sitting-on-the-beach thing before.\u201d<\/p>\n

Will Quinn \u201910 of Winthrop House braced his feet and lowered a portable cement mixer into a 5-gallon bucket. It was his second PBHA alternative spring break trip, he said, but his first time using a cement mixer. Quinn pressed the trigger, and a sheet of gray slurry sloshed over the wrists of Trevor Bakker \u201910, who had crouched to steady the bucket.<\/p>\n

Bakker has applied to Oxford, where he plans to pursue a one-year master\u2019s degree this fall before embarking on a career of human rights law. Meanwhile, he is learning how to lay tile. Does that compare to studying governments? \u201cCertainly, there is little room for error in tiling,\u201d said Bakker.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

This is the 12th PBHA service trip Tim McCarthy has directed, all in the South and all to rebuild churches. McCarthy, who is a lecturer on history and literature, works with Harvard students from the Phillips Brooks House Association's Alternative Spring Break program.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Tim McCarthy \u201993 looked in on the cement mixing. This is the 12th PBHA service trip he has directed, all in the South and all to rebuild churches. McCarthy, a big man in a tails-out white shirt and a ball cap, is a lecturer in history and literature and public policy at Harvard and director of the Human Rights and Social Movements Program<\/a> at the Harvard Kennedy School\u2019s Carr Center.<\/p>\n

He started taking such trips as a graduate student at Columbia University. \u201cI was really transformed by the experience, and found my herd, so to speak,\u201d said McCarthy.<\/p>\n

In the spring of 2001, he led Harvard\u2019s first Alternative Spring Break trip, and has since squired hundreds of undergraduates \u2014 \u201csome of Harvard\u2019s best souls,\u201d he said \u2014 on similar work trips. \u201cI\u2019m on my own spiritual journey,\u201d said McCarthy. \u201cThis is part of it.\u201d<\/p>\n

There is time on these trips for intellectual engagement too. At one point, McCarthy stood in the unfinished carport for an animated conversation with three students. \u201cWe were trying to solve the affirmative-action problem,\u201d he said later of the discussion, while heading back to work. \u201cNow we\u2019re going to put up a ceiling.\u201d<\/p>\n

To get to Hayneville, population 700, you drive down Lowndes County Route 26. Two lanes of blacktop cut through a screen of sticklike trees hung with Spanish moss. Just beyond the trees are placid creeks, pale yellow dirt driveways, neat doublewides, sparkling ponds, and rolling acres of pasture for goat, cattle, and horse farms.<\/p>\n

But Hayneville wasn\u2019t always a crossroads in picture-book farmland. It is a former Ku Klux Klan stronghold, 20 minutes by car from Montgomery, the first capital of the Confederacy. It is a few minutes south of where the Selma protest march broke the back of Jim Crow segregation in 1965.<\/p>\n

Before then, said 57-year-old Martin McCall Sr., \u201cI was scared to come to Hayneville because of the KKK. We got people shot right in the street here.\u201d<\/p>\n

McCall, pastor at Hayneville Church of Christ, said most church burnings in the South even today are racially motivated. But the 2008 fire that burned down the old church was \u201ca break-in that went bad,\u201d he said, set by a black man later convicted of the crime.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey saved only the front porch,\u201d said McCall of local firefighters, who kept running out of water. \u201cIt was horrible to watch.\u201d<\/p>\n

Building a new church\u00a0 \u2014 brick and wood, like the old one \u2014 has cost about $260,000 so far, said McCall, a mason and carpenter who did much of the work himself. Insurance money helped, but so did $100,000 donated by local residents, \u201cwhite and black,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

The PBHA volunteers help too.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve never seen anything like this,\u201d said McCall. \u201cIt\u2019s like the angels from heaven came down and blessed the congregation.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

HAYNEVILLE, Ala. \u2014 One afternoon this week, George Thampy \u201910, a chemistry concentrator, joined four other Harvard undergraduates on a low scaffold at a nearly completed church in this small south-central Alabama town. Their task was to screw a heavy wood panel onto the rafters. Thampy stretched both arms wide. When the board still wobbled, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4175,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-439377","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/439377","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4175"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=439377"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/439377\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=439377"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=439377"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=439377"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}