Volunteering by Audrey Borus

Author:Audrey Borus [Borus, Audrey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4645-0354-2
Publisher: Enslow Publishers, Inc.
Published: 2012-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

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Image Credit: © Bryngelzon/iStockphoto.com

A boy scrapes paint off a house that his church group is helping to rebuild. Religious organizations often have volunteer programs.

In 1999, Lyle Whiteman took a job with the Unitarian Universalist Church of Yakima, Washington. The job was to direct summer work camps for young people to learn about the social injustices that farmworkers face and design service projects in their communities.

Whiteman had heard there were migrant farmworkers camping by the Columbia River in central Washington state. But he and the teens weren’t prepared for what they saw. There were no services of any kind: no clean water, no bathrooms, no garbage removal, and no medical care. Many of the workers had come to the United States illegally, so they were hiding. When the teens delivered a report to Governor Gary Locke, he announced that regulations for improved housing would be put into place.

Still, conditions were far from ideal. In 2001, Heather Robb volunteered in the migrant-farmworker community of Crewport, Washington. “Crewport did not appear the way many of us had imagined it would. The fifty-eight small, flat-roofed houses were built in the 1940s at the urging of Eleanor Roosevelt, out of her concern for the growing migrant-farm worker population.”9 There weren’t any churches or community buildings, just a quarter-mile of road in the middle of farmland.

Robb reports that as they got to know people, the poverty became more evident. She said:

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