photo by Adam Koob

Mission worker Brian Longley puts the finishing touches on a floorboard he repaired in a Gaylor Road house Wednesday.

Texas teens lend a hand in house repairs

By Adam Koob (Contact) | The Natchez Democrat

Published Thursday, June 18, 2009

NATCHEZ — Before many Natchez residents were even out of bed Wednesday a group of teens from Texas were tearing the floor out of Dorothy Gaylor’s house.

The teens in Natchez this week are part of the Central Texas Conference and Youth Mission summer mission trip and are working on a variety of service projects across Natchez and Vidalia.

And as part of that work, a dozen conference members and their adult sponsors were giving Gaylor new flooring.

“I knew (the house) needed work,” said Gaylor, 75, standing in her front yard. “But I didn’t know it needed as much work as is does.”

As Gaylor looked on, a team of workers pulled the nails from her old floorboards, replace rotted boards and prepped the house for new linoleum and new carpeting.

And for Gaylor, who could not afford the necessary repairs on her own, the workers are heaven sent.

“God is in the plan,” she said. “I’ve been praying for help, and he sent what I needed.”

And those workers, like Iva Crocker, 17, are putting in long hours during their summer vacation to help out people like Gaylor.

“It’s a lot of work,” Crocker said shortly after cutting a rotted board out of Gaylor’s floor with a reciprocating saw. “But it’s fun work. We like to be able to give something back because we’ve all gotten so much from our churches.”

Crocker said the work crews wake at 6 a.m. and are working at their assigned houses by 7 a.m.

And aside from lunch breaks and prayer services, they don’t do much else, she said.

“Pray, sleep, eat and work. That’s pretty much it,” Crocker said.

The Rev. Mary Gean Cope coordinated the event and said the nearly 50 mission workers in town this week have been divided into groups and are tackling projects like the one at the Gaylor residence all across town.

“We’re all called to show God’s love in concrete ways, and this is one way we can do that,” Cope said of the service projects.

The mission workers will be in town until Saturday and plan to have their projects completed by then.