WILMOT, N.H. (AP) – So, you’re a teenager with a month left of summer vacation – what would you do? How about paying to drive hundreds of miles to scrape fences, paint bathrooms, build wheelchair ramps and dig holes – in 90-degree temperatures?
That’s what more than 300 young people are doing in the state this week as part of a national church-based service program called Group Workcamps.
The teens leave their “camp” on classroom floors at Kearsarge Regional High School each morning and head out to work at about 55 homes in a dozen communities.
At Laurie Buckley’s home in Wilmot, five teens were jammed in a laundryroom-bathroom Tuesday. Two stood in a bathtub painting the wall. Others painted windowframes. It was hot, but they were smiling, from behind white paint stripes from forehead to chin.
Outside, six others attacked a long picket fence, scraping chipped paint in preparation for painting.
“You feel so good about yourself for helping someone else, as well as making someone else feel good,” said Haley Gosselin, 17, of North Brookfield, Mass., who was attending her first Workcamp program. “It’s just as much of a benefit for us as it is for the people we are helping.”
Buckley, 47, suffered an aneurysm and stroke more than a year ago and hasn’t been able to do any projects she had planned at her home, including fixing a broken board on her porch.
“I was just waiting for someone to fall,” she said.
It was fixed on Monday.
She, and other residents, say the teens are doing more than just fixing things.
“This is the gift, right here,” she said, as the smiling teens posed with her for a photo. “The fact that they want to take a week of their summer vacation and give of themselves. They are giving to me in much bigger ways than they know.”
The teens are learning about home repair – and about life.
Aaron Greenhalgh, 18, of Amsterdam, N.Y., was pensive as he listened to Buckley talk about her continuing recovery.
“We can learn more from her in a week than we could learn in a lifetime,” he said. The lessons? “Never take a day for granted because you never know. Live life to the fullest.”
The project is run by the Group Workcamps Foundation in Loveland, Colo., a Christian organization that began the service programs in 1977. Since then, more than 200,000 volunteers have worked at more than 30,000 homes in the United States, Mexico, Puerto Rico and Canada.
This week, 339 campers from seven states – including Iowa, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Connecticut and New Jersey – are working in New Hampshire.
Camp Director Mike Warneke, of Quincy, Ill., said his motivation is basic: “Just answering the call, the Christian call, to love and to serve others in need.”
His own cot is wedged between the shelves in the school library: shirts piled neatly on a couple of bookshelves, shaving kit hanging over music history books.
He credits Casey Family Services in New Hampshire and volunteers from Trinity Bible Church in South Sutton for doing a year of research and fundraising to find homes in need and raise $19,000 for the materials to improve them.
The Sutton church has sent teens to out-of-state workcamps for the last seven years. This week, they provided teens to help the visitors.
At the high school, Principal Carl Fitzgerald said giving the teens a place to eat and sleep is the least he can do.
“Schools are supposed to be in the process of helping kids become productive citizens and I can’t think of a better way of helping that process,” he said.
AP-ES-08-02-06 1330EDT
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