Church group aids disaster victims

84-year-old grandmother amongst group of 18 Mennonite volunteers

RITZVILLE — By the time you read this, Dorothy Franz and her grandson Dennis Swinger Jr, or J.R., will have been hard at work for most of the day.

Franz and Swinger are just two of 18 volunteers from the Menno Mennonite Church who will be helping disaster victims in Pass Christian, Miss., for the work week. The group left from Spokane over the weekend, and every volunteer pays his or her own way, and will return Saturday.

"The Mennonite Disaster Service (MDS) has been around for quite a while, and members of our church have been active in that," Swinger said, noting that local coordinator Gene Claassen and others have gone to work on different projects throughout the years. "People in our church have just expressed a desire to do something with the Katrina clean-up, rebuilding."

MDS is an arm of the Mennonite Central Committee, or MCC, which formed in July 1920 when 13 church leaders met in Elkhart, Ind., to talk about how North American Mennonites could respond to the needs of hungry people in the Soviet Union. According to http://www.mcc.org/about/history/, the MCC was developed to be the relief, development and peace committee of the Mennonite and Brethren in Christ churches in Canada and the U.S.

The annual Mennonite country auction raises funds for such efforts.

"It's a family tradition, a church tradition and something that worked in our time frame," Swinger said of the disaster service.

Pass Christian is a town of more than 5,000 people located mostly on the water which Swinger said saw much devastation. "We've been almost 30 years now with this Mennonite country auction, and it's nice to be able to go to where the rubber meets the road. Here we are always fund-raising and sending money to the MCC, but now we're going to go do something …"

Swinger said the volunteer group originally anticipated helping with clean-up, but now it sounds more like they may be doing more construction work on roofs and indoor sheet rocking.

"With MDS, you show up with your work clothes and your gloves, and they have everything else there," he said, adding of his own reasons for participation. "It's one of those things that when you are so blessed, as we are here, you need to give something back and it seemed like a natural extension of all these years of working with the Mennonite country auction out here at the church, time to do it."

Franz said she is living out a dream. She has always wanted to perform voluntary service, and has in the past participated in a daylong clean-up in Omak after a flood. She didn't know Swinger had signed up when she volunteered, she said, but she was "so thrilled" when she found out.

"My time is running out, I'm getting old and so if I was going to do it, I better start moving," she explained of her reasons for going to Mississippi over homemade cinnamon rolls in her home the afternoon before her departure. "I've always wanted to do it, and I felt so sorry for the people there that just lost everything, and it spurred me on."

Swinger said he was ready to go in a heartbeat, and was even more pleased when he found out his grandmother wanted to go too.

"Not often you get to help an 84-year-old person live out her dream," he said.

Franz said she was expecting to be doing a lot of scrubbing for the five days she's volunteering.

"I put a lot of rubber gloves in my suitcase," she said. "I feel very blessed that I have good health. I can't walk very far — I'm going to take my cane. They're going to be surprised to see an old lady come with a cane, but that's a security thing for me. I want to do a lot of scrubbing, I can still do scrubbing."

Swinger said that the disaster service is very specific in that volunteers are on site to work, not to evangelize. It's leading by example, he said.

Through reports from people on the scene, Swinger has learned the group, as with other groups from other churches, will be staying in about the only building left standing, a three-story brick building that once was a school.

"It sounds like pretty much devastation," he said. "But if they're ready to re-roof and put drywall in, it can't be down to the bare earth. You get conflicting reports, and I suspect that some of the newer, cheaply made houses are blown away, and we're just going to go from there."

"I don't think I'm going to be prepared for what I'm going to see," Franz said. "When I see the things on the news, I think that must be terrible to come back and all your precious things have been completely covered with water. But I am open to whatever it is going to be."