Dear Friends,
Yesterday, I joined a few members of Northwest’s Earth Ministry team at the Outdoor Activity Center at the West Atlanta Watershed Alliance for a morning of sunshine and community service. As some of you know, our Earth Ministry team has formed a partnership with this nonprofit organization, whose mission is to improve the quality of life within the West Atlanta watershed by protecting, preserving and restoring its community’s natural resources.
The Outdoor Activity Center is located on 26 acres in a beautifully wooded section of a low-income urban neighborhood. As I parked my car along one of the side streets, it was hard not to notice the high number of boarded-up houses and burglar bars on the doors and windows of the occupied ones. This is a predominantly African American neighborhood that has gone through hard economic times and has been the victim of discriminatory urban planning (for instance, an exit ramp to I-20 sits at the very end of a residential street and, until recently, raw sewage was dumped into the community’s creeks and streams).
But WAWA has brought a lot of environmental recovery, change and optimism to this neighborhood. And that optimism was in full swing Monday morning. A few hundred volunteer men, women, college students and children were streaming in, signing up to build decking for walkways, as well as pull vines, lay mulch and clear debris from the grounds.
My assignment? To dig holes and plant hemlock trees with a fellow Northwest member and my teammate Charles, a cheerful young man who was a former landscaper and now truck driver who – like us – wanted to make a difference. So, we dug holes in designated areas along the forest floor and placed our tiny trees in them. We tied each to a slender bamboo stake and then fertilized the freshly dug earth. And, as we did, we talked about our families, our jobs and our reasons for being there.
It was good to be together – younger and older, black and white – digging in the dirt. In that rich soil we planted not only trees, of course, but perhaps a little hope . . . hope that a morning working side by side just might help change a neighborhood and the world.
Love,
Terry