Now it’s time to say goodbye…

Saturday mornings are always a little emotional.  We say goodbye to each other and our friends from Tutwiler.  We hope to see them next year.  

Some of our team are not from the Evanston area, so we may not see them for a little while.  Some are veterans who have moved out of state and make it down just for this trip.  Of course, others are people we are going to see the next day in church.

Natalie shot this picture because she says I shoot them all and never appear in any.  I maintain that it is more proof for why I stay on my side of the camera.

           This is the sign that Dino posted along with his pictures that have played such an important 

part in this week.  It explains their importance more eloquently than anybody else can.

Our group has varied in number from year to year.  A couple of times we have brought the maximum 24 people down and accomplished a remarkable amount. I was along for one of those trips, and we made huge progress on two different houses and replaced the roof on the Bargain Barn in temperatures that would melt Satan’s pitchfork.  A few years back, we followed a large group with one of eleven people, and declared ourselves “Small but Mighty!”

The past two years, we have brought down groups of eight.  Considering that we had to skip 2020 entirely due to Covid, getting down here at all last year was an accomplishment, and the fact that so many of our group have been down here so many times means that we tend to punch above our weight.  Still, progress is slow, and sometimes backwards down here.  But the relationships we have built with the community and among ourselves are ever more significant.

BOOMLAND!

As it always is when we return, it is Memorial Day weekend, as evinced by the plentiful cops on the highways.  Fortunately, none of us have fallen prey to them.  We stopped for gas in Tunica and saw one on the residents cooking barbecue and preparing for the oncoming rush.

We stopped for gas again at Boomtown in Charleston, MO.  I have written about the place in the past.  It is a place that defines overstatement, and demonstrates not the least bit of subtlety. In that regard, nothing was different this year.

Among my favorite areas of the store, the hot sauce selection is large and varied, and  shows no more subtlety than their labels promise of the contents.  The usual ones, refering to deadly animals and insects or paying tribute to various diabolical attributes are still there, but this year there seems to be a  greater emphasis on vulgar descriptions of anatomy and bodily functions.  

Smart Ass, Dumb Ass, Lazy Ass, Pain in the Ass, Ass Blaster, Ass Kicker, and four different varieties of Whoop Ass, along with graphic images illustrating Blow Out, Back Fire, and Diarreah.  (Exactly how that name appears appetizing to anyone eludes me.)

Of course, the main attraction of this place is the fireworks.  Boomland’s selection is huge.  Again, the names are the most interesting part.  No Angry Mother-in-Law or Psycho Ex-Girlfriend this year, but there is Godzilla Thrilla and Evil,Wicked, Mean & Nasty, which would make a great name for a law firm.  There is a huge range of prices as well.  I was tempted to invest a few dollars in a toy truck that rolls along the ground shooting sparks and taking it over to Welles Park where my neighbors will be shooting off fireworks all day on the 4th of July.  Then there are the ones at the other end of the spectrum.

This little package goes for $250.  Andy found one for $500 that would have taken up the whole back of his van.  In addition to the fact that we would have had to abanon all our luggage, a rear-end collision would result in pieces of us landing back in Mississippi.

Then there is this package.  At first glance, I was honestly confused about whether it was a box of fireworks or beer.  But the two should probably not be mixed.  

But there are aspects of Boomland that are darker.  This is ruby red territory.  The political views of the majority of the customers is obvious.

In addition to those proclaiming allegiance to the former resident of the White House, there are plenty of caps and other articles with the charming phrase adopted by conservatives and far too many Republicans, “Let’s Go Brandon.” After our last visit, I remarked that there was an unusual showing of bipartisanship in the hot sauce section, as one could purchase bottles of either “Screw the Republicans” or “Screw the Democrats,” with labels showing the respective party symbols in positions you can imagine.  Presumably, it is the same stuff in different bottles.  This year, “Screw the Democrats is in short supply.  It seems to be selling well.  Meanwhile, they have added a new flavor “Let’s Go Brandon.”

Much has been written about rural and less educted voters who believe with some justification that the supporters of the other political party look down on them. The division between the two sides though extends to a totally different view of reality.   For me, the reason for that is illustrated in other caps sold at Boomland.

Among all the Jesus caps are the ones like this.  

The store also has a wide collection of cheap statutes, many religious in nature.  It is somewhat reassuring to see that they sell statues of angels of various races.  But it is pretty clear what most of the patrons think of God.  He is definitely caucasian, has chosen the USA as his favorite country, and loves guns as articles of worship.  

On Tuesday, I will face a class of third-graders and try to explain to them why we have to have a lockdown drill.  I will have to deal with the fact that while we were down here in Mississippi, someone was murdering children just like them in Texas.  Many politicians, particularly those funded by the NRA, have a ready explanation for the massacre in Texas and those like it.  It is all a result in the change of religious values!  Oddly enough, I agree with them.  We are a nation of idolaters,  We worship an idol that fires bullets and value nothing more than our right to possess as many guns and as much ammunition as possible without restriction.  I can tell my students that children just like them gave their lives to protect the right of someone who thinks Jesus is a tall white guy dressed in red, white and blue and toting an AR-15 to have one of his own and that he should be allowed to do whatever he wants with it, including carrying it into a bar or a church.  I will not mention but will contemplate that we are willing to sacrifice as many children to our idol as it demands, and those demands will never be met.

Friday

One of the high points in the week for me has always been signing the sign we post on the wall before we leave.  The dorm walls and ceiling are covered with plaques, framed t-shirts, wooden constructions of all sorts, and other momentos of trips different groups have made down here.  They are written on wood, cloth, drywall, siding, and sometimes even paper.  One of he more noticeable ones is the toaster one group hung upside-down from the ceiling.  

Since we are down here year after year, and since frankly we have one of the more talented teams, our signs tend to stand out and take over lots of space.  The first year I was here, all of the Sheil signs from previous years were on one wall next to the men’s bathroom in no particular order.  A couple people spent Sunday before we got started working rearranging them in chronological order.  There are several that were skillfully wood-burned, a few others that were painted.  In more recent years, the task of designing and creating them has fallen to the multi-talented Andy.  His contribution from 2015 is a beautiful picture of a dove and a rainbow.  I have always thought it gets less attention than it deserves, as it is on the very bottom of the wall, only about a foot off the ground.  

(and besides, I wrote my name in orange because nobody else had picked that color, and while it looks great from eye level, it disappears at the bottom of the wall.)

After 2015, we ran out of room on that wall and started looking around for a new place.  We moved a few t-shirts from the next wall, only to find to our dismay the next year that someone had moved our sign and put the t-shirts back! Well, we could not stand for that, so we moved a few contributions of others (to be fair, we moved the more recent offering from the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine to the ceiling, next to several their others,) and took over a new wall.    

Here is Andy’s latest artistic contribution.

JD was quick to hang it up, and it now takes its place among the others.

We still have enough room on this wall to accommodate a few more years, God willing, and then we will come up with some other idea.  Among the group, we have acquired some significant building skills over the years.  Perhaps we will build a new wall or something.  Of course, by that time it will be time for someone else to do it.  Throughout the week you will see many of our veterans stop to look over the plaques and remember past years and the people who came along.  Many have moved to other parts of the country or decided due to age or some other reason that it was time to hang up their cordless drills.  A few have passed away, and we remembered them in the plaque last year.  We will talk and laugh and marvel at their contributions for years to come.

So we have reached the end of the week for another year. Once again, we have accomplished a lot of work.  Once again, we leave a lot of work undone.  We will have made contributions to the lives of some people.  Some of those we will know about, some we will not.  Other accomplishments that we celebrate today may well be washed away or forgotten in the future.  

Personally, I have spent lots of money and countless hours sending books and DVDs to the library.  I started because Marie, one of our former regulars, worked at the Evanston library and used to dig among the books the library was discarding and bringing the ones she thought might be useful down here.  I visited the library with her and her husband Jan one year, and the librarian mentioned that at least they were still open.  She also mentioned that the library had a couple dozen DVDs and the local patrons had seen them all.  So I started collecting them.  I was delighted to visit the library the following year and see a patron returning a couple DVDs so that she could check out some more.  Over the ensuing years, I have sent thousands of DVDs and books, and sometimes tried the patience of my teammates, as one year we had to transport about twenty boxes of books.  I have gotten far more selective in recent years, sending only DVDs that the locals are sure to like and books that I thought the library had to have.  I used to be in regular contact with the librarian, who then got promoted to take over both branches of the library in Tallahatchie County. 

Since then, Roshella has resigned and moved on to other things.  The Tutwiler branch is currently closed.  It seems it was not getting much use during the Covid pandemic, and it always takes effort to encourage people to use it.  People have a different attitude toward libraries in the Mississippi Delta than they do in the comfortable northern suburbs of Chicago.  So all those books and DVDs are locked up and available to nobody.   

Last year ten days after we left, Tutwiler got hit with a masive flood.

Every one of those houses is one we have helped build.  If you look right past the red house, you can see one where the paneling was not finished.  That was the house we worked on last year, and the water came right up to the side of it.  Fortunately, no significant damage was done to that one.  But it often seems that progress around here is two steps forward and one step back, or sometimes the reverse.

Still we keep returning.  Some years back, I missed the blessing that Fr. Kevin gave the group before our trip down, so I caught up with him after 5 o’clock Mass and asked for his blessing then.  He was happy to oblige, and turned to the priest who had celebrated the Mass and said, “This is one of our missionaries.”  That was a new thought to me.  I always thought of missionaries as those people who travel to far-off places to convert the unlettered natives.  Actually, upon further reflection, Tallahatchie County is as poor as many of the places people often consider missionary territory, so maybe the thought is not so far off.  But the point of missionary activity, at least from a Catholic point of view, is not to turn the locals into people like you.  It is to be with them.  And we have done that.  We have met longterm friends down here.  We have made our contributions, some long-lasting, some not.  We have celebrated the successes of the community and mourned its losses.  As Fr. Kevin mentioned once, the people of Tutwiler have become part of the Sheil community, and we have become part of theirs.  If you doubt that, just look at the videos of Dino and his pictures.

Among ourselves, we have developed a community of our own.  Many of us feel blessed to be part of this group.  In the tradition of Sheil, we always try to be open and welcoming to whoever wants to come along (ANOTHER HINT:   SOME OF YOU MIGHT WANT TO COME ALONG.) Inevitably you become close with people who you have worked with, sweated with, eaten with, laughed with, and prayed with.  We have developed friendships, shared each other’s joys and sufferings, and mourned each other’s deaths.  Despite setbacks and seemingly unsolvable problems, God is at work here, both in Tutwiler and in our group. Indeed, God works in strange and mysterious ways His wonders to perform.

It is Friday and it is encouraging to see all the progress we have made this week.  You can see it for yourself.  This is the room we were working on yesterday.

One of the downsides of progress is that it is harder to see in a room where the walls are actually constructed but the lighting in the ceiling is not.  It is also harder to walk from one room to another when there are walls in the way.  But lots of naked beams in the house are now covered with drywall

The team has gotten downright efficient in getting drywall up, even on the ceilings.

Wallls are a little easier and the crew has gotten really efficient.  We can get a piece of drywall measured, cut, up on the wall and screwed up in no time.

We had a few problems.  A fuse blew when I bumped into these switches that someone carelessly left hanging around attached to a stud.  It wasn’t my fault!

As noted, we worked on this house last year.  The owner Dana and her mother dropped in to do some work and her mother wrote her name on one of the studs.    It still has some work before the new owner can move in.  Some people have had to wait a couple years for their houses to be ready.

Dino and his trusty sidekick Lorenzo got pretty speedy at using a dremel to cut out the windows.  Dino thinks this is the funnest toy in the world, and we have a good idea what he is getting for Christmas.  While he is at it, he has used it for new forms of artistic expression.

We end the week with a potluck dinner with the homeowners.  It is usually held at the community center, but this is graduation weekend, so most of the staff is busy celebrating one graduation or another, so this year the potluck was at the HFH dorm.  We had a respectable turn-out.  The homeowner waiting to move into House 47, the owner of one of the houses we helped finish a couple years ago, and a homeowner who brought a bunch of her grandchildren.  We got some beautiful pictures of them, but the Archdiocese of Chicago won’t let us show them to you.  But you might find them on my Facebook page.  

So here are the ones we can show you.  

This is Dana, who is waiting to move into House 47.  We did our best to speed up the process.  So if you want to see the ones with Natalie and all the kids or program director Sherri and her grandson, you will have to look on my Facebook page.   

As work was a bit slow and I found myself standing around with nothing to do, I returned to the dorm to work on this blog.  Thus I missed the visit to the house from the Tutwiler police chief and did not get to appear in the group picture with him.  Oh, well.  On the bright side, he did not have a occasion to check my driving record.

BOUNCE!

Thursday

The weather this week has alternated between pleaant and dreadful.  The temperature has been pleasant, in the 70’s mostly, so we have not had to deal with temperatures that make you feel like you are melting.  On the other hand, it has rained just about every day, not all day, but for long stretches, like all night last night.  There are puddles everywhere, and much of the grass is flooded. Fortunately we have been mostly working inside. It would be a mess if we were putting up siding or staining woodwork instead.

We hung more drywall today and got at least one room and a closet done.  JD tried to talk us into sticking around for a couple more days to finish the job.  Alas, as is the case most years, we will leave the job for someone else to finish.  Unfortunately, this year there are not a lot of other groups scheduled, so we have tried to finish as much as possible.  

We have gotten it down to a pretty efficient system.  Somebody measures the wall, somebody else measures the dry wall, somebody cuts it down to size, somebody screws it into the wall, and Dino goes to work with his dremel cutting holes in it where required.  I had never heard of a dremel before.  It is this cool little tool used to cut holes in drywall.  Dino originally referred to it as a dreidel, which I suppose is what they call it in Israel.  

Here Kristin measures drywall before Lindsey cuts it.  Kristin has to do the measuring, because if anybody else comes up with measurements, she won’t believe them.

                           Dino and Andy screw it into place.

JD’s nail gun works much faster.  He insisted that Natalie and Lyndsie give it a try.

The nail gun is loud! Is is powered by a gas canister and is more powerful than you might think.  JD demonstrated by firing a couple of nails at the house next door.

Here are the two houses and here is where the nail embeded.  Moral of the story:  Never get a guy with a nail gun mad at you.  

The crew has found ways to amuse themselves in between hanging sheets of drywall.  

 Dino found a way to use his new toy, the dremel, with his new career as an artiste!

And others found other ways to amuse themselves.

We usually get around to shooting a group picture at the end of the week, sometimes on Friday and sometimes on Saturday morning.  A few times we have taken them on Thursday to accommodate people who have to leave early, but this year, as long as we have a small crew and both JD and Lorenzo were present, we took it today.

Nicole entertained all of us during lunch with a dramatic reading from her latest favorite book, 

I Need a New Butt!

CLARKSDALE

We took Thursday afternoon off and made a visit to Clarksdale and the Delta Blues Museum.

We got a chance to watch an artist paint a mural on the side of the Ground Zero Blues Club.

    But back at the Delta Blues Museum, Dino got to give away a couple more of his drawings. 

But the really cool part was when the part of the crew went to Ground Zero Blues Club later in the evening.  The guys in the picture were playing and the one on the left brought along his picture.  So now it sits in a place of pride on the wall behind the drummer at Ground Zero. 

I wasn’t there, so I am trying to talk someone who was into writing up a description of what happened.  Stay tuned.

Wednesday

The weather this week has alternated between pleaant and dreadful.  The temperature has been pleasant, in the 70’s mostly, so we have not had to deal with temperatures that make you feel like you are melting.  On the other hand, it has rained just about every day, not all day, but for long stretches, like all night last night.  There are puddles everywhere, and much of the grass is flooded. Fortunately we have been mostly working inside. It would be a mess if we were putting up siding or staining woodwork instead.

We hung more drywall today and got at least one room and a closet done.  JD tried to talk us into sticking around for a couple more days to finish the job.  Alas, as is the case most years, we will leave the job for someone else to finish.  Unfortunately, this year there are not a lot of other groups scheduled, so we have tried to finish as much as possible.  

We have gotten it down to a pretty efficient system.  Somebody measures the wall, somebody else measures the dry wall, somebody cuts it down to size, somebody screws it into the wall, and Dino goes to work with his dremel cutting holes in it where required.  I had never heard of a dremel before.  It is this cool little tool used to cut holes in drywall.  Dino originally referred to it as a dreidel, which I suppose is what they call it in Israel.  

Here Kristin measures drywall before Lindsey cuts it.  Kristin has to do the measuring, because if anybody else comes up with measurements, she won’t believe them.

                           Dino and Andy screw it into place.

JD’s nail gun works much faster.  He insisted that Natalie and Lyndsie give it a try.

The nail gun is loud! Is is powered by a gas canister and is more powerful than you might think.  JD demonstrated by firing a couple of nails at the house next door.

Here are the two houses and here is where the nail embeded.  Moral of the story:  Never get a guy with a nail gun mad at you.  

The crew has found ways to amuse themselves in between hanging sheets of drywall.  

 Dino found a way to use his new toy, the dremel, with his new career as an artiste!

And others found other ways to amuse themselves.

We usually get around to shooting a group picture at the end of the week, sometimes on Friday and sometimes on Saturday morning.  A few times we have taken them on Thursday to accommodate people who have to leave early, but this year, as long as we have a small crew and both JD and Lorenzo were present, we took it today.

Nicole entertained all of us during lunch with a dramatic reading from her latest favorite book, 

I Need a New Butt!

CLARKSDALE

We took Thursday afternoon off and made a visit to Clarksdale and the Delta Blues Museum.

We got a chance to watch an artist paint a mural on the side of the Ground Zero Blues Club.

    But back at the Delta Blues Museum, Dino got to give away a couple more of his drawings. 

But the really cool part was when the part of the crew went to Ground Zero Blues Club later in the evening.  The guys in the picture were playing and the one on the left brought along his picture.  So now it sits in a place of pride on the wall behind the drummer at Ground Zero. 

I wasn’t there, so I am trying to talk someone who was into writing up a description of what happened.  Stay tuned.

Tuesday

A new day and lots of progress.  We are hanging drywall in House 47, the one we sided last year.  The hardest part is the ceilings.  Those require a real group effort.  We got just about all of them up today.  

Then it was on to the walls.

     Andy and Dino teamed up.  Dino got assigned to do all the cutouts.  

         Dino and Andy take a break to admire their work.  And they should.

               The change in a day is noticeable.

    Meanwhile, JD supervised.

Monday

This year we are mounting drywall.  Over the years, we have done just about every task that can be done.  We have framed houses, hung dry wall, connected the electricity, mudded the walls, tiled the floors, stained the wood work, painted the walls, built closests, nailed up the siding, and cleaned up the mess that other crews left behnd.  It is fascinating to see the exterior of the homes change over the years.  

What some of us remember as a concrete slab or some bare lumber have turned into places where people live.  There are cars, bikes, and toys out front.  Several of the owners enclosed the front porch.  One homeowner eliminated the porch entirely and extended her kitchen.  This gives a rough idea of how the interior of this house looked when we arrived.  Since we were here last year, not much has changed. We were the first post-Covid crew to come down last year, and there have been only a few since then.  A crew came in from California to frame this house. We are putting up drywall in the house we worked on last year.  JD the project manager held off on ordering the dry wall until we were scheduled to be down here.  There has not been a crew big enough or experienced enough to put it up.

We started nailing up plywood in House 48.  Before we started, Natalie, aka Tina Sparkle, had to make sure that the floor of the house met her exacting standards of cleanliness.  

Natalie brought down her granddaughter Lindsey to join the crew.  Lindsey immediately made her presence felt by inflicting injury on one of her teammates with a flying nail.  Dino claims he will carry the scar for life.  

The first thing we did was nail plywood to the outside of the house.  The whole crew took part.  Note Lindsey and her deadly hammer.  Kind of like Thor, the god of Thunder, but nobody has made movies about her (yet.)

For most of the houses, JD lays out a wooden frame for the concrete slab, then removes the frame.  This year, the California crew lead by the famous Bob the Builder came in before the frame was removed.  That crew always frames the houses.  We worked with them a couple of years.  So the frame remained in the ground until we arrived, and we had to pry it out. 

 It turns out that this is much easier to do with a tractor.

That got the job done, and for all his hard work, JD let Dino drive the tractor.  

This is our eighteenth trip to Tutwiler.  Lots of people have come and gone.  Last year we posted a memorial to four of our regulars who have passed away.  Their legacy will live on in the work they have done.  In his blessing sending us off a few years back, Fr. Kevin said that the people in Tutwiler have become part of our community and we have become part of theirs.  He’s right.  We have built lots of long-lasting relationships here.  This year, Dino posted some drawings he made of people we have met over the years in the commons at Sheil, in an effort to attract some new volunteers.  (HINT!)

J.D. Smith has been the foreman down here since we started, and gotten to know us well enough that all the veterans had to line up for hugs when he dropped by on Monday morning.  On Tuesday, Dino presented JD with the picture he drew of him.  

Sunday

Good morning gentle readers!  

Please excuse the delay in getting this blog started, but I tried to set it up through some program that is designed to help you promote your business and which assumes that you have someone in your IT department helping you.  We are not a business and I am the IT department, such as it is, so I finally gave up and looked for an easier site to create a blog, and we shall see if it is.

So here is what we have done so far.

Most years, we come down on Saturday, take Sunday off to do something fun, and start work on Monday.  This year due to a smaller crew and people’s schedules, we came down on Sunday instead.  On the way down, we stopped at the legendary Boomtown! But we only bought gas.  Andy intends to buy some fireworks, but did not want to drive around with a trunk full of ordnance for a week, so we will stop on the way back and I will provide a more thorough description of this temple of Southern capitalism.  But in the meantime, I could not pass up the opportunity to buy a momento of this wondrous commercial establishment.

We did make our customary stop at the Mexican restaurant in Clarksdale and as usual, dinner was paid for by our good friend and faithful supporter, Ron Silver, MD.  Doctor Silver generously pays for dinner every year as his contribution to our trip and every year, we send him a picture.  His constant support and prayers are a real blessing to us.  Mazel Tov, Dr. Silver!