May 20, 2024

We are back for our 20th year here back in Tutwiler. After all this time, our routine is pretty well developed, though in recent years we have come down on Sunday rather than Saturday.

We always meet at Niemerg’s restaurant in Effingham, IL (named after the British nobleman who refused to take up arms against American revolutionariers.) Niemerg’s has pretty good food and a great salad bar. And it is about halfway down.

Last year I purchased one of these beautiful t-shirts on the way down.

My sister Kathleen died the week after Easter this year. She never made the trip down here, but paid for a few of mine. In my early years as part of the team, I was dropping in to assist with her first-grade class at St. Paul of the Cross in Park Ridge.

Later, some of those classes were about my trip to Tutwiler and the students were given an assignment to write letters to Dr. Anne Brooks at the Tutwiler Clinic.

Dr. Brooks was a sister who attended medical school later in life and had to serve in an underseved community to pay for her government loans. She stayed for thirty years providing medical care to the very underserved residents of Tallahatchie County. The clinic staff told me they always looked forward to those letters. They would take them to the conference room and spread them around so that everyone could look at them. Sr. Anne graciously replied to each one.

The first-graders were always excited to hear about our trip and never failed to remember us in their moring prayers. Last Friday, I had the pleasure of teaching first grade at St. Sylvester School in Logan Square, and asked them to take up that responsibility. So we look forward to their prayerful support this week.

This is our twentieth year making the trip down, and my twelfth. We have seen lots of houses built, lots of progress made, and some of it lost right back. Things tend to move in a positive direction, but slowly and sporadically, and not often in that direction. But as Father Kevin Feeney pointed out a few years back, we have become part of the Tutwiler community and they in turn have become part of ours.

JD Smith has been the contractor for the West Tallahatchie Habitat program from the beginning. (Now if we can just get him to do something about the leaking roof in the volunteer dorm…)

Lorenzo is one of his relatives who has been showing up to help out whenever we come down for years, at least since I joined the team. When I first met Lorenzo, he was a skinny little kid. He is not any more. Lorenzo helps out on some of the Habitat jobs throughout the year but always shows up when we are here. At the end of the week, we put up a plaque with all our names on it, (more about that later) and Lorenzo’s name is on every one since I started. I gave him grief because he started texting other members of our team on our way down and forgot me.