The Sierra Service Project (SSP) is a work project sponsored by the United Methodist Church. Every summer, crews of teenagers head out to Indian Reservations in California for a week of weatherizing and repairing houses for people who because of physical or financial limitations can not do the work themselves. I have participated in SSP for the past five summers working on both the Hoopa and La Jolla Reservations. Every year the work is different, sometimes painting, sometimes caulking and occasionally putting on a new roof for a house that has burned. The people I have worked for have all been different also. Some choose to go on vacation while we are working, others sit around and watch us, but only one of the people I have worked for has ever worked right along with us sometimes working harder than anyone else on the work team.
I worked for the Willison family in the summer of 1986. Gary Willison, like about 90% of the people living on the Hoopa Reservation does not have a full time job, but he works wherever and whenever he can to support his family of eight and their many animals. Being unemployed, Gary could not afford to do all of the work needed on his house by himself, but he had no qualms about working with us once we got the necessary supplies up to his house.
Watching the expression on the face of Gary’s three year old granddaughter as she switched the lights on and off for the first time in her life made the whole week worth the effort.
The house Gary was living in had once belonged to the Tribal Doctor, but had been destroyed by fire in 1980. The Bureau of Indian Affairs considered this man to be important enough to rebuild his house for him. They commissioned a contractor to rebuild the house but he gave up before the job was entirely finished. The main body of the house had been built, but there were still a number of important details which needed to be finished. These details included building a cabinet around the water heater, installing insulation in the attic, putting skirting around the bottom of the house, finishing a drywall job in the bedrooms and sealing all of the seams on the outside of the house with lathing. This last job is what Gary helped out with the most. He completed one full side of the house after the rest of us had gone back to the school for the night. One other task that we all got a lot of satisfaction out of completing, involved installing light switches and sockets in the house. The house had been wired for electricity when it was built, but Gary did not have a generator to run any lights. While we were installing all of the light fixtures, we wired the house up to the generator which we had rented to run our power tools during the week. Watching the expression on the face of Gary’s three year old granddaughter as she switched the lights on and off for the first time in her life made the whole week worth the effort.
The work team, however, didn’t always mind being stuck by the side of the road as the abundance of blackberry bushes there kept our hands and mouths quite busy.
Getting the necessary supplies up to Gary’s house, however, was not always an easy task. The Willison house is seventeen miles from the school where we were staying and the last two miles of the trip were on a dirt road with a twenty percent grade. A number of times our cars simply could not make it all the way to the house. On one occasion my co-counselor was burned by boiling water when he attempted to check the radiator after one car overheated. Gary realized that we were running late that day and could be having car problems, so he drove down to pick us up and then drove us back to the school at the end of the day. The work team, however, didn’t always mind being stuck by the side of the road as the abundance of blackberry bushes there kept our hands and mouths quite busy.
Despite the fact that we were going to work, making it to Gary’s house was well worth the effort. The house stood near the top of a hill overlooking the Hoopa valley and from where we stood it appeared that Gary’s house was the only house in the valley. Gary and his family also did a lot to make us feel welcome and appreciated. The many dogs at the house always ran to greet us when we arrived and often sat beside us while we worked. Gary’s wife Pat also showed her appreciation by crocheting ski caps for each member of the work team in their favorite colors.
Remembering the week I spent working for Gary and his family make me feel that life is not as bad as it sometimes seems to be.
Working on the Sierra Service Project is always a meaningful experience for me, but it is made even more meaningful when I get to work for a person like Gary Willison. During the week that we spent at his house, Gary showed us in a hundred different ways how much he appreciated the work that we were doing. Knowing how much it meant to him that we were there, made the week a very special one for everyone on the work team. Of all the people I have encountered over the past five years, Gary was the first to really say Thank You for the work we had done even though we were the ones who wanted to thank him for caring so much about a group of seven teenagers who he would probably never see again. Remembering the week I spent working for Gary and his family make me feel that life is not as bad as it sometimes seems to be.