• non-perishable foods (canned tuna, fortified pasta, peanut butter, and powdered milk are particularly desirable)
• infant clothing (summer-weight cottons only, please)
• nonprescription medical supplies such as band-aids and antibacterial creams
• prenatal/children’s vitamins
• school supplies

Also, if you or your company has a laptop to donate, these would be put to very good use at the school. Items can be placed in the designated box located in the parish hall during the month of October.

For a more complete list of needed items, please see the bulletin board in the parish hall. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to reach out to Lauress or Debi.

The hospitality committee invites all to bring a Haitian dish for a potluck. If you don’t have any Haitian recipes, we will provide some (a great activity to do with your kids!). But don’t worry, Haitians also eat sandwiches, salads and fruits. A sign-up sheet for the potluck is on the bulletin board.

Workshops will cover a range of topics from stewardship, youth ministry, raising anti-racist children, mission and outreach, communications, business practices for churches, etc. Terry from COS is moderating a session on “learning from our roots” with the rectors of two of the oldest churches in the diocese: St. Michael’s Marblehead and Christ Church Quincy. This is a continuation of her work on the connections between the Episcopal Church and the economic benefits derived from slavery.

The fee for the day (includes lunch) is $15. Go to diomass.org and register online!

Thursday, January 14 – Rev. Lily deYoung
Thursday, January 21 – Bishop Thomas Shaw
Thursday, January 28 – Rev. Lily deYoung
Thursday, February 4 – Bishop Thomas Shaw

The House will likely be taking up budget vetoes on Tuesday, July 14, so we are planning a State House call-in day for Tuesday.

Please spread the word and mobilize those you know to call their Representatives and Senators on Tuesday, July 14th, to support maintaining health coverage for 30,000 Commonwealth Care members whose coverage is in jeopardy.

Find the phone numbers (and e-mail addresses) for your state legislators here: http://www.mass.gov. Making just two phone calls will probably take less than 10 minutes, total. If you can’t call on Tuesday, please call any other day early this week. Most legislators also have voice mail–you might be able to leave a message. And staff members often work late–don’t assume that calling after 5 p.m. won’t work. Please try.

And, then, I talk to my neighbors Ellen and Dennis. They have fallen in love, passionately and actively in love–with the people of Farato, a small village in Gambia, one of the poorest countries in West Africa.

Here is how it started. Ellen is an artist. Her husband Dennis, a Vietnam veteran, is retired. Both are in their early 60s. They own a large house and decided to host foreign students studying in the United States. One of these students was Biran Sallah, from Gambia, the smallest country in Africa and a former British colony. Both Ellen and Dennis enjoy traveling and decided to visit him in Farato when he returned home. They had never been to Africa before but they expected that they would see real poverty and they did. What they did not expect to discover was how easily they fell in love with the people of Farato, not as victims but as real individuals with families, wanting the best for their children.

There was a problem in Farato, however. The nearest school was six kilometers away and that was a long way for the children to walk back and forth each day. Dennis asked why the children didn’t just ride a bicycle to school liked he had done as a young boy. he reply? There was no money for bicycles; the average income in Gambia is only $350. Dennis nodded and then fretted … “if only these children had bikes”… and when he and Ellen returned home, he decided to fix up the two old bikes stored in his garage and to ship them to Farato. Ellen organized the photos she had taken in Farato into a slide show and at our neighborhood pot luck dinners she showed them, telling the story. One of the neighbors wanted to help but had no bicycle to offer. Instead she suggested raising money to buy bikes and, well, the whole thing snowballed from there. Ellen set up a web site and arranged a fundraiser at a local restaurant. Progress is being made. Right now 25 village children have bikes and attend school for the first time. There are 77 others waiting for their bikes so that they, too, can go to school.

Ellen and Dennis continue to visit Farato–in this African village, these two ordinary people who live on my street in West Roxbury are enabling kids to go to school. In the process, they have been changed as well into advocates for outreach and connection across continents. All it took was a willingness to fall in love.

I invite you to take a look at Ellen’s photos at www.futureforfarato.com, and to keep their work in your prayers. I invite us all to be open, too, to those unexpected loves and places where we, ordinary people, can serve as the hands of God.

– Terry Hofmann
Terry is the author of a series of occasional columns in our newsletter in which she shares with COS her continuing journey in formation as a permanent deacon. Terry has been a frequent contributor to Loaves and Fishes, often writing about mission, service opportunities, and linking us to interesting talks and events. Her columns will continue this tradition and give her free rein to talk about whatever is on her mind and heart.

That which my brother sought to show me gradually came in to view as we walked along the sand. The emerging image was that of a small neighborhood of homes nestled on a narrow peninsula between Bridgeport Harbor on one side and Long Island sound on the other. What began as a remote outline of shapes in the hazy distance now stood in hard and silent relief against the late winter sky.

The neighborhood was abandoned. Walking off the sand of the beach path onto the hard, broken blacktop of what was once a main street, we entered a world of silence and sadness. Sadness because there were no longer any people to enjoy the beauty and tranquility of the nearby ocean. The now empty homes stood ransacked and disheveled by time and neglect. Turning to Jay I asked the simple and obvious question “What happened?”

In 1996 a fire destroyed the only bridge that made this area accessible by car from the mainland. Since then, the only access to the area is via the long walk made by my brother and me along the barrier beach. Without adequate access to the mainland for emergency vehicles and services, the town of Stratford concluded that the neighborhood was not safe for habitation. Failing to secure the money necessary to rebuild the bridge, the residents of the neighborhood were forced to abandon their properties. This lovely community, once home to families, an amusement park and a summer theater company were left simply to decay and die, an anachronism of a seemingly simpler time.

Perhaps not. There is talk among residents and political leaders in the area to either invest in and renovate the land for local use or sell the land to the federal government. Either way requires rebuilding the bridge to the mainland. The usefulness of this beautiful area for people is contingent upon its accessibility to people.

Your vestry is actively engaged in a similar process. Right now, there is active and engaged discussion of how we can make our church more accessible. Not just to people with disabilities, but everyone, without exception. And it is more than just talk. As a first step, we on the vestry are working diligently to install a ramp so that accessibility to the church is not limited to those who can negotiate stairs. Factors of design, placement and installation of the ramp are all being carefully weighed and considered. Ensuring that what is conveyed visually by the installation of the ramp preserves what is important to us all as a community are all hugely important in our deliberations. The installation of this ramp is long overdue and, like the rebuilding of the bridge to the beach community in Connecticut, is vital if the Church of Our Saviour is to continue to be a place where God is accessible and useful to the people of the community which it serves.

Lent, I think, is at least in part about the same sort of thing. It is a time when we are called to abandon the clutter and clatter of busy lives that have a tendency to cut off our access to God. The journey of Lent is often like a long walk along a path of sand. The steps we take are often heavy, weighed down by the pain of grief, loss, and those whom we must release when once mutual paths diverge, leading each in separate directions. The footprints we leave in the sand say much about where we have been. The long walk of Lent allows God to gradually come in to view and restore our access to God thus allowing us a glimpse of what is to come in the celebration of Easter.

– Allen Whitaker, Co-Warden