Motor City Makeover

This summer has seen a host of Gonzales residents travel to remote and exotic places to take part in various church mission trips in order to help communities rise out of hardships. For five members of the First Evangelical Lutheran Church of Gonzales, the rebuilding effort they undertook was right here in our home country.

Church youth members Cody Oakes, Jacob Burek, Kaitlin Cappleman and Alexis Cappleman were participants in the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America’s (ELCA) Youth Gathering. It is a mission held every three years that see upwards of 30,000 youth meet in a city to do a common good.

This year, the Motor City saw the congregation converge in an effort to tackle the blight that has befallen parts of that community.

The hometown troupe was escorted by two students from Texas Lutheran University and church elder Elgin Heinemeyer. He has attended several ELCA Youth Gatherings and enjoys the mission and message from the event.

“We had a good time,” he said. “We left on a Tuesday and came back this Monday.”

The initiative was in partnership with Focus: HOPE, an organization looking to improve the rundown sections of Detroit through community effort. The focus was on land surrounding the HOPE Village neighborhood where thousands of these ELCA young volunteers worked with residents to “clean up vacant lots, board abandoned homes, and introduce new rain gardens, public art, and trees to the neighborhood,” as described by the Focus: HOPE website.

In the lead-up to their arrival, the city did their best to fix street lights, patch potholes and raze dilapidated structures to prepare for the improvement invasion.

Heinemeyer explained that the kids had several jobs to choose from like clearing lots of debris and painting over graffiti on abandoned buildings. Others created murals on boards that would be placed over the empty windows.

Police closed off streets so that the massive group could walk from their home base to their work and convention stations. Authorities were careful to direct the crowd through the better part of town, leaving the seedy sections for someone else.

Detroit news outlets reported that together the youth gathering cleared 1,000 vacant lots of debris, boarded up 100 vacant homes, removed 500 tires and mowed 20 acres of land. It is all part of a long-term plan to better the lives of people in the area.

But is wasn’t all work for our hometown delegation, for the students were able to see a few sights, like peering across the river into Canada, and attending daily services at Ford Field, home of the Detroit Lions football team. There they heard from leaders, inspirational speakers, participated in workshops and interacted with various Lutheran colleges doing their best recruiting.

And with that many high school students in town, you can imagine a few of the challenges the city faced.

“We just about ate the town out of food,” Heinemeyer said.

The trip was made possible by donations that were solicited throughout the year at the church. This Sunday, the travelers will have their chance to get up and tell the Gonzales congregation just what their money bought.

“We’ll have a bunch of pictures on the big screen,” Heinemeyer said. “I really enjoyed it. We had a good time.”