Church group's work on home a prayer answered

An emotional Claire Henderson talks to the group about how much she appreciates their work at her house on Thursday. (Lebanon Voice/Harrison Thorp photos)

LEBANON - Seventeen-year-old Katie Commers of Minneapolis, Minn., spent less than a week in Lebanon, but the time she spent here will leave a lasting impression on a Lebanon family for years to come.

Commers was one of hundreds of young people who gathered at Noble High School a week ago today to begin a five-day mission to spruce up houses for folks who needed a helping hand.

Claire Henderson and her husband, Robert, of Center Road, Lebanon, were one of those families chosen, said Tony Matta, a group leader who used a double-crew to paint the entire exterior of the Henderson’s home, plus weather-strip two doors and build a sill for one of the doors.

The church-oriented groups that arrived to do the work hailed from all over the East Coast and Midwest, including Connecticut, Michigan, New Hampshire, Minnesota, Maryland, Virginia and Pennsylvania.

Matta, Commers, plus hundreds of teenagers and chaperones were all part of an effort put together by Group, an interdenominational, Christ-based assemblage of various churches and religious groups that go around the country to do the work of the Lord one house at a time.

Katie Commers, left, of Minneapolis, Minn., looks over at Claire Henderson as she talks to the teenagers who helped scrape and paint her house on Thursday as Tony Matta, background blue shirt, looks on.

For Commers, who will be a senior at Visitation School in Mendota Heights this fall, it meant a 28-hour bus drive from Minneapolis to Boston before arriving at Noble High a week ago.

“The boys sleep in one gym and the girls sleep in the other,” she explained Thursday as her group took a break from applying primer to the Hendersons’ hillside home.

The teens and their chaperones slept on air mattresses, ate food from the school cafeteria and fanned out each day to do the jobs they were assigned.

In all, 56 crews descended on 51 sites to spruce up, paint, repair and rehabilitate dwellings in Lebanon, York and North Berwick among other towns, said Matta, who added a double crew was used on the Hendersons' home due to the size of the job.

Matta said he loved the rural nature of Lebanon, but said he loved even more “being able to connect with people you would never have met who are so cool.”

Besides meeting people like the Hendersons, Matta, who has been a leader for many of Group’s outings, said teens and chaperones never know who they’re going to be working with until the week’s assignments are drawn.

“We met for the first time on Sunday, then we were off and working as a team the next day,” he said on Thursday.

For Commers, who traveled the farthest of anyone in the group at the Hendersons’ work site, the worst part of the job was “the scraping. I didn’t like that at all,” she said with a grin.

The best part, she said is seeing the appreciation with which their hard work is received.

“The faces of the people that we’re doing this makes all the work worthwhile, because you know you’re actually helping people,” Commers said.

And did she have anything to say about her experiences with the folks of Lebanon and southwest Maine?

“People talk funny,” she said. “They make fun of me, say I talk funny, but they do, too.”

The dialects may have been dissimilar, but Claire Henderson spoke eloquently enough so everyone knew where she stood.

“You don’t know how long I’ve been waiting for them to come,” she said as the group took a break and gathered around in a circle before her. “I’ve been waiting for a long time for them to come, and I was praying they would come and my prayers were answered. They are a great bunch of kids, they’re my family and they mean a lot to me and they’re doing a wonderful job.”