BELFAST, Maine — Lynne Andrews and her family live in a Cedar Street fixer-upper that they haven’t really been able to fix up. Her husband is handicapped, and Andrews suffered a heart attack about 10 years ago.
“There’s just so much that can’t get done,” she said Thursday.
So when a group of willing volunteer teenagers offered to do a week’s worth of work on her home this summer — for free — it seemed like the answer to her prayers.
“It is a huge blessing,” she said, while admiring the newly painted and repaired porch and the power-washed walls of the house. “It is absolutely incredible. I can’t even express what it means to us.”
The four youngsters who have been painting, hammering and otherwise helping at her home since Monday are participants in Swan Lake Workcamp 2010 with nearly 400 other youth and adult volunteers,. They came from all over the country to take part in the project organized by the Loveland, Colo.-based Group Workcamps Foundation and Swanville Community Church.
During the week, the teens are split into 65 crews to do carpentry, painting and roofing projects around Belfast. While many of them had little to no hands-on experience, by Thursday they felt like old hands.
“Random kids from across the country can work just as good as work crews,” said a proud Logan Max, 15, of Littleton, Colo.
Max and the other teens at the Andrews home said the front porch had warped steps and the back porch sagged dangerously. But not anymore.
“It looks so much better now,” said William Brewer, 15, of Libertyville, Ill. “I feel really accomplished.”
Rachel Parrish, 18, of Gastonia, N.C., said that the group has worked so well together that even though they only met Monday, they’re “like family now.”
“It gives us something to be proud of,” she said of their work.
Mike Keyes of Swanville Community Church said church members have been working for two years to bring the work camp to the Belfast area and that they were inspired to do so because of the needs they saw in the community.
“We’re a small church with no big bank account,” he said. “People were coming to us, asking for help heating their homes. You want to help in a relevant way.”
People in need of a helping hand applied to be part of the summer project, he said, or were recommended by their own churches or other organizations. Although the applications trickled in slowly at first, in the end more than 130 people asked for help.
“I think it was hard for some people to believe they were going to get work done on their homes for nothing,” he said.
The church also had to find a place for the volunteer army to stay and to raise $19,000 to pay for the locally bought building supplies. Through fundraising activities such as indoor yard sales, auctions and more, organizers secured about $20,000 in pledges and donations.
“There were a lot of doubts — ‘Can we do this?’” he said about the endeavor. “Now I think I’m going to be in trouble if we don’t do this again.”
The volunteers have been sleeping in classrooms and eating meals at Troy Howard Middle School, where they’ve been appreciated by the Mainers who are helping them.
“A Troy Howard lunch lady was in tears the other day,” Keyes said. “She didn’t want them to leave. We’ve been getting that over and over again.”
The participants also brought nonperishable food with them for a massive food drive, he said.
“There’s a real effort to all-out bless the community,” Keyes said.
Jeff Bettinger of Hingham, Mass., is the director for Group Workcamps. The organization has been working for more than 20 years coordinating the Christian service camps around the country, he said, and has three main goals: to make sure everybody’s safe, to allow the teens to focus on spiritual growth and to get the project done.
“We’ve got a program that changes lives,” Bettinger said.
Those changed lives include the teen and adult volunteers as well as the residents who benefit from the labor of love, he said.
Olivia Andrews, 9, who lives in the Cedar Street house, bounced around the teen volunteers, smiling up a storm.
“It’s awesome,” she said of the work done on her home. “It’s really nice. They even made it so it’s more sturdy. I won’t have to jump over the top step now, cause it’s not falling off anymore.”