Lower 48 volunteers lend their hands to Valley service projects

MAT-SU — After months of fundraising, 39 volunteers from seven states will spend the week in the Valley lending their hands to a dozen service projects.

Amy Hughes made the trip from upstate New York with a group of 15 youths and four adults. It’s her first time in Alaska.

“We started raising money in December to get here,” she said.

Through Thursday, Hughes will be painting the exterior of MY House in Wasilla with a group of six volunteers. She said she was especially excited to take on the project because she works at a homeless shelter back home in New York.

“This is a neat concept,” she said of MY House. “I can’t wait to take some of these ideas back with me.”

Local volunteers Jim Faiks, Cathi Kramer, and Stephanie Vitt with the Faith Bible Fellowship in Big Lake organized this end of the trip and in conjunction with the non-profit LifeTree Adventures, which is part of Group Missions out of Loveland, Colo.

Vitt said she was working as staff for LifeTree on a 2005 mission trip to Tyonek when she met her husband and eventually moved to Alaska. Now she’s volunteering to facilitate its trip July 12-19.

Camp Maranatha director Terry Livengood is providing lodging for the group this week.

In addition to the painting project at MY House, program volunteers also are working at the Knik Tribal Council Fish Camp on Fish Creek, building a retaining wall for a veteran, helping to repair a hangar at the Big Lake Airport for a non-profit organization called Alaska Missionary Aviation, and spending four days making repairs to senior Lily Empie’s home.

Empie is an elderly widow whose home was destroyed by fire more than a year ago. Volunteers will spend four days making repairs and finishing up a project to move a house to her lot off Mile 50, Parks Highway.

Pail Wolski, an employee with Greenstreet General Contracting, said that company moved the house to Meadow Lakes from its former location near Arctic and Tudor in Anchorage where it was built in 1959.

Empie was born and raised in Ukraine until the Nazis forced her family into forced labor in Poland and later in Germany during World War II, Vitt said.

The seven volunteers working at Empie’s house will repair Sheetrock damaged in the move, touch up paint and siding and make other repairs to make the residence a comfortable home for her.

Mike Krantz, who works for Life Tree and is leading this Alaska adventure, said this trip is made up of roughly equal numbers of adult and youth volunteers from Arizona, Colorado, Nebraska, New York, North Carolina, Virginia, Washington and Wisconsin. He said the non-profit began organizing home repair missions for interdenominational groups of youth in 1977. He said the trips are an avenue for people from various denominations to share their faith through their actions. Krantz said the non-profit also received strong support from Spenard Builders Supply and other local businesses.

Volunteers will spend their last day in Alaska exploring the Talkeetna area, Hughes said.

Contact Heather A. Resz at 352-2268 or heather.resz@frontiersman.com.