The Garden City Telegram

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Holiday meal fundraiser helps pay for mission trips

Published 11/27/2009 in Local News

By SHAJIA AHMAD

sahmad@gctelegram.com

Exactly 149 plates were cleaned off Wednesday night at the Trinity Lutheran Church, 1010 Fleming St., during its annual Thanksgiving meal, the sixth year the church has hosted the community get-together.

Donations for the turkey, mashed potatoes and gravy, corn and green beans and hearty helpings of pie brought in about $890 from dinner guests, netting nearly $400 for the church's activities.

The dinner-style fundraiser also provides a venue for those who want to share a meal with others on the festive occasion, and the church has seen between 150 and 200 guests each year since it has been opening its doors during Thanksgiving for the past six years.

Garden City residents Joyce Miller and Larry Smith aren't Trinity Lutheran churchgoers but have been coming to the meal for four or five years, they said.

"The meal and the people is what brings us back every year," Joyce Miller said, as she finished a slice of pumpkin pie with a dollop of whipped cream. "I'm just finishing this up, and it's almost too much -- too much -- but it's too good."

Almost every type of pie imaginable -- apple crumb, lemon merengue, cherry, pecan and pumpkin -- were baked by volunteers, and brought in about $70 at the end of the night when leftover pies go home with dinner guests.

The funds each year subsidize the costs of "servant-trips" to Louisiana and Mexico for the church's area high school and college students and other church volunteers, said Leland Jackson, the church's director of Christian education for 17 years.

This year, the funds will benefit another mission trip to New Orleans in early January and a National Youth Gathering for churchgoers in July.

This is the third year that Trinity churchgoer Carol Wigner will be heading south to help with a local Lutheran Hurricane Katrina rebuilding effort.

Wigner said that last year, she and her group retextured and repainted a home for a Louisiana woman, a former emergency dispatcher who told Wigner that they gave her back "hope."

"It's so rewarding what you get to do for people," Wigner said. "Anytime you volunteer or give, you're receiving. What we get in return is not just the trip, but it continues on."

Even after the monetary support from the dinner fundraiser is figured in, the mission trip volunteers pay a few hundred dollars out of their own pockets for gas and meals along the way, Wigner said.

Hurricane Katrina, which put an entire metropolitan area under water, hit the southern coast in August 2005, displacing hundreds of thousands of people. More than 1,800 were killed, and the fiscal impact of the damage stands at about $80 billion, according to government estimates.

Efforts to rebuild in the coastal area were hampered by Hurricanes Gustav and Ike, which hit the Southern state coasts in August and September 2008, respectively, doing damage in the tens of billions of dollars, as well.

The Corporation for National and Community Service, the nation's largest grant-maker supporting service and volunteer advocacy organization, estimates that more than half a million volunteers have contributed more than 7.8 million hours to the relief, recovery and rebuilding efforts in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

**

The original version of this article, which appeared in the Telegram Nov. 27, 2009, incorrectly identified the name of a dinner guest, Larry Smith. An appended version appears above.

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