Some mission groups travel to places such as Haiti, Mexico or Guatemala to provide a boost to the less fortunate. A group of local adults and young people, however, found a chance to make a world of difference this summer in nearby West Virginia, which has one of the nation’s highest poverty rates. “You would have never thought that would have been in the United States,” said volunteer Scott Wallace, a sophomore at Penn Hills High School. “I didn’t know it would be that bad.” The group from Monroeville United Methodist Church spent a week with World Vision, a Christian relief and development organization. They joined 140 volunteers from Ohio, North Carolina and South Carolina to improve residents’ homes. The local group’s projects included building a 20-by-24-foot deck on the home of a woman whose mobile home burned earlier this year, building a 16-by-8-foot deck on a local pastor’s mobile home, splitting firewood for winter heating and cleaning debris. Under a big tent, the volunteers led daily Bible school for youngsters in Wallace, a town of about 150 people with another 100 or so living on the outskirts. As they slept on the floors of a gymnasium and classrooms at a junior high school outside Clarksburg, the volunteers were reminded of how different life is just 150 miles from home. The volunteers had to ride more than 10 minutes along a potholed gravel road to reach one home, said Bethany Beale, a junior at Plum High School. “We take a lot of things for granted,” said Andrew Dotterer, a Gateway High School student. “They don’t have the luxuries we have.” “They don’t know if they’re going to have food the next day,” added Emily Pearlman, a Plum High School freshman. Carol Morris of Murrysville, a Penn Hills High School math teacher who led the trip with her husband, Pete, a Westinghouse engineer, said the goal of the mission trip is to help lift people out of the conditions in which they are living. “If you give somebody a fish and they don’t know what to do with it, they’re not going to cook it,” Carol Morris said. “The hope is the community will bond together and finish some of these projects.” In a week’s time, the volunteers formed a bond with Sue Counts, 50, a former cancer patient who needs shoulder surgery. Her mobile home was destroyed by fire in February. World Vision provided her with treated lumber to build the framework of her house. Before the group arrived, she had finished putting on the rough-cut wood siding herself. The students were surprised to learn that Counts supports herself through “junking”: collecting and selling scrap metal.

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