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Of hammers, nails and dilapidated homes
 Leslie Andres
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The sun slowly rises over the Appalachian Mountains, its warming rays creeping toward the wooden buildings of Camp Andrew Jackson in Jackson County, Ky.
Some 100 students awaken to start a brand new day filled with activities that will, to say the least, tire them out by day's end.
Sounds like a nice summer day at a nice summer camp. NOT!
The truth of the matter is that the scene I just described was experienced in the middle of spring break. Yes, you read right � spring break. And the students I'm talking about are college students.
Let me start from the very beginning. Every year, Christ Church Newman Center arranges alternative spring break trips for SCSU students. One of these trips was to Kentucky and I was one of the lucky ones to choose to go on this trip.
March 8 saw nine of us leave for Kentucky in a van. We spent the night at the the University of Notre Dame before leaving the next day for Camp Andrew Jackson.
Camp Andrew Jackson is a summer camp site run by the Christian Appalachian Project, a non-denominational Christian organization founded 50 years ago. CAP has over 70 programs for the less fortunate in Kentucky. One of these is WorkFest.
WorkFest is a four-week program that recruits college students to help repair the homes of people who do not have the money to hire professional help. CAP fronts the money for materials and a third of it must be repaid.
The students each spend a week �their spring break week � doing various repairs to the homes, which are usually in such bad condition that they would normally be considered unfit for living in. All in all, there were eight project homes for us to work at in Owsley County, which lies adjacent to Jackson County.
We arrived at the camp after a long, long drive. Apart from the regular CAP volunteers, we were the first ones there as the other students were scheduled to arrive the next day.
One of the first things I noticed about Kentucky was that the grass was green! This, of course, was a marked difference from good ol' St. Cloud, Minn., where snow still covered most of the ground. Heck, we heard that we had just missed a huge storm that dumped a ton of snow the day before.
The next day saw about 90 other students join us at Camp Andrew Jackson. We were divided into eight teams to work on each project and were introduced to one another.
March 11 was the big day, though. My team, the purple team, was to work on Floyd and Martha Sandlin's home, situated about an hour's drive from camp. Floyd was a truck driver who was unable to work after injuring his back on the job. The Sandlins bought their home two years ago, unaware that it was in bad condition.
We arrived at the Sandlin's home that first morning feeling a little apprehensive. At least I was, anyway.
I took a quick look at the house and thought that it didn't look too bad. CAP volunteers Jonathan Stokdyk and Bud Cairns, our crew leaders, had explained to us that we were to work on repairing the Sandlins' roof, windows, bathroom, porch steps and floor insulation.
So we set about working on the roof and the windows first. Half of the roof had been completed by a group working the week before us, but it was still hard work for those on the roof.
As for me, I was one of a few who began replacing some of the windows. Two days later, I was on my hands and knees, crawling under the house putting in insulation for the floor.
By the time the week was up, we left the house almost 75 percent completed, I dare say. And there were still two weeks of WorkFest left.
It was a lot of hard work, but it was the most fun I have had in a long time. The friendships built and the satisfaction gained are more valuable than 1,000 spring breaks anywhere else.
It is an experience I highly recommend to anyone willing to experience it. Not everyone, I know, will want to spend their spring break doing work instead of partying it up somewhere fun. I fully understand, of course.
But this is still something that I think everyone should experience at least once in their lives.
Try it. You might just like it.
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