Being a Worry Buster – Neighbors Helping Neighbors

Who said “Hey! Isn’t this just the best thing we’ve done in a while?”

Members of Appalachian Zen House joined a dozen members of Martha and Julian United Methodist Churches for a morning of work for neighbors who had requested assistance - weeding a steep bank and covering it with a mulch with strong whisky aroma, shifting furniture, using donated carpet to mulch a nursery of young trees intended for the ball park, painting shutters, and cleaning up the community garden.

We enjoyed:

• meeting new delightful neighbors (in addition our current door knocking activities  in the local trailer parks, pubs, and other local venues, about our Local Fresh Food Alliance)
• a wonderful church breakfast of eggs, toast, crispy bacon, muffins, fruit and coffee,
• learning about local activities and resources eg where cheap clean compost is available,
• receiving a luminous spring green Worry Busters T-shirt each,
• being donated a strip of carpet to make floor mats for our camp and for meditation,
• promoting face-to-face our teen summer camp, and Local Fresh Food Alliance,
• being able to volunteer to give government-supported free summer lunches to children and teens at a nearby trailer park,
• learning that the only fresh vegetables the kids eat are carrots, cucumbers, and celery,
• meeting the minister who runs four of the local rural churches in series each Sunday.

We didn’t enjoy initially:

• an encounter with poison ivy – but the outcome was less itchy than expected.

Certainly! We will be returning to bust worries with our Methodist neighbors again in the fall.