If you happened to be shopping at the Gilroy outlets this week,
you might have noticed a new young man in town named Shem busily
trying on hundreds of different hats.
If you happened to be shopping at the Gilroy outlets this week, you might have noticed a new young man in town named Shem busily trying on hundreds of different hats. He is visiting Gilroy from his faraway home of Wales, a beautiful country across the vast Atlantic Ocean. When I went there last summer with other Gilroy volunteers, we worked at the Amelia Trust Farm, a 160-acre working farm with classroom facilities, gardens, a kitchen, a gymnasium, a recording studio, an area of wetlands that is being restored, a wood shop, a silk-screening area and a pottery room in which a local artist teaches in exchange for use of the shop.
On the “challenge course,” an obstacle course for students in which they must work together, it is impossible to finish the course by one’s self – cooperation is essential in order to surmount the obstacles.
The Farm was founded by the formerly poor servant-class Robert and Ethel Huggards, who eventually pulled themselves out of poverty to become extraordinary philanthropists. They established their school for abused and troubled youth as both a model for other charities and a church in its own right, having as its director the Reverend John Stacey Marks, to whom Prince Charles presented the MBE, Britain’s highest honor. Amelia Trust is not a church in the conventional sense, but a church of the outdoors, a church whose healing is in its natural setting, in its hands-on work ethic, in its cathedral of pond, tree and garden, and animals who love you no matter who you are or what you’ve experienced in life. The Farm is a living tapestry of opportunity for these kids to find a better chance in life.
And so, in the spirit of cultural exchange, six Welsh people from the Farm have come to spend 10 days with various Gilroy people. When our team of volunteers went there last year to work on projects to improve the facilities at the Farm and make new things possible for the students there, the idea of some of them coming over here to see where we live in Gilroy and to tour the area was just a dream. Since that time, they have worked hard to raise funds to come here, and Gilroyans have raised some money to help as well by holding a car wash. These spirited young people arrived on July 3, just in time for a good old-fashioned American Fourth of July celebration replete with food, flag and fireworks.
Various Gilroy youth will be joining them throughout the week; high school students Kristina Pena and Jeremy Kirchner spent part of the weekend doing volunteer work with them at a new church in Oakhurst (near Yosemite). Gilroy’s John Quincy Adams and his wife Melissa will be hosting them in their home for much of the week, and they will do some volunteer work around town.
It is planned that they will tour Alcatraz, go whale watching (yes, people from Wales, watching real whales!), go deep sea fishing, and conclude the week with a Hawaiian Luau at Arline Silva’s house. The youth will travel to San Francisco to participate in hands-on work on St. Anthony’s, where 3,000 homeless people are fed each day. They may be surprised to see that even in America, not everyone has enough to eat.
The goal is not just to work hard, but to make connections between our community and theirs, between our culture and theirs, between our country and theirs. It’s all about relationships. Volunteer work is not foremost about building buildings – it’s all about building relationships.
