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A mission worth taking up
BY KELLI CATANA
Staff Photographer
I’d never met any of the volunteers at the North Country Mission of Hope until today, so I had no idea what they did, but once I heard what they had to say, it made me think.
Over the past few years that I’ve lived in Plattsburgh, I’ve heard many stories about the Mission of Hope.
One of my good friends told me about a family who came to Plattsburgh from Nicaragua with nothing and worked their way up, living what sounded like one of those American dream stories.
I got the assignment at around 11 a.m. and drove out to Sharron Avenue. I stopped at two places, trying to find where I was supposed to take a photograph of some of the volunteers. Finally, I came to a discreet building that looked like an old warehouse. The paint was chipping off the outside, and there was a rusty lock on the door handle; it almost looked scary.
I opened the door, and about 15 bright and smiling faces confirmed that I was in the right place.
I met Sister Debbie Blow and Marty Mannix, both Mission of Hope volunteers, and they told me a little bit about what they did and what kind of items they sent.
One thing that really stuck out to me was something that Mr. Mannix said, “We’ve become a vehicle where instead of throwing things away, we send it somewhere it will be put to good use.”
For example, some of the things they cleared out of the old Plattsburgh Air Force Base hospital five years ago are still being used at the children’s hospital in Nicaragua.
For anyone whose traveled abroad, like I have, words like this hit home, especially when you’ve seen a mother holding her sick child begging on the streets and families living in alleyways and parks.
As Americans, we take so many little things for granted. Having a paper and pencil to write down a thought, clean clothes and running water are nothing special to us, but in other places around the world, they are luxuries.
I can’t remember where I heard it but someone told me they were abroad once and someone told them they knew they were American because they only wrote on one side of a piece of paper. That, for me, is so telling about how wasteful we are as a society.
There are a lot of charities around the North Country, and all of them support a good cause, but I think that because these people are taking things that we would normally throw away and putting it to good use, it is special. It keeps usable items out of landfills and puts them into the hands of people who could use them.
This photograph is important to me because, even though these folks were hard at work packing bags, they were all smiling.
They know they are doing a good thing, and I agree.
