Mountains of Pride

Mountains of Pride

Written by: Yours Truly

“Make sure you take notes on this film, you may need to know some of the information for next week.”  Professor Bleach began the film “Stranger With a Camera”, directed and narrated by Elizabeth Barret, who was a native of the Appalachian Mountains.  The content of the film; explaining how a man from out of the area, was killed for trying to take a native man’s picture; gave me a chill down my spine as I began to realize how poorly the people of the Appalachian Mountains are most of the time portrayed by reporters and people that feel the need to judge them. 

            Because the film angered me so much, I decided to look deeper into the controversy reporters in the past have had with the way the people have been living.  I found mostly mixed reviews, which gave me hope that there are other reporters and writers that actually know the truth.  However, when I discovered the quote “Not only is Appalachia the embodiment of poverty in a rural, normatively white population, it provides potent imagery of what is wrong with the poor (Duncan 1999).  it saddened to me to think that there were people in America that were so misinformed. 

For eight summers in a row I have gone on the Appalachia Service Project (ASP), and every single year I come back a different person than I was before I left.  ASP is a service project that brings volunteers into the 24 county area along the Appalachian trail.  The staff members assign the work crews from each church a family that is in need of help, and a house that is in need of repair.   Through this trip, members of my church and I have been to West Virginia, Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Alabama.  Every year I meet people that change me for the better, and for that I am thankful. 

Every night on ASP, during Evening Gathering (EG), the staff members provide some sort of activity for the volunteers.  Normally, every Tuesday night they have us divide into our work crews and give us scenarios that are common among the households ASP helps.  The statistics are most of the time more alarming and scary than most of the volunteers can imagine.  Approximately 26% of the population lives at or below the poverty line, and 55,541 households have an annual income of less than $10,000.  Everyday necessities that most of America takes advantage of, are lacking in many of the households.  Some of the statistics include that 4,341 housing units lack complete plumbing, 2,382 homes do not have complete kitchens, 31,236 households do not have a vehicle, and 19,254 cannot afford a phone.   

However, what the families and individuals lack in material possessions, they make up for with spirit.  The people of the Mountains exist in a different culture than the rest of America.  They may own very little, but unless they were to present you with information on how much money they make a year, or how much they were able to eat that day, you would never realize how unfortunate they were. 

This past summer, my work crew worked on a man named Carl’s house.  Carl had taken in at least twenty stray cats and dogs that other members of his community had brought to him.  Knowing that if he didn’t feed them, they wouldn’t survive, Carl told the staff members that he’d rather feed the animals and know that they weren’t starving, than feed himself.  This is the information that my work group read in our Family folder, complete with what needed to be done to the house, and extensive information on Carl.  Before even meeting Carl, I knew it was going to be a good year on ASP.  From what we already knew, he was the typical person one would find in the mountains.  Approaching his house the next day, it didn’t appear to be in horrible shape as I had imagined it the day before.  The stairs that led up to a big blue porch were whole, and the door could close.  On the porch stood an older man with, just as we had read, about twenty cats and dogs surrounding him.  Assuming it was Carl, we all walked up to greet him.  As we did this, a spry fox terrier jumped up to his feet to stand in front of the man and greet us as well. 

“Hey there! “ Carl walked over to us and greets us, as we each shake his hand and share our names.  Carl takes us around the front of the house to the side room he had enclosed by a door with no window.  We walked inside and found a bare room with dirt for a floor and nothing but plywood for walls.  As I looked deeper into the room, I could see that it was connected to the main part of his house.  There was an open doorway, covered by a sheet.  A cat jumps through the open part in the door leading to the outside and runs into the house.  That’s safe. I thought to myself.

“Now the ASP people told me that this week you folks were gonna put in the floor for me.  I guess they’re gonna come later, but I just really wanted to tell you how thankful I am that ya’ll are doing this for me.”  It was then that I realized how much I wanted to help this man. 

Throughout the week we developed a strong bond with Carl and the animals that he had been feeding.  My friend Kyra and I had become attached to one puppy particular, that by the middle of the week, we had named Bella.  Carl tried convincing us to take her home, but we knew we’d never be able to.  The information we had read in the folder about his feelings for the animals was true.  Every day we’d see him throwing whatever he could out in to the yard.  Sometimes it would be bread, other times he was able to find cat food.  For lunch our work crew packed peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and every time we would offer him a sandwich he would say thank you, but he couldn’t accept it.  

I learned a lot from Carl that week.   He always made sure the animals were fed, even though he didn’t have the money to do so.  He didn’t have a way to completely close his house, but he was just grateful to have people help him, and made sure we had everything that we needed. 

When we left that summer, we felt like we always did.  There is something about the people of Appalachia that is contagious.  Once you see how little they have, how happy they are, how much faith they have in God, and how much they cherish family, it brings you back to reality and makes you realize that money truly isn’t everything. 

Watching “Stranger With a Camera” gave me mixed feelings.  I felt angry for the way some reporters choose to portray the Mountain people, and happiness because once again I was being reminded of the people in general.  They have a different way of life than most of the people in America.  Not only are they happy, but they have a simple way of looking at life.  They’re passionate for their Blue Grass music.  Songs are passed down through generations, and new ones are written every day.  This also helps keep their family bonds strong.  It’s refreshing to see how they live outside of a material world.  What accessories or phones they have doesn’t matter to them.  The people of the Appalachian Mountains live with integrity, pride for what little they have, a faith in God none can match, and are thankful for their families that they know they can depend on for anything.      

Websites and Citations

http://asphome.org/learn_about_appalachia/overview_of_poverty

Mary K. Anglin.  “Lessons from Appalachia in the 20^th century: Poverty, power, and the “grassroots”  ProQuest.  Vol. 104.  (June 2002). Issue 2. 18 pgs.  Periodical article.