Treading softly.

We had five places to choose from and I chose Appalachia. My student union was sponsoring alternative winter breaks, and in my senior year of college, I felt I was ready to be a volunteer. I could have helped out in a Washington, D.C., soup kitchen or aided migrant workers in Texas. But I wanted to learn about Appalachia, and I was intrigued by the host organization's affiliation with the Methodist Church.

I'm not Methodist and I don't consider myself religious. Until last winter, my contact with organized religion had often left me with a bit of acid in my soul. Devout people, I thought, were those who felt more righteous than the rest of us, and who proved their righteousness by seeking out "evil" members of society. It made me particularly uncomfortable to listen to anti-abortion activists who seemed less dedicated to saving unborn babies than to chastising women who dared to make their own decisions.

But my two weeks in Chavies, Kentucky, with the Appalachian Service Project, a nonprofit home-repair organization, neutralized my antipathy toward religion. Like many of my fifteen fellow volunteers from the University of Wisconsin, I was wary of any attempts at religious conversion, but the ASP staff taught without preaching: no prayers at meals, no church on Sunday.

I thought I would find in Appalachia people who were in need of financial assistance and donated labor from volunteers who usually lived in comfort somewhere else. I knew the trip was supposed to be educational for me, but I hardly expected to learn more than I could give. I found, however, that the people of eastern Kentucky practiced an ethic of looking inside and looking after each other that they called Christian love. It wasn't the "Christian love" televangelists and pro-lifers spout. The lesson was universal and empowering, not damning and cruel. It resided in ASP's ability to take the resources of the community and use them to keep wind and rain out of the homes of people most in need.

When a blizzard brought Chavies to a standstill, the residents didn't stand around wondering when the plows would come; they gathered at the town gas station and pooled tire chains. And to make sure those walking on the main hill wouldn't slip, one man sprinkled ashes on the snow.

One friend of the ASP staff worked with the Hazard Perry County Community Ministries. Like ASP, that organization had grown out of a religious community and worked to provide such basic needs as shelter, food pantries, and child care. She spoke simply of her work, finding fault with no one, finding the possibility of solutions within us all.

In the local cemetery, with the blanket of snow deepening the silence, I found a place to piece my thoughts together. Standing there, I could look across clusters of markers commemorating people who were related, who had known or known of each other. And I could look across at a mountain whose top had been blown off to uncover a layer of coal.

Looking down at the small town, I felt intrusive. I knew that the people of Chavies had welcomed one volunteer group after another, most of them affiliated with religious organizations. Each group had to learn, I suppose, that the reason unemployment reaches 50 per cent in this region, the reason people don't have the means to repair their own homes, the reason coal mining can continue to rape the land is not just that there is corporate greed and governmental apathy. It's also that our lifestyles demand it. We enjoy and blindly expect cheap electricity, we want cheap aspirin, and cheap textile dye--all of them made from coal.

There in the cemetery I came across something I hadn't expected when I chose Appalachia. The people in this place, the people I had heard were so desperate for help, weren't asking for salvation. They weren't proclaiming a Gospel. They simply taught me to tread a bit softer, and to remember that despite the isolation of the mountains, despite the alienating rhetoric of those who claim to do "God's work," we all share this world together.

I walked back to the center knowing that whatever my faith, there is a benefit in believing. But it comes from knowing the solutions are inside.