AUMC represented on Texas Conference Partners-In-Mission (PIM) team to Nome, Alaska

AUMC is active in missions outside our local area this summer.  The youth participate in Big House and UM-Army.  A PIM mission work team is going to Costa Rica July 14th-22nd.  Our church family has been helping raise funds for this international mission trip as well as for the youth trips.

On July 5th-17th, Rev. Don White from our church is helping lead a PIM team going to the northwest coast of Alaska, the town of Nome which has a high percentage Native American population.

In that area, which has ice and snow on the ground for most of the year, summer months are the only time that outdoor construction, maintenance, and repair can be done.  This PIM team will be doing maintenance and repair work at Community UMC and the Youth Center in Nome, possibly building a tent-platform at the church’s fish-camp near the Bering Sea, and helping with maintenance and repair on homes of Native American elders in the church family.

Most often, mission work teams are made up mostly of people from one church.  However, the Nome team this year is quite a diverse team of eleven made up of United Methodists from Friendship UMC in Porter, St. Mark’s UMC on Pecore Street in Houston, 1st UMC in Angleton, and Atascocita UMC, as well as two people formerly from 1st UMC in Katy now of Grand Junction, Colorado, and two retired missionaries from the Navajo area in New Mexico.

After working in Nome for eight days, the group will spend two days sightseeing many things in the Anchorage and Seward areas before catching their return flights home.  Among the planned R & R activities are riding the Alaska Railroad through beautiful scenery between steep mountain peaks on one side and the waters of Cook’s Inlet on the other side, to the seaside town of Seward where they will visit the Alaska SeaLife Center, the fishing harbor and other sites, taking a boat cruise within 300 feet of the front edge of Portage Glacier.  In Anchorage they will visit the Native American Heritage Center, the Alaska Experience Theater, and shop for souvenirs.

Don will stay an extra week to travel to the Matanuska Glacier Valley where he will join with two Volunteer-In-Mission teams from Ohio to help build the log home of Jim and Bernice Hitchcock on their homestead.  Jim was the on-site construction foreman at Birchwood United Methodist Camp at Eagle River, Alaska, in 2007 when Don and a Texas Conference PIM team along with an Ohio team built the log Native American Sweat Lodge on the Birchwood campus.

Don White served as a pastor in the Texas Annual Conference for forty years.  In retirement, Don and Vivian have become (unpaid) certified Individual Volunteers-In-Mission with the General Board of Global Ministries.  A big part of their time since retirement has been involved with Partners-In-Mission, serving not only in Alaska, but also at Mount Sequoyah United Methodist Conference and Retreat Center in Fayetteville, Arkansas, and at SIFAT (Servants In Faith And Technology) in Lineville, Alabama, a training center for missionaries going to Third World countries and people from those countries to come learn simplified technologies to take back for use in their own country.  Last summer 2009 our AUMC youth participated in the Youth Learn and Serve Camp at SIFAT.

Since 1999 Don and Vivian have been participating, leading, and for nine years coordinating Texas Conference Partners-In-Mission teams to Alaska.  He says they easily got started because at the time their daughter Susan and Scott Sandlin, now AUMC members, were living in Alaska for thirteen years and Don & Vivian would stay over after a work team to visit with Susan and her family.  They have served on mission work teams to Fairbanks, to Unalaska on the Aleutian Islands, Chugiak, Nome (three times), Anchorage, Homer, Juneau (twice), and Sitka.  Don says the best way to see Alaska is to be part of a mission work team.  You get to work and visit with the local people, usually sightsee in the local area in the evenings, plus two days of R & R at the end of the work time.  On cruise-trips you are usually limited to a day or even a few hours in a port town, and usually basically limited to shopping at the cruise-lines-owned stores around the port.  On mission trips you are involved with the local people.

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Don & Vivian White
832-794-8162 – cell