Today Messiah Lutheran Church embarked on a new ministry. The carpentry team, which consists of veterans of Habitat for Humanity, decided that they needed a project to keep them busy during the off season. They teamed up with Care Assurance System for the Aging and Homebound (CASA) of Madison County to build wheel chair ramps. CASA currently has 55 elderly or homebound people on the waiting list for a wheelchair ramp. Today the Messiah carpentry team help scratch one off of the list. The lady we constructed a wheelchair ramp for today has been on the waiting list since April of this year.
For the last several weeks, the carpentry team has been preparing parts of the wheelchair ramp during Wednesday Night Activities. We joke with each other that this gives us something to do while all of the people with musical talents are participating in their activities.
Today was the big build day. We met at the Church at 7am and enjoyed a hearty breakfast prepared by Joe Stuart. We then loaded up the trailer and headed out to the work site. We were joined by Max Bennett who has built over 100 ramps for CASA. He showed us some of the finer points of ramp building. We expected the build to take about 4 hours, but the learning curve coupled with a few false starts and runs to the hardware store made the build last 6 hours. We are pretty sure that we can build ramps much faster now that we have a better understanding of the process.
Our plan is to build one ramp per month. If you would like to participate in a future ramp build, please contact Owen Wasmoen for more information.