Pastor Copeland took us out to see the site of a small brick and mud house whose roof was blown down and walls broken and nearly washed away by a rain storm earlier this year. His young parishioner and her sister lived in the house and survived the storm. They are staying in temporary quarters until the house gets repaired, which apparently won’t happen until building materials and labor can be found. Copeland asked if our team could rebuild it. We assessed the damage and prospects for rebuilding the house, but it was beyond our capacity. WorldHope Corps will consider sponsoring the project if a donor can be found.
South Central, Los Angeles, was the neighborhood in the city where Communities of Shalom began in 1992. I met Marx Gutierrez from El Salvador who was there attending High School at the time. He remembers what happened at the corner of Florence and Normandy Streets in South Central, LA, when Reginald Denny was pulled out of his truck and beaten while the crowd looked on and the police did nothing; and how the Rodney King beating resulted in a not-guilty verdict for the police and resulted in a major, 3-day uprising in the neighborhood, until the National Guard came in and finally imposed law and order. He can still remember the fires, the bright orange night sky, the mass looting, 45 unsolved killings, the social chaos...And how the United Methodist Churches responded by creating a zone of shalom in 7 neighborhoods of Los Angeles. Today, Marx is a community organizer, and married to Jennifer Gutierrez, Conference Shalom Coordinator in the Calif-Pacific Annual Conference, and Rev. Vilma