“We love our porch, it’s really nice,” Vickie told Americans Helping Americans® staff on a visit to McDowell County last June. “Y’all have done a lot for us.”
Chester Ball is an accomplished bluegrass musician living in McDowell County, where Americans Helping Americans® partner, Big Creek People in Action (BCPIA), is currently operating its home rehabilitation program to help enable individuals like Chester and his wife, Vickie, remain in their homes thanks to our generous supporters.
BCPIA Executive Director Dyanne Spriggs told us that Chester has been volunteering his time and talents for nearly two decades, “for almost every work group that stays at BCPIA to come play music.
“He drives himself and the band members from over an hour away to perform for our groups and tell stories about Appalachia.”
BCPIA operates its home rehab program utilizing grant funding from Americans Helping Americans® to purchase shingles for new roofs, drywall for interior work, lumber to repair porches, and construct (often very elaborate) handicap ramps.
Dyanne and her staff organize the volunteer groups – for the most part, church groups and college students – who come to spend a week working to help people in need who may be strangers on the first day, transform into friends by the last.
BCPIA strives to give the volunteers a taste of the “Appalachian experience” in the evenings following the long workdays, and Dyanne always knew she could count on Chester to entertain and educate the volunteers in the evenings.
Then the time came when it was Chester and Vickie who needed help.
“Our group rebuilt his porch and built a handicap ramp because they were having issues getting up and down the steps due to health issues,” reported Dyanne.
“I had some needs,” Chester told us, “And they stepped up and helped me.”
Chester told us that some 25 years ago, he became acquainted with BCPIA following the major flooding in McDowell County in 2001, and that’s when he started performing for the volunteer groups.
“I saw their good deeds,” he says.
Vickie commented that she “really appreciates the younger generation” of volunteers, such as college students who spend their spring break week helping others instead of partying on a beach in Florida. “I really admire them.”
One of those college groups that Chester performed for in 2004 was from Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire – nearly 900 miles from McDowell County in the southernmost tip of the state.
Among the songs that Chester would’ve played for the Dartmouth students was “Muddy Water,” written by West Virginia singer and songwriter Alan “Cathead” Johnston “about two horrific back-to-back 100-year floods that tore through McDowell County in 2001 and 2002,” reports West Virginia Public Broadcasting.
“They heard it, and they loved it,” recounted Chester.
In fact, so much so, the Dartmouth students returned to college with a mission – to have Chester travel up to Hanover to perform a concert for the student body.
Now, the students assumed that Chester, who at that time had “never been outside West Virginia much,” would just hop on a plane and fly up, but he wasn’t having any of that.
And as he wasn’t too inclined on driving all that way, the students figured out how to get him and Vickie to come up on a train.
He received a stipend, along with train tickets, meals, and all expenses covered for the trip.
“We had a great time,” he said, with Vickie commenting, “They eat a lot different up there.”
