By Valerie Baldowski
vbaldowski@henryherald.com

Twenty-one members of the Avalon Church are signed up for a trip to Jamaica, to spread word of the church’s mission to help others.

The volunteers from the church will tutor students, minister during Sunday church services, and help with projects on a “handyman” basis, according to Dusty Beach, the church’s executive pastor.

“We’ll really just be hanging out with the Jamaican people there, and doing whatever they need us to do,” said Beach, 28.

Focusing on international missions is not the church’s lone goal, Beach added.

Avalon, located at 1467 Ga. Highway 20 West in McDonough, is in the midst of planning its annual Easter ministry for needy families in the community. Five-hundred boxes of food, plus Easter baskets for children, will be given away on April 3.

“What we’re about to do now is what we’ve done for the past two Easter weekends on Saturday, which is to give boxes of food away to people,” Beach said. “We invite them to come here and pre-register for free, so we know how many boxes to have.”

Elsewhere around the globe, the church has involved itself in international outreach ministries, the pastor added.

“Our senior pastor [Ritchie Miller] just got back from South Africa not too long ago,” said Beach. “We had been raising money to support a children’s village in Durban, South Africa.”

The village houses AIDS-infected orphans, he said. Volunteers work with the South African government to locate individuals willing to adopt children from the village.

The volunteers headed to Jamaica plan to visit St. Mary’s Parish, one of the island’s most impoverished areas. Volunteers will come from the church’s 1,300 members, skilled in construction, personal care and teaching.

The age of the volunteers scheduled for the trip ranges from teens to older adults, according to Beach. “It’ll start at age 14, and go up,” he said. “My mom signed up, and she’s 61.”

Rachel McDaniel, the church’s events coordinator, said she loves working with children, and she hopes to focus on ministering to children during the trip.

“This is the first time I’ve ever been on a mission trip,” she said. “I’ve never been to Jamaica. I don’t know what to expect.”

She stressed the need to reach out to others.

“It’s more important than you can ever imagine,” she said. “It says in the Bible to help the poor, and that’s exactly what we need to do.”

Beach said the church is planning the trip for Sept. 11 through Sept. 18, through a company called The American Caribbean Experience, an Atlanta-based organization which works with schools and churches to plan trips.

“Most people have been on a cruise to the Bahamas headed to Nassau,” the pastor said. “If you ever get off the boat in Nassau, you can go a square mile away from where the tourist epicenter is, and you see it’s very poor, very low income. There’s not a lot of opportunity for people to make a living in those areas.”