‘Making sure the community stays together.’ Pine Mountain honors COVID Heroes
The Chipley Historical Center in Pine Mountain opened a new outdoor garden exhibit honoring COVID-19 heroes on Sunday, June 26.
The center received a $19,500 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities that funded this project along with others, spokesperson Rachel Crumbley said.
The exhibit is currently honoring two groups of heroes, Pine Mountain’s Bethany Baptist Church and the Pastor’s Pantry of the First United Methodist Church, who worked to decrease food insecurity in the community during the pandemic.
Additional COVID-19 heroes in the Pine Mountain area will be selected this fall, Vice Chair Cindy Bowden told the Ledger-Enquirer, and will change three times a year honoring different types of heroes.
The next group will include firefighters, ambulance drivers and police officers, she said, and the center is currently asking for nominations for the third group of COVID-19 heroes.
“I think it’s our job as a history museum in this area to make sure that you not only remember people like Horace King back in the 1800s,” she said. “But you remember that there are people now that are heroes. That people are movers and shakers making sure the community stays together.”
Delivering meals after COVID closes the church
Several members of Bethany Baptist Church worked together to make and deliver meals to homes when many of the church’s elderly members were unable to access food.
Josephine Bray is the church’s treasurer, and her husband Curtis Bray serves as chairman of the deacon board. The two were worried for members in their community when the pandemic began and the church closed for about six to eight months, Curtis said.
“We had people getting sick right here in our neighborhood,” he said.
When two families who lived near the Brays caught COVID-19, the couple worked with other members of the church to deliver meals to the families. The group would leave meals on porches since they could not enter the home, Josephine said.
The organization continued to deliver food to people who were unable to go to the grocery store or were struggling financially for about two months at the start of the pandemic. Some of the people who received food cried because they were thankful about what the church was doing, Curtis said.
“We want to keep (this organization) together because we don’t know whether it’s going to ever happen again,” he said. “But there’s always people that need help. So, if it translates from one emergency to another one, we still want to help.”
‘One little, tiny spot’
In 2019 a tornado moved through southern Pine Mountain, leaving some residents in need and First United Methodist Church’s small pantry completely out of food. The church’s pastor asked Lorraine Berry to be the director of the Pastor’s Pantry, and she agreed to build up the pantry.
“Then we found out that we could shop at Feeding the Valley Food Bank,” Berry said. “And that was a godsend.”
The Pastor’s Pantry operates with about four volunteers and is open every Monday. If people are unable to come on Mondays, the pantry will leave bags of food for the church’s administrative assistant to hand out.
“When COVID came out, we felt like we still had to go one because more than ever people needed food,” Berry said.
The pantry was careful about creating social distance and wearing masks. Rather than allowing people to come into the pantry, they had clients wait in the lobby and brought them full bags of groceries.
Helping to ensure homebound people have access to healthy food is one of Berry’s priorities. During the pandemic she began helping to bring food to four homebound people every month, and knows another woman who began coming to the pantry once a month to pick up food for a homebound friend who would tell her what he needed over the phone.
“She fills up his bags,” she said. “And I think that makes her special too. She’s taken half of her day to do this for them.”
Being honored by the exhibit for the pantry’s work throughout the pandemic is important because it is a reflection of the job the Pastor’s Pantry is doing, Berry said. She hopes the exhibit raises awareness about the pantry so more people can take advantage of the resource.
“We are just one little tiny spot here,” Berry said. “(We are) one room feeding people, and we could feed way more.”
