By Kathianne Boniello
It’s a bit more than 1,400 miles between McPherson, Kansas and Douglaston, but the distance seemed like nothing last week when seven volunteers from the tiny Midwestern town paid a visit to the Alley Pond Environmental Center’s Winterfest activities.
Part of a group calling themselves Kansas Volunteer Aid, the seven Kansans who visited APEC last Thursday are part of a larger goodwill mission to help and support New York City after the Sept. 11 destruction of the Twin Towers.
Although most of their time has been spent in and around Manhattan working in soup kitchens, shelters and at Ground Zero, some of the group passed through Queens as well.
Some members of Kansas Volunteer Aid — who paid their own plane fare and have been sleeping in shelters and churches — visited APEC, helped out with a holiday party for seniors at SNAP in Queens Village, and have been spending their nights in an Astoria church.
Surrounded by noisy, happy children last Thursday at Douglaston’s APEC, where Winterfest included arts and crafts and roasting marshmallows, volunteer Jana Koehn of McPherson, looked tired but happy.
“We wanted to do something,” she said of her choice to come to the Big Apple. “It’s been a great experience.”
Enough people in McPherson wanted to “do something” for New York, Koehn said, that the current group of 30 volunteers is actually the second to travel to the city.
An impromptu effort at Thanksgiving had inspired so many people in and around McPherson to make the trip, Koehn said, that some volunteers had to wait for the second time around and come to the five boroughs at Christmastime.
True to the spirit of the holiday season, the volunteers also made the trip bearing gifts. The group has arranged to get work socks and lip balm collected by Kansas schoolchildren to workers at Ground Zero, and a company back home donated sleeping bags for the volunteers to use during their stay. The sleeping bags will be given to the shelters the volunteers stayed in when the group goes home.
Wearing bright red sweatshirts that read “Helping New York One Hero at a Time,” the volunteers showed Queens kids how to make picture frames from popsicle sticks, construct paper puppets and paint Winterfest flags.
For most of them, their five-day trip to New York, which had been jam-packed with volunteer activities since they got off the plane at LaGuardia Airport Dec. 26, was their first.
“Flying into New York over the lights at night was just awesome,” Koehn said with a smile.
McPherson, situated on the sprawling flat plains of central Kansas, is a quiet town of 14,000 whose economy is shaped by wheat and oil production. It is 70 miles north of Wichita.
Between helping children sort out paints for their arts and crafts Anna Zernickow, of Abilene, said her first trip to the city was “way cool.”
“It’s been wonderful,” said Zernickow, a high school journalism teacher in Kansas. “Just walking down Times Square and seeing every walk of life — it’s been an adventure.”
Watching the volunteers help clean up after an afternoon of messy fun, a smiling Dr. Aline Euler of APEC had just one thing to say.
“I’m just awestruck by all this,” she said.
Euler said she was contacted by the group about two weeks before they came to New York and had been in touch by e-mail before they made the trip to APEC last week.
Through all the excitement of visiting New York and working to help those in need, the volunteers admitted last week there were a few bumps in the road as they missed their first Long Island Rail Road train to Queens from Manhattan.
Volunteer Kelli Dossett said: “It’s just exciting for us to ride the subway and navigate the city.”
“It’s a little scary because of all the transportation,” Zernickow said with a laugh.
Reach reporter Kathianne Boniello by e-mail at Timesledgr@aol.com or call 229-0300, Ext. 146.
