On June first our crew traveled for 22 hours from the Farm in Summertown, TN to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. Our project: to build an outdoor kitchen for the volunteers camp in the Slim Butte community located in the southeastern part of the Reservation. Every year, especially in the summer months, numerous volunteers from all over the United States and even some countries in Europe travel to Pine Ridge to work on different projects. After the farm School volunteer trip last summer, when we all experience the house flies by the thousands when we cooked and ate our meals, we realized a screened in kitchen was needed. We knew it would raise the health standards in the camp and hopefully make any volunteer’s stay on the Reservation more pleasurable so that they would want to return to help the wonderful people who live on this beautiful land.

This year our crew included too young men with carpentry skills—Louie Kachinsky and Sal Jefferson, along with Steve Skinner and his teenage daughter Julia, teenager and Kids to the Country staff member, Ryan Clark, and myself. Thanks to a grant to Plenty from the New Road Map Foundation we were able to cover our traveling expenses and construct a 12 foot by 20 foot pole frame structure using local cedar trees for corner posts and galvanized sheet metal for the roof. It is built strong! We don’t think those South Dakota winds will be taking it anywhere. We even joked that in this land where housing is so badly needed that someone might move in and make it their home!

We ran out of time and money to finish the job so plans are already underway to commence fundraising for a return trip to add a floor, walls, doors and windows, add a solar water heater, upgrade the outhouses at the camp and finish the nearly completed hemp house so that people can move in before the next winter..

We felt honored to work with the Lakota people. They welcomed us warmly, made us feel at home and shared their stories and land with us. On our last day watched a thunderstorm move slowly toward us for hours across the open plain. It finally hit with a fury at midnight. We were dry and warm around the campfire in our 28-foot tipi, but it is a storm we will all remember. To be in a canvas tipi during a heavy storm out on the plains of Indian Country feels like being tossed about on the high rough seas in an ancient schooner.

There are many things we will carry in our hearts from this experience and we are comforted by the knowledge that we will return and once again be with our Lakota friends. Was te (wash-tey)! It is good!

See updated article, Summer 2002