“I never thought this would happen to me.”
Fourteen-year-old Garrison stood in front of his North Carolina home, now cut in two by a fallen tree, and started to tell his story.
He paced in front of the gathered Generation Joshua students as he recounted the freak hurricane, the heavy rain, and how he had believed his dad was being paranoid when he woke up the kids and dragged them into the basement. The next day they had to hike for miles to safety because all of the roads out of their neighborhood had been blocked by fallen trees. Garrison had worn a pair of jeans so big he had to hold them up as he went (his own jeans were trapped in his room, where the tree had fallen).
My role as the director of HSLDA’s GenJ program, which engages teens and teaches them how to be involved citizens, always seems to put me in places that I never expect. I am no stranger to crazy stories, difficult times, triumphant successes, and charging forward into life at 150 miles an hour. But bringing 55 homeschool volunteers from GenJ to Asheville, North Carolina, to do hurricane relief work was more out of left field than normal (and that is saying something). On this day, I was wearing work gloves and standing in front of a condemned home, making sure hungry teens got three meals a day.
As Garrison spoke, his father listened at the edge of the crowd, and the look on his face told me that he too was hearing his son’s thoughts for the first time. He had told me earlier that afternoon that he was seeing his son in totally new ways. He noted that something seemed to click for Garrison when he saw our relief team show up.
Garrison recounts the night of the storm
The teens from New York, California, West Virginia, Florida, and other far-flung states had converged on Garrison’s home to remove thousands of branches from his yard, clear debris from the house, and cut fallen trees into segments to haul away. Whether it was the sudden realization of a young man seeing his place in his family anew or a growing maturity in the momentary light of observation, Garrison took ownership of the moment.