Penn-Tucky connection: Project blesses Harrison City church, aid recipients

Apr. 23—There's a proverb that says if you want to be blessed, be a blessing to someone else.

Volunteers with the Kentucky Project at St. Barbara Catholic Church in Harrison City have proven that to be true.

Since 2006, the group has assisted poor rural families in eastern Kentucky by providing monthly food boxes, along with clothing, monetary assistance and other forms of aid.

They also tote down supplies for a day of food and fun at an annual reunion, which returned April 15 after a three-year hiatus because of the pandemic.

"We've been going down every month for 17 years," said parishioner Al Kustra, who leads the project with his wife, Barb. "Sometimes we get tired, and then there's another sign to keep on going.

"Where the holy spirit has taken it just blows our minds."

Seeds for the project were planted when a Franciscan sister from a rural Kentucky mission church visited St. Barbara in summer 2005 and talked about rural poverty in that area.

"The sister came looking to raise funds and visited quite a few churches in the area," Barb Kustra said. "When they stopped at our church, it really bore fruit for them, because we were similarly moved."

In the fall, a few parishioners gathered school supplies to ship to Kentucky, then followed up with a coat drive.

The Kentucky Project got underway with church members "adopting" four families to help in the areas around Beattyville and Campton, Ky., southeast of Lexington.

Involvement has grown over the years, with St. Barbara volunteers, either individually or in groups, now assisting 20 families. Each individual or group is responsible for one family.

Families are chosen for the program by Sister Susan Pleiss of The Catholic Church of the Good Shepherd in Campton, along with a local school resource officer. The family receives assistance until the youngest child graduates from high school, until their financial circumstances improve or until they move out of the area.

Each sponsor group commits to providing a week's worth of nonperishable food timed to arrive during the last week of the month, when shelves tend to be emptiest. Personal care items and paper products often are added to the boxes, and many sponsors provide gifts for birthdays and Christmas.

'Go where the need is'

In the early days, boxes were shipped through the postal service. About 14 years ago, the project connected with Christian Layman Corps in Greensburg to borrow one of its trucks, often driven by the organization's president/CEO Curt Hoffman.

"The Lord has given us beautiful trucks to use, and we go wherever the need is," Hoffman said. "There's no mileage between us and our neighbors — that's almost scriptural — and Kentucky is not that far away."

Recipients of aid tend to be grandmothers raising grandchildren, the disabled and the working poor, Barb Kustra said.

"They have jobs, they just don't pay well, and so they aren't able to support their children," she said. "My perception of rural poverty is that there is not the employment opportunity that you have in the city. There's not a fast-food joint on every block where you could at least get some type of employment."

By meeting basic needs, the hope is that children will stay in school, graduate from high school and thereby have better outcomes in life, Al Kustra said. They learned early on that many teens drop out of school because they are bullied about their clothing and poor personal hygiene.

The Kustras were surprised by some of the most-needed items, including socks, underwear and toilet paper.

"You can get good clothes at the thrift store, but you can't get socks and underwear," Barb Kustra said.

Al Kustra said he scoffed when someone donated a wringer washer, thinking that no one would want such an old-fashioned relic. It turned out to be "like gold," he said, because the wells at many rural homes don't have the water pressure needed to run a modern washer.

Breaking the ice

At the beginning, Kentucky Project volunteers had trouble breaking the ice with aid recipients. Children and adults alike were reluctant to engage in conversation or even make eye contact.

Al Kustra said he knew things were improving when a family was pulling away after receiving a food box and their daughter — who previously had been very shy with him — made her father stop the car.

"She said, 'I forgot to give Al a hug,' and she ran across the parking lot to give me a hug," he said.

In brainstorming ways to forge closer relationships, the St. Barbara group came up with the idea of hosting an annual dinner bringing the Kentucky families together with the Pennsylvania volunteers.

Over the years, the dinner grew into an all-day event called the Annual Penn-Tucky Family Reunion. This year's luau-themed event drew 120 people, including 16 from St. Barbara.

It was a little stressful, Barb Kustra said, because eight of the originally scheduled volunteers ending up not being able to make the trip.

"We worked really hard because I had jobs for 24," she said. "At the end of the evening, we were trying to clean up — and none of us are young — and I thought, what did I do to them, giving them all this work?"

Later, a volunteer related that a local woman remarked, "I was trying to imagine what this was gonna look like, and it's so much more beautiful than I could have imagined."

That made the effort worthwhile, Kustra said.

Longstanding commitment

"It is so good to know that the solidarity and bonds between the parishes and communities continues to be fruitful and life-giving," said Bishop John Stowe of the Catholic Diocese of Lexington. "I am delighted that this celebration continues and so grateful to our sisters and brothers from Pennsylvania for (their) longstanding commitment to this relationship."

Just as relationships have grown, resources have multiplied.

At the beginning, Al Kustra said, "We didn't have two nickels to rub together. We ran by the seat of our pants, and we didn't have any idea what we were doing."

He was encouraged on his first trip to Kentucky when the priest at the mission shared that he was born in Export and, as a child, had visited a little white church in a town that started with a "C."

"And I said, 'Claridge?' St. Barbara started in a little white church in Claridge. I said, 'OK, Lord, there's our sign.'"

Divine connections always seem to pop up, Barbara Kustra said. Nowadays, when there's a particular need, the money just seems to appear.

"When we started, and still, the main gist is sending food to our adopted families. Since we partnered with Christian Layman, it's ballooned so that we can now send furniture, clothing and household items for the community," Al Kustra said.

A man who heard about the program recently pledged a $500 gift to every student in the program who graduates from high school.

Money came in to help with cleanup and rebuilding after floods inundated the Campton area in 2021.

Hoffman said the Christian Layman "selfishly" benefit by association with the Kentucky Project. If there's extra room on the truck making the monthly run, they'll fill it with items for the thrift store in Campton.

"Things we do at Christian Layman Corps might not make sense to secular people," he said. "If somebody said, 'Hey, you're not making any money off of that,' we don't look at the dollars and cents, we just look at what the spirit is calling us to do.

"That's what makes sense to us."

Shirley McMarlin is a Tribune-Review staff writer. You can contact Shirley by email at smcmarlin@triblive.com or via Twitter .