McWhorter Gives Back

by Thomas Phillips
 

When students attend McWhorter Elementary School in Carrollton, they get an education. This spring, they gave one.
 

Two second-grade classes mentored by Timothy Smith, who attends Bent Tree Bible Fellowship when he is not on the road as a truck driver, collected coins to buy school supplies for students in Uganda. Smith and other members of Bent Tree’s Uganda 1 team delivered the purchased supplies — and a carload of other materials donated by the school — during their mission trip in May.
 

“It’s just really neat seeing how, even through kids, God’s arms are stretched from the east to the west, to the north to the south, how he can connect us — especially the little children,” Smith said after the team returned to the U.S.

 

Smith had told them about the team’s upcoming trip and asked if they could donate anything so they could participate in the trip. He was thinking of clothes and toys. Instead, they hosted a coin drive.

 

The second-graders collected $290. 

 

 

Unbeknownst to Smith, while he was mentoring the students and they were collecting coins, another Uganda 1 team member approached the school for help. Elisa Laird thought it might be worth a shot to ask the for extra school supplies. 
 

McWhorter responded again. Instead of nickels and dimes, the school opened up a closet full of unused supplies. School staff member Nanechka Sawyer said she would put out a list of needed supplies and ask parents for help.
 

Laird, who is on the Bent Tree staff, thought she would receive a small amount of supplies from the school. When she went to pick it up, she was overwhelmed.
 

“I literally had six or seven boxes of stuff — and it was heavy,” Laird said. “I was shocked.”
 

She stuffed her Toyota Camry with curriculum, posters and other supplies.
 

For Laird, the abundance of supplies was a moment of love reproducing itself at the school. Bent Tree has been pouring into the school, and now the school was returning the love.
 

“They care just as much about what we were doing as we do about what they’re doing,” Laird said.
 

The mass of supplies, which included pencils, pens, metric rulers, erasers, pencil sharpers, colored pencils, highlighters and four-packs of crayons, eventually found their way into the hands of grateful grade-school students in Uganda. The Bent Tree team stuffed the supplies into individual drawstring backpacks — called hampers in Uganda — and gave them to the children at the Village of Hope school.
 

“The looks on their faces when they opened up the backpacks and saw the pencils and the pencil sharpeners and the rulers — they were just so excited,” Laird said.