The Dark Side of Small-Town Life

I'm a city girl. I was born in a city and spent most of my previous career working in an even bigger city. When I came to a small town to pastor a church, I thought I knew a little about small towns because I had lived in a town with a population of 47,000 twenty miles outside the big city. I didn't know squat. I had been living in a bedroom community of a city, with all the amenities of a city close at hand. And 47,000 is NOT a small town. A small town of 6,000 people is a whole 'nother ball game.

To complicate matters, the local area where I live now is one of the poorest in the state. And when you live in a poor area, housing prices are low, property taxes are low, and there isn't any public money available for some of the things you take for granted in the city.

My little church has been blessed in the last year to be hosting a group of developmentally disabled adults during the week. There are six or eight adults, with a supervisor who is training them to do meaningful work. They use our education building, which otherwise would sit empty all week long.

Great. But then we started to have plumbing problems. The toilets would overflow every time we had moderate to heavy rain. And in our part of the state, let me tell you, we are famous for getting a lot of rain.

We had a plumber come out. He did what he could. We got someone from the town to check the town's side of the sewer line. The upshot of it all seems to be this: years ago, maybe in the 1940s, the town installed "temporary" sewer lines under the streets. And after sixty years or so, "temporary" just can't handle the rainwater anymore. I don't think rainwater and household wastewater are supposed to be in the same line, and excess rainwater should not be making toilets back up, but I am not a sewer expert. I just know that the experts are telling me the rainwater is backing up our toilets and when it rains, you can't use them. And we have people in wheelchairs, working all day long at our church, and they can't use the bathroom on a rainy day.

My personal solution to the problem is to go home from the church office. I live out in the country, and I have a well and a septic system. No problem. At least not yet. But the folks working at our church don't have that option.

I'm told the town doesn't have the money to fix the sewer lines. "There is nothing we can do," they say. "Many areas of the town have this problem. We just can't afford to fix it." And if I can get past my outrage that the town can't seem to find the money for as basic a service as this -- and let's face it, this is a public health issue and darn well ought to be a priority -- I take a deep breath and stop and remember how poor the area is. And if they say they don't have the money, well, they probably don't. Big cities have budget crunches too, I know, but not this bad. In a city, the newspapers and the television stations jump on the bandwagon and keep pestering and embarrassing the city officials till some budgets get juggled and the problem gets addressed. In a small town, nobody has that kind of clout. At least, I don't think so.

But I'm not giving up. I used to be a journalist, by golly, and one of our favorite expressions (now kind of quaint in the era of the Internet) was, "Never pick a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel." I'm going to do a little legwork here and try to figure out what I can do. Some people think all the minister should do is preach on Sunday and visit the sick, but this one comes under the heading of social justice. People living in a community deserve basic services. And a sewer system that works is one of them.