NMCC ships gifts to Miss. college ‘Presents for Perkinston’ brings holiday spirit to flood victims

PRESQUE ISLE – A local college’s desire to aid people hurt by Hurricane Katrina helped make Christmas bright for children and their families in a Mississippi community.

Earlier this month, Northern Maine Community College shipped 425 presents and a children’s playhouse to Perkinston, Miss.

According to college officials, there couldn’t have been a better way to celebrate the holiday season.

“This has just driven home to our campus community more than ever that this is the season for giving and that the value of giving is more important than receiving,” said Karen Gonya, NMCC spokeswoman and one of the project’s many organizers.

NMCC “adopted” Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College in Perkinston this fall after Hurricane Katrina devastated the region. The plan was to make a personal connection with the institution, which is similar to NMCC in size and programs.

To help the college, NMCC staff and students set up the “Presents for Perkinston” drive and a trip in February to help the Mississippi campus community clean up and rebuild.

For Presents to Perkinston, NMCC officials gathered everything from bicycles to stocking stuffers and built a wooden playhouse complete with cathedral ceiling, a porch and window boxes. Naturally Potatoes shared the shipping costs and Dexter Cowperthwaite of N.X.E. Transportation drove the trailer truck full of toys to Perkinston.

Guy Jackson, NMCC residential construction instructor, said Friday that it took 12 of his students about a month to finish the playhouse for the MGCCC day care center – on their own time nights and weekends. Most of the materials for the 41/2-by-7-foot playhouse, which is about 7 feet high, were donated by Rathbun Lumber, S.W. Collins and MPG. The finished project, with handmade flowers in the window boxes, a moose head above the front door and a mailbox with a Christmas card inside, barely fit into the tractor-trailer.

“To me, the best part was when they [the students] would come in and say, ‘Are we going to work tonight?’ And I’d say, ‘Yep.’ And they’d say, ‘Well, I’ll be in,'” Jackson said. “I think there was a lot of pride in one college helping out another.”

Other staff and students are staying busy with fundraising for the February trip. Nikki Hallett, a member of the Alpha Beta Gamma business honor society at NMCC, came up with the idea and said Friday that the group was close to its goal of raising about $8,000 for the trip. Participants already have bought the $3,847 in airline tickets needed.

Nine ABG members and their adviser will fly out of Bangor on Feb. 20 to spend a week in Perkinston, helping staff members paint and clean up. The college’s officials have asked them to bring safety eyewear, leather gloves and sleeping bags. The students will live in campus housing. Hallett said she and the others taking the trip are eager to help people there clean up and put their lives back together.

“We’re all talking about how this is going to be a really good experience for us,” Hallett said. “We have our winter storms up here, but we can’t even come close to understanding what they’ve all gone through or the devastation of having everything taken away from you.”

NMCC officials hope the trip and the gift drive will help ease that sense of devastation.

“This was really about giving to people who wouldn’t have had any gifts at all at Christmas,” Gonya said of the drive. “There’s this whole idea of the magic of Christmas. Children have their beliefs in Santa, and you can’t just say, ‘Boy, Santa just can’t come this year because we had a flood.'”

The Mississippi campus received the truck shipment of presents on Dec. 13, and, according to Gonya, everyone was thrilled.

“Thank you for your tremendous outpouring of goodwill for the children in our college family,” Mary Graham, MGCCC dean of instruction, wrote in an e-mail to NMCC officials. “It is amazing how much one college can do when they focus their efforts.”