October 1, 2001
Destination changed for ministry in New York
___By George Henson
___Staff writer
___COPPELL--Airline tickets originally purchased to celebrate a Texas Baptist pastor's 40th birthday were changed into tickets to ministry after the Sept. 11 attack on the World Trade Center.
___Jaletta Parsley had bought the tickets to take her husband, Larry, to Seattle for his birthday. But after the terrorist attacks in New York City and Washington, the pastor and his wife didn't feel like celebrating.
___So Parsley suggested to her husband, pastor of Valley Ranch Baptist Church in the Metroplex, that she wanted use the tickets for ministry in New York.
___"We e-mailed Gary Baldridge (co-coordinator for global missions with the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship) that we had plane tickets that could be transferred to New York City, whenever he had a need for volunteers," she said.
___She expected the need would be in weeks or months to come, but instead the call came immediately. So Parsley and a friend, Melissa Helm, flew to New York City Sept. 22.
___The two women thought they would be helping New York residents fill out forms necessary to receive monetary relief from a victims of crime fund. Instead, they initially served as liaisons with the Salvation Army and a local restaurant to set up future ministry efforts.
___They also delivered cards, letters and pictures from school children in Coppell to a fire station that had lost 15 of its crew.
___"That was probably the most painful moment of the trip," Parsley said. "The firemen were standing there next to this poster they had made with the pictures of the men who had died on it. There was this steady stream of people coming by to tell them how much they appreciated them, and they were very gracious, but the pain was evident on their faces."
___Helm agreed it was an emotional experience.
___"You felt moved to tears, but at the same time, you felt that maybe not being a native New Yorker you shouldn't cry--like you should try to be strong for them," she said.
___They then teamed up with Lower Manhattan Residence Relief Foundation to help residents of a largely elderly area near Chinatown.
___The Texans went door-to-door in low-income high rises checking on residents.
___"This is a largely impoverished area with a lot of elderly people there," Helm explained. "And since it is so close to Chinatown, there are a lot of people there who only speak Chinese or Mandarin. There also are many Hispanic people, along with some whites and blacks."
___While not in close proximity to the World Trade Center, the area still was without telephone service two weeks after the attack. One of the women's primary ministries was letting people use their cell phones.
___"Many of these people were afraid to come out of doors. Some could see the pictures on their TVs, but did not really understand what was happening," Helm explained. "They also had no telephone service so they could talk with relatives, which scared some of them even more."
___One of the women they met struck a resonating cord with both the Texans.
___"Aunt Ethel, and that's what she insisted we call her, is a 93-year-old fiercely independent woman," Parsley recalled.
___She had been staying with family but insisted they take her back home, not knowing her apartment had no telephone service.
___"She couldn't call her health care provider, and since her body is riddled with arthritis, she needed our help," Parsley said.
___"The remarkable thing about Aunt Ethel was that she didn't complain the whole time," Helm added. "Basically all she had in her house to eat was crackers. She had 10 to 12 prescriptions, and four of them had run out, and she had no phone to call the pharmacy or her health-care provider who not only helped her around the house but did her shopping for her. She called us her 'angels from Texas.' She was sure God had sent us to help her, but he had taken care of her all her life."
___They called her health-care provider, got her prescriptions filled and treated her to a fried chicken dinner.
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