12/25/2002 - Program gives gifts to inmates' children

By Shirley Wentworth
Herald Basin bureau

OTHELLO -- There was a time Paula Laing wouldn't have been caught dead in the same room as a prison inmate.

Yet it was a prison inmate who turned around her perspective. As a result of her acquaintance with an "incarcerated person," as she puts it, she realized he was a member of the human race, too.

Hearing his story about how God changed him and sustained him throughout his prison sojourn changed her, too. It even brought her to church. She hadn't really believed in God one way or another.

"I needed that slap on the head," she said.

When the Rev. Bob Luhn was asked if his church would participate in an Angel Tree program, a nationwide outreach through Prison Fellowship Ministries to collect gifts for the children of prison inmates, he asked Laing if she'd coordinate it.

For Luhn, the request was a bit of a surprise. He hadn't heard of the program but immediately recognized inmate children belong to a pretty well-forgotten segment of society. Still, he also was surprised to discover there were a lot more inmate children in the area than he had expected.

The program was started 20 years ago, under the umbrella of the Prison Fellowship Ministry, by Mary Kay Beard, who was formerly wanted by the FBI and the Mafia. The FBI found her first, and it was during her prison sentence that she saw how much it meant for children coming to visit their mothers during Christmas to receive a present -- even if it was just a tube of sample toothpaste. It meant they were loved.

Through the Angel Tree program, about 60,000 inmate children nationwide are remembered at Christmas. Between 6,000 and 7,000 of them are in Washington.

That first year for the Othello Church of the Nazarene, 1998, Laing took on 15 Basin children. This year she and her husband, Bill Laing, whom she married about a year ago, began with 38 children in Othello, Basin City, Mesa, Connell and Warden. They were all finished up with those when the state coordinator asked if they'd take on an additional 41 unspoken-for children in Moses Lake.

"People (in the congregation) got gifts on two days' notice. They had them all covered," she said.

The Angel Tree committee brings the names to the congregation at the beginning of December. Luhn's sister, Mary Luhn, also serves on the Angel Tree committee with the Laings.

"By the end of the 8:30 and 9:30 a.m. services that morning, all the names were scarfed up," Bob Luhn said. "The same thing happened with the Moses Lake names."

Although people are asked to provide one fun present and one practical present for a child, oftentimes they get swept up and go whole hog with the things they buy and provide. Sometimes a family even "adopts" another entire family, Bill Laing said. More than anything, he said, the program is about relationships -- helping maintain the relationship between prisoners and their children, the relationship between the household members of a prisoner and the relationship between individuals and God.

Although Paula Laing often finds out a lot about families when she calls to find out if a family wants to participate and what kinds of gifts are needed, she usually doesn't know much about the inmates themselves.

"I have absolutely no idea what any of these people are incarcerated for -- murder, robbery, parking tickets -- I don't know," she said.

And it doesn't matter to her. She knows enough when she gets the emotional thank-you letters and phone calls from inmates who reported what it meant to be able to be on the phone with family members Christmas morning, hearing their exclamations as they opened presents.

The inmates are in for a different experience, too.

"Their mentality is that if something is given to them, there's strings attached," he said. "This is done completely out of love."

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