Chaplain Bruce Fowlkes
By: Eureka College Alumni
Tags: Christianity, Travel

I remember the excitement I had when I was first hired. I received a phone call from President Arnold about the job. I remember coming on campus for the first time, in the dead of winter, and driving on the campus and then all of a sudden being on the end of Burgess at the T there and saying, “That’s it.” I remember just being utterly charmed by the place. I had been wanting to get back into campus ministry, and this seemed to be the perfect kind of job for me. I could be a chaplain all the time, and in a small town much like the town my parents live in in Sheridan, Arkansas. So it felt like home and my people.

Some of my richest memories, the most vivid memories since I have been here have been trips with students. One of the first ones we went to was to the Good Samaritan Ministries in South Texas, and taking a group of students down there. We flew from Houston and drove a rented a van from here. We spent a week working for both Good Samaritan and also across the border in Mexico. So the students were doing their work and in that area for the first time in their lives. We’re talking about Colonias and communities that are right along the border and the kind of realities they were in. The students experienced shopping in a really nice mall in Mexico and then driving into the kind of poverty that I’ve never experienced before and then talking with the students about it. That was a rich experience and also the joy of being with them and living with them for a week and watching their eyes and their awareness that comes from getting out of your comfort zone and being in a new place.

So we went there and also to Yakima, Washington, to the Yakima Nation, and spent a week there at the log church for the Yakima Mission. I remember vividly the end of that week. We had purchased food for the week and had made our own meals and such, and we had all this left over food.

And Kathy Whitson — Doc Whitson — wanted to talk to me about something so we went outside. All the students were cleaning up the kitchen and trying to figure out what to do. We started to have a conversation about how we live in a world of so much — so much plenty — and we were working in a community with so much need, not just members of the Yakima Nation but others in that area. It’s a farming community, so you have a lot of migrant workers and so they are living hand to mouth. And just as we started that conversation, a man was walking down the road on the other side of the fence, down by the driveway, and he raised his hand and yelled “Hello!” It was out in the country and seeing someone walking along the road gets your attention. And he asked over the fence, “Do you have any food?”

And I paused because it was kind of amazing that it happened at that very moment when we were discussing that topic. And I said, “Yes, Come on in.” So I went and opened the gate. He went downstairs and was telling us a little about himself. He was walking from his home to town to catch the bus, and he just needed a little food. So we just made some sandwiches for him and stuffed his pockets with apples and bananas so he would have enough to take with him. Then he asked us if we wanted to pray. So we all stood around in a circle, Doc Whitson, the students, and I. Since I am a chaplain, I am expected to say the prayer, but I didn’t even get the words out of my mouth before he started praying. And so he prayed for us and not himself. He actually prayed for us. That was the end of the week. It was a wonderful way of wrapping up, making all the stories come together, like pulling all the loose ends together. So we talked about a lot of different ways people live and survive, how they live through the difficult times of poverty, culture clashes, colonialism, and the local concepts of mission.

So those kinds of moments were remarkable.

We went to Costa Rica for spring break. It was a similar thing in that we experienced a different culture, and it was one culture sitting right next to the other. — the well-off culture sitting right next to the impoverished neighborhoods. We could easily see that contrast. You can see that kind of contrast in America, too. But many of our students do not come from that stark reality. So while we were in Costa Rica we worked for a congregation that built a handicapped accessible bathroom. The government had mandated that all churches had to have a handicapped accessible bathroom. So this was a poor congregation that didn’t have the money to build such a bathroom. We built a stand-alone accessible bathroom. That was an eye-opening experience because that country has different construction methods. We had to understand how that worked. We did manual labor and mixed cement using big piles of sand that were dumped on the front porch of the church. We mixed cement by hand. We dug the hole for the sceptic system, which is what it basically was — a hole in the ground. We covered it over. Ernie Potter was with us, and he was the hardest working person the whole week. He was just an amazing man. He saw by the end of the week that we couldn’t finish the project. He wanted it done, so he talked to the leadership of the church to find out what was needed to get the project completed. They told him all of the stuff that needed to be secured, and he started writing it down. And he said, “Let’s go ahead.” He went to some of the leaders of the church and they purchased everything that was needed to finish the project because as a congregation they were living on the edge and didn’t know where their next bit of money would come from. It was important to finish the job. Ernie saved the day for those people.

The mission trips, I believe, were started by Terry Ewing. He would take groups of students on mission trips during spring break. Since then the trips have become a tradition. Students have expectations and get excited about where are we going to go and questions of that nature. Students get involved in the planning of the trip because it is their project. I am the advisor of the event, but I get students who research the location, make the budget, write the grants, and appeal to funders.

Students volunteer for these projects. They have to raise their own money. We try to make it very affordable for them. We receive support from a lot of local churches — Eureka Christian Church and a church in Litchfield have been very generous. Other churches in the area have been generous. Week of Compassion, the Disciples relief organization, has also given us grants. We have several different pieces of funding that come from various places.