Whalley cleanup a group effort

After a number of home invasions in Whalley, Surrey Mayor Doug McCallum began to barricade roads in the problem areas to impede drug dealers and addicts. The Surrey Pastors NEtwork met with the mayor last month to see how churches can help out.

By Jeff Dewsbury

WHILE THE rest of the world talks about a war in the middle east, people in Whalley are dealing with a different type of battle zone.

Drug houses are being bulldozed, and city-owned tracts of land are being set aside for projects designed to bring pride and ownership back to those who live in Whalley.

Christians are increasingly becoming part of a unified community solution that supports initiatives by the mayor, yet still tries to help drug addicts and street people contribute to the community, not take from it.

Annie McKitrick works for Surrey Social Futures, a community and social planning group helping to clean up Whalley. Her office is in the same building that houses the area's needle exchange and her group provides a foodbank for HIV/AIDs sufferers who use the needle service.

As a long-time social advocate and chair of the Richmond School Board, McKitrick is a staunch advocate of Christians being involved in community service. She says there are plenty of chances to be involved in places like Whalley beyond working for particularly 'Christian' ministries.

Johnson Heights Evangelical Free Church, Southside Community Church and North Langley Vineyard all send members of their congregations to help out with the various community programs that McKitrick's group offers.

"Faith affects how people see issues. This is the perfect way for Christians to be involved in being salt and light in the community," says McKitrick, "by showing an understanding of the kinds of barriers that people face."

She says the number of groups focusing on Whalley now is crucial to transforming the area, since the lack of community planning played a big part in its downward slide.

"There was no planning Whalley, it just sort of happened," she laments. And while McKitrick thinks churches and secular community service organizations have never worked well together, she wants to see that change. "This is the perfect chance for them to bring their perspective into the mix of community wide efforts."

One focal point in the restoration of Whalley is a scarred piece of land in the 106 block of 135A street, called the Three Oaks Project.

Mayor Doug McCallum has given the green light to nonprofit groups to change to property into a community garden -- a green space in the middle of the city that will become a park as well a place where people will be permitted to grow fruit and vegetables. McCallum even plans to eventually make Whalley the city centre.

The Surrey Pastors Network -- a group of roughly 25 pastors from many different denominations -- had their first face-to-face meeting with McCallum last month over breakfast. Kevin Cavanaugh, a spokesman for the group who pastors at Cedar Grove Baptist Church, says the group is excited about the mayor's commitment to make changes in Whalley.

The mayor is dealing with several drug-related problems, including 'drug houses' owned by absentee landlords, rogue methadone pharmacies and pawn shops.

According to Cavanaugh, the Surrey pastors appreciated the mayor's candor on the issues, the same issues the group has been praying about.

At the breakfast, McCallum spoke about the 10 methadone pharmacies (suppliers of methadone, a legal substitute for heroine prescribed in order to regulate addicts and separate them from the drug dealers) all in a two block radius in Whalley.

While by-laws require that pharmacists only provide one dose at a time and that addicts take the drug in front of the pharmacist, many pharmacies were not following the law. Instead, addicts were taking two or three doses out the door at one time.

"It has become one of the most highly traded drugs in Surrey as a result," says Cavanaugh. To stem the problem of methadone-only pharmacies catering to the addicts, the mayor has imposed an extremely high tax increase on the businesses. He is also following through on his much publicized promise to clean up the areas drug houses "one block at a time."

The pastors wanted to meet with McCallum to let him know that they -- and their congregations -- want to be part of the solution too. "We [the church] have so abdicated our role in society, we're not even called on for help in these things," says Cavanaugh. "We're saying to the mayor, 'How can we get in the game here?'"

"A large part of addressing social needs is through church participation -- a unified plan (among the churches), ownership of the area and prayer," says Mike vanZanten, a pastor at Southside Community Church and a member of the Pastors Network.

He says the group is looking at ways to break down the city into streets and blocks and see churches in those corridors taking responsibility -- through prayer and hands-on ways -- for restoring those sections.

Since the pastors began to meet together, they set out to 'prayer walk' around every school in Surrey. In a unified effort, the group was able to accomplish that daunting task and now has plans to start block-by-block prayer walks too. They also put the issue of car theft -- Surrey was named the car-theft capital of North America last year -- on the agenda, praying that the crime will go down.

To see the problem first hand, several pastors from the group took an afternoon patrol shift at Guildford Mall, the epicentre for thefts, in December to gain an understanding of the epidemic and to pray on-site.

Cavanaugh says one answer to prayer has been a 30 -- 35 percent reduction in theft related crimes in Whalley since December. =