By John M. De Marco

DAVENPORT — Each year in Florida around October the season hits. They gradually make their way down and live among us. Traffic gets a little heavier. Hospitals grow a little more crowded. Life in general has more of a buzz and intensity. And suddenly, a little after Easter, they’re gone.

Snowbirds? No. They’re migrant workers.

They don’t have second houses. Instead, they live in temporary slums. They can’t do a lot toward under-girding the retail sales market. And they probably don’t help spike winter church attendance at Florida Conference churches. But for a season, they live among us—sort of.

Many of the items people often take for granted are a luxury and privilege to them. The Leesburg District’s recently-chartered Community of Faith here has worked hard to see that the migrant mothers and fathers don’t have to sit up worrying about where the next day’s necessities—and their children’s Christmas presents—might come from.

Almost since its inception in 1998 the church has collected clothing, food, furniture and toys for migrant families. Members deliver the items to the East Coast Migrant Center in Dundee, which is funded through the federal Head Start program. The center is required to inventory all donated items and give them a dollar value for accounting purposes.

Recently the church learned its in-kind donations for the 2000-2001 migrant season totaled an estimated $250,000 value.

Founding pastor Scott Smith and his assistant, Sandy Allen, who coordinates the program, could not believe the amount, thinking it was an error.

“I still think they miscounted. Either they’re charging $5 for beans or something,” Smith joked. “We’re a new church start. We don’t have property or a building. We can’t find the money to buy property, but we have $250,000 to help out a migrant center. We’re pretty excited about that.”

The tangible expressions of God’s love continued throughout the year. Week after week during migrant season, church members donated items. One member runs a bridge club. The cost of admission each week? A bag of rice, destined for the migrant center. Another woman decided to forgo gifts for her adult grandchildren—who never send thank-you cards anyway—in order to sponsor an entire migrant family’s Christmas gifts, which was done for about half a dozen of the families this past Christmas.

The church’s efforts began around Christmas 1998 when Allen was still working at a local bank and a co-worker, the daughter of migrant parents, mentioned one day how the previous Christmas all the children received was McDonald’s Happy Meals.

“All night long, I couldn’t sleep,” Allen said. “All I could think about was all these kids. The next morning, I called Scott.”

The migrant center enrolls up to 76 children, ages six weeks to five years, in its day-care operations. Allen asked Smith if the church could provide at least 76 presents, using the Angel Tree format. Community of Faith collected more than enough gifts that first year and has since expanded to stocking stuffers. By mid-December church members had donated 240 presents for this year’s Christmas and more than 120 stockings.

Community of Faith’s youth group and other small group ministries conduct fund-raisers for the center. Several women from the church also volunteer at the center and hold babies or play with the children. A tutoring program is planned for the many migrant workers would like to earn a high school education. Allen is continuously amazed at church members’ generosity and dedication to the migrant families.

“It is overwhelming,” she said. “Every time I start to talk about it, Scott knows I start crying. The good thing about it is we actually see where the money goes. They [migrant families] just can’t believe it. They have told me that when they receive these bags at Christmas, they just break down and cry.”

Smith is delighted the church’s outreach to the migrant center does not rotate around an annual event, but has become a way of life for its members.