Cuba Project Brings to the Forefront the Joy of Volunteer Service

Marvin Wray was in his mid 20s when he thought he would die of a heart attack. After years of smoking and drinking, his health was in tatters. But one day Wray met a Seventh-day Adventist young woman who eventually led him to a new life in Jesus and the Adventist Church.

Now, at 78 and after more than a half century in Adventist ministry in the U.S. and overseas, on April 18 Wray was the first to volunteer to be lifted 15 feet up on the working platform of a skylift. From up there Wray, who pastors the Carmichael Seventh-day Adventist Church in Sacramento, California, United States, helped sweep and scrape the walls of one of the buildings at Cuba Theological Adventist Seminary in Havana before repainting them.

“If I hadn’t met the Lord, I would probably be dead,” Wray said. “Now I have retired five times but keep going back to pastor as needed. And I can even volunteer for Maranatha!” he added, referencing supporting ministry Maranatha Volunteers International, which repairs and builds churches and schools around the world and was organizing the seminary repainting project in Cuba.

Meeting the Challenges

Marvin Wray and his wife, Ingrid, were two of approximately 30 Adventist lay professionals and retired church workers who volunteered in two projects in Havana April 17-27. In one of those projects they helped to give a new face to the seminary, which Maranatha built in mid-1990s in partnership with Adventist leaders and Cuba government officials.

Through the years Maranatha purchased a plot of land to enlarge the Adventist campus; built dorms, classrooms, and a cafeteria; and provided a state-of-the-art church building inaugurated by General Conference president Ted N. C. Wilson in 2011. Now, as an acute economic crisis sweeps the country, Maranatha has gone beyond their usual mandate and has shipped containers with food to feed the 90 young men and women who are preparing to pastor Cuba’s growing congregations. “We figured that since we had invested millions on this campus, we’d better help to keep it open,” said Maranatha president Don Noble. “And the only way of keeping the school open was to make sure students had food to eat.”

The crisis has not subsided. A recent shortage of natural gas across Cuba has forced the school cooks to resort to firewood and charcoal to cook the daily rice and beans that, together with some fresh produce, comprise most of the students and faculty diet. “Occasionally we get some gas,” a cook shared. “But most of the time we have to get up very early to get the fire going so students can have lunch.”

The Volunteer Model

Maranatha, which is donor-based and not part of the corporate Adventist organization, regularly invites volunteers to get involved in various kinds of mission trips around the world. Some initiatives are called “group projects”—a local Adventist church or school, for instance, gets together and lets Maranatha work on the logistics.

Other Maranatha initiatives cater to specific age groups. The popular Ultimate Workout projects take scores of 14- to 18-year-olds with chaperones to build churches and serve churches in India, Peru, or Zambia. Now in its thirty-fifth edition, it’s planning to take teenagers to build a church in Paraguay in July. Then there’s Catalyst, for 18- to 28-year- old volunteers. And popular family projects, which enlist grandparents, parents, and children in service initiatives around the world, usually around vacation times. Open projects, finally, create “impromptu” groups of volunteers who sometimes meet at the mission site for the first time. “There are different ways of getting involved,” Maranatha leaders said. “The model is not as important as the willingness to serve.”

Volunteering in Cuba

Serving in Cuba, however, demands specific logistical considerations. Even basic working tools are very hard to come by, so every step must be carefully considered before arriving in the country. But Maranatha has built a sound reputation after decades of organizing volunteer service trips to the most challenging places. “The key in any mission project is flexibility,” Maranatha vice president Kenneth Weiss said. “There are always ‘surprises’—things that don’t go as we had planned them. But we must adapt and go on.”

And what about volunteers? “It depends,” Weiss explained. “Every group is different. But through the years mission trips have helped develop lifelong friendships, and even some lifetime marriages.”

In the case of Cuba, the Maranatha-led initiative in April combined a group of mostly veteran volunteers for 10 days of service, led by John Thomas, retired General Conference associate secretary and former director of Adventist Volunteer Services. Some of the volunteers commented they had served in multiple Maranatha projects in four continents. (“This is my 29^th volunteer project with Maranatha!” a volunteer and donor proudly announced on his first day in Cuba). Others had been in that Caribbean Island nation a dozen times since Maranatha arrived in the country in the mid-90s.

Still, there are those, including Wray and his wife, who were visiting Cuba for the first time, or volunteers who were not as acquainted with the “Maranatha model” until they arrived in Havana. “Don’t worry about how much you know about the rest of the volunteers, or your practical skill levels,” a Maranatha leader tells the group on the first organizing meeting on the eve of launching the initiative. “By the end of the project you will all know each other better. Some of you might have even become friends.”

The Joy of Volunteering

The following day the seminary campus suddenly became a beehive of activity as volunteers started scraping and power-washing the exterior walls. Inside the cafeteria, volunteers moved boxes around before applying putty to holes and prepping the hall pillars for repainting. In a congenial mood, volunteers, some of them in their late 70s, seemed energized as they used masking tape to protect doors and windows, climb on the school chairs and ladders, and moved up to work closer to the ceiling junctures.

Outside, Thomas called for two volunteers to go up in the skylift working platform. It was then that Wray volunteered. Only hours later, when the tropical sun had reached its peak and volunteers were called to lunch, that he and his partner on the platform finally went down for a well-deserved break.

After a simple meal of rice, beans, and salad, the 78-year-old church pastor who seems unable to retire was ready to go on. “Where would I be if I hadn’t met the Lord?” he reflected. Then, giving the skylift operator a thumbs-up, he said to him, “Take me back up.”

Maranatha Volunteers International is a nonprofit supporting ministry that is not operated by the corporate Seventh-day Adventist Church.