Print edition: 
Everyone has seen houses with debris piled up around the yard, porches sagging, weed trees out of control. But not everyone knows what it can be like to live inside such a house when you have no ability to fix things, how isolated and forgotten so many disabled and low-income people feel.
But some of them got needed attention Saturday when 4,000 volunteers from 40 churches cleaned up, tore out, rebuilt or beautified 200 houses, schools, parks and nonprofits in Wichita.
It was the third year for a burgeoning outreach program of Eastminster Presbyterian Church called Love Wichita.
"The Catholics signed up this year — we're very excited," Janet Johnson, the city of Wichita's neighborhood assistant for District 3 in southeast Wichita, said of the program. Johnson is one of four neighborhood assistants who collect names of people who come to the attention of the city during the year needing help, for example, with meeting city codes.
"I have hundreds of these, and only one has told me thanks but no thanks," Johnson said. "The people receiving the help typically are extremely gracious and grateful."
The program involves not only physical help but spiritual as well. Each of the 197 teams prayed before they started their projects, and other teams were back at church praying while the work went on.
The power of the program can be seen as it picks up volunteers like a rolling snowball, Darin Hecht of Eastminster said. When neighbors see a swarm of volunteers all in blue T-shirts mass in front of a house, they recognize an organized effort that they feel safe to join, he said.
"If there are strifes between neighbors, this is a chance to bridge those relationships, a way for people to come together under a comfortable and joint effort," Hecht said. "We will have people join on the spot. They'll say, 'I myself couldn't have tackled it myself. You've given me a way of helping and you've given me a way to reach out to that person where I wouldn't have before.' "
Johnson said a man who was helped last year had no income and no transportation. He had been battling for months to get his VA benefits when Love Wichita came to do minor repairs on his house.
"He said, 'They completely changed my life, my outlook. I had stopped believing that people even cared in this world. It changed everything,'" Johnson said. "Those are the sorts of things we see over and over and over.
"And it's really good for the volunteers because they're not always exposed to these kind of hardships. To see firsthand what some in our community are living with, it's good for people."
That was evident as Hecht's team worked in the yard of a man in the Planeview neighborhood who lives with two adult daughters, their children, and an adult son who is developmentally disabled. The volunteers, from Eastminster, tore off an old deck which had been cited for being unsafe and built on a new one, tore out weed trees so that the man once again had access to his driveway, hauled off old wood and tidied the garden.
"I wish people could have seen what it looked like before," volunteer Rachelle Ewy said as she surveyed a clean corner of the yard. "It was just full of trees and vines full of thorns — I can't believe the kids hadn't gotten into it."
Several women from the church reassembled a play castle that they'd discovered in some brush. The children who lived in the house buzzed all around it.
"I don't even think this is my house anymore," one little boy said as he took in the new terrain.
