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[bobf <bobford79 AT yahoo.com>]

I enjoyed this article about these two women who have been homesteaders, 
farmers, midwives, and teachers in an enclave of kentucky for the past 50 
years.  They started out as 'do-gooders', but stayed and actually did good.  
there are (2) links -- to a video and to a photo gallery --that show images 
of their farm and community. So much negative news to read lately, I thought 
this was a positive story.....................................................

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  'The nurses' birthed a better place at Stinking Creek 

 
Nurse and midwife Peggy Kemner wraps up her gardening for the evening with 
her dog Fluffy at her side. 
 

 MAKING A DIFFERENCE 
 
 
 
 WALKER, Ky. — Midwife Peggy Kemner, 78 years old and bent over with 
osteoporosis like a tiny question mark, climbs into her dented car, peers 
over the dashboard and hits the gas.
"Hold on," she says.

The next 20 minutes of gut-twisting turns take Kemner on a familiar route: up 
a mountain hollow to help.

"I could've made it faster if these roads were straighter," she says with a 
laugh. 

For 50 years, "Miss Peggy" and her schoolteacher friend, Irma Gall, have 
volunteered as missionaries along the winding watershed of Stinking Creek in 
Knox County, Ky., one of the poorest counties in America.



VIDEO: How 2 missionaries helped Kentucky community
PHOTO GALLERY: Looking toward a better life in Stinking Creek

Kemner has been midwife for the births of 507 children, most in bleak 
mountain cabins with no running water and one light bulb stuck in the 
ceiling. She's nursed the sick, sat with the dying. 

Gall has been a teacher and farmer, riding her horse up the hollows on muddy, 
rutted roads to teach at one-room schoolhouses in the late 1950s and 1960s. 
Together, they set up a community center called Lend-A-Hand Center, taught 
Sunday school and 4-H classes, and ran one of the nation's first home health 
care services. 

Quietly, they advocated birth control and education for women. Viewed at 
first with suspicion and distrust, the women known as "the nurses" have, over 
the decades, proved how much hands-on caring can make a difference in the 
lives of individuals. 

"We just wanted to lend a hand," says Gall, 72.

Back up in the hollows of Stinking Creek, where a couple of hundred people 
live, times are still tough. Nearly 35% of the 32,000 people in Knox County 
live below the poverty line, a rate three times higher than the national 
average. Still, life is better on Stinking Creek today than it was back then.

President Lyndon Johnson's "War on Poverty" brought billions of dollars in 
federal aid to the Appalachian region, from food stamps and health insurance 
for poor children to Head Start early-education programs and payments for men 
who suffered from black lung disease after mining the coal-packed mountains. 

Women went to work, family incomes doubled and more children graduated from 
high school. More went to college, too. As throughout Appalachia, many people 
left for better opportunities elsewhere. But for those who stayed, 
particularly women, opportunities grew.

As family size shrank, the abject poverty that encased Stinking Creek began 
to ease.

The mountains opened up, and the people could see out.

Bringing quiet change

Sometimes it's hard to imagine just how hard, just how remote, life was 50 
years ago for many of the people of Stinking Creek.

When Kemner and Gall arrived in August 1958, almost no houses had running 
water. Coal stoves provided the only heat. One electric plug worked the 
light, then the radio, then the light again. Big families — 13, 14, 15 kids — 
lived in tiny, three-room, hand-built, wooden cabins. Few houses were painted.

"Gray and brown and black," says Gall of the hills, the houses, the dust on 
the children's faces. "Everything was gray and brown and black."

Almost everyone had a pig or a couple of chickens, a garden and an outhouse. 
Land wasn't flat enough on the mountainsides to grow money crops such as 
tobacco. For the most part, families ate what they grew.

"There wasn't a lot of money left lying around," says Esco Smith, who runs a 
gas station and mini-grocery on Stinking Creek. He remembers the cabin he 
grew up in was so rickety, "You could see a chicken running around under the 
floorboards."

To scrape by, men did a little logging, a little mining and a little hunting. 
Most children didn't graduate from high school, and women had baby after baby 
after baby for 30 years. 

"They didn't know any better," Kemner says.

Kemner and Gall brought a social revolution to the remote hollows of 
southeastern Kentucky. 

They advocated birth control, civil rights, education for women and health 
care. All were seen as radical ideas. "People called us communists," Gall 
says.

Midwife Kemner birthed babies in the middle of snowstorms and in the middle 
of the night. She tucked bottles of hot water next to tiny newborns to keep 
them warm. She washed babies in cooking pans and, once, in a hubcap. Gall, 
though not a registered nurse, often helped.

Now, the mountains are filled with girls named Peggy.

Shrinking families

Looking back, Kemner and Gall say it was birth control, as much as anything, 
that changed the fate of Stinking Creek. 

The daughters of women who had 14 or 15 children in the 1950s and 1960s grew 
up and had three or four. Their daughters and granddaughters now have one or 
two, or none.

"I saw how my momma lived, and I weren't gonna live like my momma," says Suzi 
Carnes Brown, who was born with Kemner's help. Her mother had nine children. 
She had four. Her daughter has one. 

"I put a coil in, then I had my tubes tied," she says of the birth control 
she used on Kemner's advice. "I weren't gonna have no more babies."

Kemner and Gall came to Knox County because it was the only county in this 
part of Appalachia where they could find a doctor to sponsor Kemner's work as 
a midwife. Gall's earnings as a schoolteacher were supposed to support 
Kemner's volunteering. 

When "the nurses" got here, no one would rent them a house. Finally, a man 
offered a house that had been flooded so many times that snake paths were cut 
through the mud on the floor. They cleaned up and got to work.

It wasn't long before the men of Stinking Creek were coming to their house in 
the middle of the night because a baby was being born. 

In the still after the births, Kemner and Gall would strike up a conversation 
just loud enough for the women in the cabin to hear.

"You know, it doesn't have to be like this," one would say to the other, Gall 
recalls. "You don't have to be pregnant all the time."

Later, a sister or a female cousin would stop one of them and ask, "What were 
you talking about?" Then Kemner or Gall would explain birth control methods, 
such as the IUD or spermicidal foam and, later, the birth control pill. Women 
could come down to the health clinic at Lend-A-Hand and get birth control.

"I'd talk to them when their husbands weren't around," says Kemner. "Men 
didn't like it at all. Back then, a man's worth was the size of his family."

Shrinking family size meant more money for food, clothing and housing because 
there were fewer to feed, clothe and house. 

Average household size in Knox County fell from 3.92 people in 1960 to 2.51 
people in 2000. That was faster than the decline nationwide, according to the 
U.S. Census. Women went to work and family incomes jumped. The average income 
of women who worked in Knox County more than doubled to $21,000 in 2000 from 
$9,000 in 1960, adjusted for inflation, according to a report in July by the 
Population Reference Bureau and the Appalachian Regional Commission. 

More children graduated from high school. More went to college, too, though 
still far fewer than nationwide. College graduation rose to 8.8% in 2000 from 
7.3% in 1980, much below the 24.5% graduation rate nationwide.

For the young girls of Stinking Creek, Kemner and Gall were the first women 
they'd ever met who had college educations and were independent and living on 
their own.

"Miss Peggy's been an inspiration to me," says Myrtle Brown, 29, who is 
graduating from Eastern Kentucky University soon with a degree in nursing. 
She's got $40,000 in student loan debt and borrowed money from Kemner, too, 
to go to college.

"What's being done in Appalachia is the classic strategy for the developing 
world," says Greg Bischak, senior economist at the Appalachian Regional 
Commission. Birth control, education, health care and infrastructure work 
together to ease poverty, he says.

"It works here, too."

New chances

In a crowded trailer perched on a hillside above Stinking Creek, three 
generations of Sizemore women sit and visit every week. 

The grandmother, Margaret "Baby Lu" Sizemore, had 10 children and raised them 
on her own after her husband left her. Kemner helped at the birth of half of 
them. 

"I raised my own hogs, I killed 'em, and I made my own ham," says Sizemore, 
79. 

She sent all her children to Sunday school and 4-H classes at Lend-A-Hand.

One daughter, nicknamed Peggy after Nurse Peggy, left Stinking Creek after 
high school and lives in a suburb of Atlanta with her husband and two 
children. "My life isn't anything like my mother's," says Alice "Peggy" 
Pruett, 48.

"From the time I was a teenager, I always knew there wasn't anything (in 
Stinking Creek) for me. There just wasn't, wasn't any jobs, wasn't anything."

Her other siblings are closer by. But none has a big family like their mother 
did.

"They preached birth control, and we preached it to our kids," says her 
sister, Debbie Smith, 45, who lives nearby in Bimble, Ky. 

She says that because she had fewer children, she was able to work outside 
her home and is now going to community college with her daughter, Ashley, 19. 
She's getting a certificate to be a home health aide. Her daughter wants to 
be a dentist. 

Ashley is a modern girl who says she "can't imagine" how her grandmother 
lived, raising animals, killing them, living with coal heat and having babies 
at home with a midwife. She shivers. "I can't live without my iPod." 

Stinking Creek doesn't look the same anymore.

Wooden cabins have been torn down and replaced by mobile homes. Almost 
everyone has running water and indoor plumbing. 

Satellite TV dishes hang off window sills. And some neat brick ranch houses 
and bigger two-story colonials have sprung up in the wide, more-prosperous 
land at the mouth of the creek. Most homes are neatly painted, some in bright 
colors.

Lend-A-Hand has a computer, and most folks have cellphones.

Government programs have helped, of course. But they've also bred dependency 
on welfare. Nearly 37% of people in Knox County got some kind of government 
help in 2004, according to the Kentucky Cabinet for Health and Family 
Services.

And many people, including some along Stinking Creek, make money from growing 
marijuana and selling drugs such as Oxycontin and methamphetamine. Kentucky 
is the second-largest producer of pot in the nation, behind California, and 
Knox County is one of the biggest growers in Kentucky, according to the U.S. 
Drug Enforcement Administration. 

"One thing's different, that's the drugs," says Ken Messer, whose father, 
Elis Messer, ran a country store 50 years ago on Stinking Creek. 

"You got to lock your doors now because they'll steal anything to buy drugs." 

An uncertain future 

Kemner and Gall say they are retired, but they both work all day long. "Nurse 
Peggy" still makes the rounds of the hollows, checking on sick and elderly 
patients, and runs a weekly health clinic where truck drivers can get a 
checkup required by law for $25, instead of the $150 a doctor would charge.

The women grow almost all of their own food on a self-sustaining 600-acre 
farm that itself is a thing of the past. 

Gall breeds, raises and slaughters cows, goats, sheep and pigs. She's 
rebuilding a split-rail fence and finishing rock work on a restored mountain 
log cabin that she had moved onto the Lend-A-Hand property and expanded. She 
lives there now. 

Kemner and Gall, with some hired help, built two houses, a chapel, a barn and 
several outbuildings. They hired a crane to build a rickety bridge across 
Stinking Creek and even widened the creek with backhoes to ease its flooding. 
"Like the River Nile," says Gall.

Each year, dozens of church and university groups volunteer to help at 
Lend-A-Hand. They travel from cities across the nation to live and work at 
the center for a couple of weeks. Kemner cooks all their dinners. 

Through the years, fewer volunteers have come, as people in other areas have 
gotten more attention than the poor in Appalachia. "We have a lot of 
competition now," Gall says.

On a late winter day, two volunteers hunch over the garden, digging up 
potatoes from last year for dinner.

Laura Hahnfeld and Kristen Borst are going to college in Michigan, and they 
spend vacations and summer breaks helping Kemner and Gall. They teach Sunday 
school and help run the farm.

One day, Kemner and Gall hope, the two young women might take over the work 
they do at Lend-A-Hand. But the young women aren't sure if the work here is 
relevant anymore. 

"I wonder: What are the needs now?" says Hahnfeld, 26, of Midland, Mich. "The 
face of poverty has changed. It's all about access to technology now."

Borst, 27, of Grand Rapids, Mich., agrees. "I wonder if it's the 'working 
farm idea' that will keep Lend-A-Hand relevant in the future," she says. "The 
kids are in danger of a total disconnect from the earth." At least, she says, 
"We can show them that sweet potatoes don't come from the grocery."

It's a future Kemner and Gall don't worry about. If Lend-A-Hand goes on after 
they're gone, that's fine. If not, that's fine, too. 

They'll just keep working until they can't work anymore.

"If the Lord sees we need help," says Gall, "he'll send it."



****Mindy Fetterman's father, John Fetterman, who was a Pulitzer 
Prize-winning reporter for The Courier-Journal in Louisville, wrote a book 
about the area in 1967 called Stinking Creek: The Portrait of a Small 
Mountain Community in Appalachia. She went with her father several times to 
Knox County as a child.

http://www.usatoday.com/money/economy/2008-12-25-stinking-creek-kentucky_N.htm