Christmas finds the overlooked in Gwinnett

It was the day before Christmas but 2-year-old Joseph already held tight in his little hands his haul for the season.

“He won’t let anyone else hold any of it,” said Dominique Davis, as she struggled to balance her overloaded boy in her arms. From behind the big, boxed sports car and the two smaller die cast models he clung to, all that showed of Joseph was a wealth of curly hair dampened by the afternoon drizzle, a patch or two of SpongeBob pajamas, the Scoobie-Doo socks and a wide smile.

The gifts arrived early for the residents of four extended stay hotels in Gwinnett County, delivered by a nine-car caravan of volunteers who sought out those who otherwise would be passed over by the holiday.

“I think it’s awesome,” Davis said, “especially in these hard times.”

Need has no permanent address. It can’t be neatly filed away as a heart-of-the-big-city condition. Nor is it enough to just include the less charming backwaters of rural life.

In between, in the Atlanta suburbs, there also lives need, often in motels close by an interstate that rent by the week or month, places discretely tucked just out of sight of the subdivisions. A recent AJC analysis showed that the number of poor living outside the Perimeter increased 249 percent in the 20 years between 1990 and 2010.

Those living on the margins have gravitated toward the margins of Atlanta, where a family might crowd into an extended stay hotel room that leaves little room for the spirit of Christmas.

“In all these years I’ve been doing this, I’ve never seen one of the rooms decorated for Christmas,” said Davida Baker.

It was a decade ago that Baker helped her son with a community project as part of a class assignment at Greater Atlanta Christian. Working a shift with him at Norcross Cooperative Ministries, Baker found a calling in the tears of a mother who visited the food bank that day. There was not enough on hand at the time to feed her three teen-aged sons, and she broke down in despair.

Later that night, Baker delivered additional food to the woman at the hotel where the family had temporary shelter, and saw firsthand the poor in her midst.

Since then, during the summer when school is out, Baker has overseen a program that delivers two meals a day to the young residents of a handful of extended stay complexes in Gwinnett. Project Kids Eat is the name of her program, operating out of Campus Christian Church in Norcross (to make a donation, visit campuschurch.org online).

At Christmastime, again relying on the time and donations of church members around the area, Baker coordinates the delivery of toys, food and cleaning supplies to those same pockets of want.

The volunteers began arriving at the Campus Church at mid-morning Monday. Toys were separated by age and gender preference and loaded into separate vehicles. Others were reserved for bags of food and care packages of household goods. The volunteers loaded up enough for 85 families. Every car was empty at the day’s end.

Before departing, the group joined hands in a circle while one of them prayed: “Let us be the vessels of light…Help us to show people that they don’t have to be stuck in the muck and the mire; that they can get their feet on solid rock.”

This was the second year the Damon family of John’s Creek – Reed, Kelly and their two children, Jack and Anna – volunteered for duty. They have found it to be, said Kelly, “a time to take the focus off ourselves to serve others.”

Baker’s own home goes undecorated this time of year. “Who needs a 20-foot tree, when you have this,” she declared, as children began strolling between the cars at the day’s second stop, picking out their first and only toys of Christmas.

Some at the hotels were caught off-guard by the visitors bearing gifts. In the transience of life there, not all had gotten advance word of the delivery. And these were people unaccustomed to the pleasant surprise.