Archive: Around Town

Cooking Christmas dinner is a lot of work at a time when you already have a lot to do.  If you could get a freshly cooked pork roast, hot and juicy on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day, and by doing so help to put a roof over someone's head, isn't that what Christmas is about?  Spending more time with friends and family, and helping those in need?  Jeff Sandsted is making that easy by cooking and selling pork roasts to raise money to support his mission work repairing houses in poor, rural South Carolina.   "I don't do it just to raise the money," Sandsted says.  "It's also a lot of fun."

Sandstead barbecues the roasts for Thanksgiving, on December 22, Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.  He likes to makes the cooking days an occasion.  He cooks a big pot of seafood bisque and a beef roast and hot sauce to share, and invites people to hang out while he cooks the roasts.  He plays Christmas music, and says that last year people brought cookies to join the party.  Last Christmas Day he cooked and sold 41 roasts.  Sandsted's wife Reenie helped with the cooking and daughter Sarah brought friends to hang out for a while.  "It turned into the best Christmas Day I've spent in many years," he says.  "This is only the second year, but I hope it turns into a tradition.  To me that's the kind of Christmas that people should spend.  I'm looking forward to it again."


But it is not his second year working for the mission.  Sandsted went to Johns Island for the first time in 1998 when he accompanied his son Travis on the youth mission from Lansing United Methodist and All Saints Catholic Churchs.  They stayed a week working on a home for an 87 year old woman living on her own.  "She is really tough, but real sweet," he says.  "Very inspiring.  There was something about her that made me want to keep going back and seek out people like her."

He's been going back ever since.  His employer Franziska Racker Centers generously allows him three months of unpaid leave per year.  He does extra work including chicken barbecues, the holiday pork roast sales, catering parties, and working at Baker's Chicken Coop at the State Fair.  That helps make up for lost wages and pays his living expenses when he is in South Carolina.  He will spend next February, March, and April working for the mission on Johns, Wadmalaw, Yonges, and Edisto Islands, his fifth extended stay and tenth year he has participated.

The people whose homes he works on are typically quite poor, and the onset of new vacation homes, golf courses, and horse farms on the islands have raised property taxes.  That makes it harder for residents to make home improvements.  These houses weren't in great shape even when they were new, and many need major reconstruction.  Sandsted says that is why there is a waiting list of 300, prioritized by greatest need.  And sometimes that much need is hard to deal with.  "Somebody said, 'The needs of the world are too great, but when you help just one person -- to them you are the world.'  That's how you have to look at it.  You don't look at the 300 families.  You have to concentrate on the one family you are working with."


While there he does construction work on houses that are hacked together with whatever the original builders could find fifty years ago.  There is often major damage to roofs, floors, and walls, and it is not uncommon to find more serious problems as crews solve the ones they came for.  In his first year, while fixing the elderly woman's ceiling a workman put his foot through the rotted floor, and as one thing led to another repairs were also made to the floor and walls.

In another case Hospice care workers called to say they couldn't get their equipment or people into a dying man's house.  "The sub-flooring had rotted out and the only thing that was left was the joists from the front door to his bedroom," Sandsted recalls.  "Somebody had rolled a piece of carpeting up the side of the walls, and nailed it to the walls with roofing nails.  Where the carpeting sagged between the floor joists you knew where to step.  So we had to pull a team off of another project."

"Mission work is not always feel-good," he says.  "There are times when you shake your head and say, 'What on earth am I doing here?'  But I keep going because most of the people that I work for have known nothing but hardship all their life.  Yet they are the happiest people I've ever met.  It's quite remarkable.  It's inspiring, and I always feel like I got the better end of the deal when I point the truck northward."

Sandsted buys the pork roasts in bulk.  A couple of days before cooking the roasts he rubs them with assorted herbs and spices, then puts them into cold storage until the day he cooks them.  He cooks them at the barbecue pit at Baker's Acres over a combination of charcoal and hard wood.  The eight to ten pound roasts take about three hours to cook.  Customers must order beforehand by calling 607 533-7568 or emailing This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., and he recommends that they bring a large cooler to bring the roasts home in, because it keeps the roasts hot and catches the juice.  "In my opinion the juice makes much better gravy than turkey ever could," he says.

He plans to cook a roast this Sunday for the coffee hour at All Saints Church to try to drum up business and let people know about the mission.  Sandsted says parishioners at All Saints and Lansing United Methodist Church have been very supportive, not only buying pork roasts, but donating so that he can stay to work at the mission longer.  Last year he wouldn't have been able to afford to go at all, but donors from the churches raised enough to send him for five weeks.  Next February will be his fifth extended stay.

"I always look forward to it," he says.  "I'm always ready to do it again."

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