Archbishop's web site Denver Catholic Register Parishes Catholic Pastoral Center
June 20, 2001
School, community find God, write book
Former Denver native leads class writing project that helps school
By Alwen Bledsoe
It takes a village to write a book — at least if you're Shelly Mecum, fourth-grade teacher turned best-selling author, and you have your heart set on saving a bankrupt Catholic school, turning your students into authors, and charming and cajoling an entire country into proving that God can be found even in the smallest of things.
Our Lady of Perpetual Help School on Ewa Beach in Oahu, Hawaii — an island Mecum described as a desert where one is more likely to find scorpions than air conditioning — began to experience dwindling enrollment after sugar cane fields, a main source of income for islanders, were closed down.
Mecum, a Denver native who had attended St. James Catholic School and Bishop Machebeuf High, began teaching in Ewa Beach in 1997. During her first year with Our Lady, the school was unable to garner enough funds even to pay teacher salaries and was seriously considering closing.
The young teacher was devastated.
And then came the whisper that was soon to become a gale sweeping across the entire island.
"What whispered in my brain were three words, — 'It's a book,'" said Mecum.
In the school's literary magazine, Dolphin's Splash, Mecum had read essays detailing students' discovery of God in everyday life, an assignment that had grown quite accidentally out of an angry eighth-grade teacher's words to her misbehaving students —"Oh, go find God, and have it on my desk by tomorrow."
"(The teacher) was quite shocked as to where they found God," said Mecum with a laugh.
Mecum envisioned her students traveling across the island with cameras and journals looking for God, taking his picture when they found him, and creating a book out of it.
After hundreds and hundreds of phone calls, Mecum had convinced major corporations to donate money, 300 disposable cameras and notebooks, 14 luxury coaches, a submarine, a trolley, and a glass bottom boat for the journey the school's staff, kindergarten through eighth-grade students, and their families would take across the island.
The school closed down, posting a sign that read, "We have left to write a book. We'll be back soon to celebrate," and 300 people, ages five to 80, set off on submarine, yacht, and luxury coaches to find God.
Visions of God came back in the form of 4,000 photographs and 300 journals.
"I believe they were the ghost writers for God," raved Mecum. "They were so inspirational. They have changed my life forever. I can't leave my house without being haunted by the way they found God."
Children, parents, grandparents found God in the waves, in street signs, in bus drivers. Seemingly no subject was safe from the eyes of faith with which these students and their families scoured the island. Cans of food, dilapidated buildings, empty rooms, shadows, sails, the elderly, children all became pictures of God.
"Ewa Beach is much like Nazareth," said the vivacious teacher-writer. "The impression was that nothing great could come from it."
But from it has come "God's Photo Album" —192 glossy pages of photographs and sincere reflections that document the school's search for God.
Some reflections verge on mysticism — "I see God deep in the cave because it is dark," writes Holden Moi, age 10.
Some are intensely personal. Blaize Faurot, 5, photographing a row of logs, writes, "Are these the stairs that my Papa Faurot and Papa Tiqui took to heaven to see God? God, are my Papas okay?"
Mecum's literary agent, Roger Jellinek, president of Jellinek and Murray Literary Agency, the only literary agency in Hawaii, described the book's concept as "very powerful."
"I just connected with it immediately," he said. "I'm not religious at all, but it's not only a striking idea, it's a moving one."
Mecum, he said, is "not an ordinary fourth grade school teacher."
Indeed, the energetic blonde more closely resembles a tidal wave, one with unquenchable energy and power to topple what appear to be impenetrable barriers, including finding a national publisher and writing a book with absolutely no knowledge of the publishing industry.
"I've never seen anyone who's as filled with faith as she is," said author Wally Amos who wrote the forward to the book. "Shelly Mecum has really become the standard of faith for me.
"Really she was just stepping out on faith blindly, not knowing a thing about the publishing industry," he added.
After learning she would have to write the book rather than just send a publisher journals and pictures, Mecum said, "I couldn't breathe. I couldn't say a word."
When she landed her deal with HarperSanFrancisco, she cried all night, she said, believing she could never write 12 chapters and an epilogue in the six weeks the contract gave her.
After much encouragement and help from husband Bill and father Richard Foco, the book was written and went to press as planned.
According to Jellinek, it has sold 30,000 copies since May 1. And most important for those on the small island of Oahu, enrollment is up again.
"They're still scared, of course," said Mecum, "but the important thing is that the classrooms are being filled."
Mecum has dedicated 85 percent of the book's net proceeds to the school.
"I think it's probably the most remarkable example of an author going from zero to 60 I've ever seen," said Jellinek. "My mantra has been, it's not a book, it's a movement."
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