Wednesday, July 2, 2008

Students, experts work to rescue chapel

Kenn Rodriguez News-Bulletin Staff Writer; krodriguez@news-bulletin.com

Los Lentes Century High School students Tyrone Flanders, Shaquan Neil and Willie Tryels silently carry pieces of scaffolding out of San Antonio Chapel at the end of a long Friday as work is being done all around them.

One might assume that high school students would only be around to do the grunt work.

That assumption is wrong.

"We've basically done a little bit of everything," said Neil as the trio helped Pat Taylor with the scaffolding. "I learned a lot of things I never thought I would here."

Taylor and Jean Fulton are both senior programs managers for Cornerstones Community Partnerships, a non-profit based in Mesilla, N.M., which is working with the University of New Mexico and Los Lunas' Century High School to do an assessment of the chapel, which is more than a century old.

"Basically, we have some UNM students conducting wall examinations and doing moisture tests in the back room," said Fulton. "We did an investigation back up here, we've done an inventory of furnishings, an inventory of paintings. The whole idea is a conditions assessment, and ultimately the students are aiming to post a Web site with all the information we gathered this week."

UNM students Eric Haskins and Jessica Gardener are among the 14 university students doing tests, taking pictures and doing measurements on the San Antonio Chapel grounds.

Haskins said the group has done moisture tests in several rooms of the chapel as well as taking samples of the walls themselves.

"Basically what we're trying to figure out is the existing condition of the chapel," he said. "It's been here a very long time. They know that they have some structural problems with the adobe; there are some cracks.

"We're trying to assess it through moisture testing, through scraping off some of the stucco and looking into the walls, assessing where there's damage and the prospects for renovation."

The chapel and its grounds are essentially an on-site classroom for the intensive one-week class. When they're done in Los Lentes, Haskins said each student would spend 70 hours on projects ranging from reports to actual drawings of the existing conditions of the chapel.

Fulton said the week has been filled with hard work, with students working 10-hour days. Eventually the work done today will help with restoration of the chapel - but the actual restoration is a long ways off.

"This is just the start," Fulton said. "Hopefully, after we're done with the conditions assessment, we can help the community find the money to implement a restoration plan. Then once the plan is together we can do a cost estimate of the implementation, then it comes to the hands-on work."

Fulton said all told, five Century High students helped with the project, but said Fulton, Neil and Tryels went above and beyond with their help.

"These have done a phenomenal job," she said. "They did a lot of the photo documentation. They learned 35 millimeter photography with a manual camera, and they just really helped us all the way around.

"Today, they just helped us finish cleaning - they're having a dinner tonight. The place was in disarray with dust everywhere. They helped us move and put everything back."

All three said they learned a lot working on the project.

"It's been fun," Flanders said. "We expected to do some stuff with adobe, but we got to do a lot more. I feel really good about working on this."

Tryels said the wall excavations were the most interesting part to him.

"We got to look inside the walls and stuff, so that was pretty cool," he said. "To see how they did things back then was pretty interesting."

Century High is involved in a community service project that involves restoration work and building with adobes. "They came out to demonstrate making adobes because they had the expertise," said Taylor. "They showed how to mix the mud then make the adobes."

"Shoot, I had to figure out what adobe was at first," said Neil with a laugh. "But yeah, we showed them what we know. That was kind of neat."

"We knew some about the church before we came out here," said Flanders. "But now we know a whole lot more. It feels good to be part of this, bringing the church back and fixing it up."

Fulton said the project is ongoing and he wasn't sure when the actual restoration would begin.

"We're working towards that, that's for sure," she said.

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