By Michelle Martin
Staff writer

When Shelly Mecum sits down to talk about “God’s Photo Album: How We Looked for God and Saved Our School,” the words tumble out of her mouth like a waterfall, so eager is she to share her tale of faith.

Mecum created the book with the children and families of Our Lady of Perpetual Help School in Ewa Beach, Hawaii, in an attempt to bring attention to the school, which was in danger of closing because declining enrollment was making it impossible to make ends meet.

Mecum, 38, came to the rescue with an inspiration of the sublime: sending the children out across the island of Oahu to find God, and recording their glimpses of the divine in a book.

Find God they did: in their baby brothers, in the sea, in traffic signs and trash cans.

	God’s Photo Album: How We Looked for God and Saved Our School By Shelly Mecum and the children and families of Our Lady of Perpetual Help School, Harper SanFrancisco 2001, 192 pp., $23

“He is really the author,” said Mecum, pointing to God’s name on the cover during a Chicago interview. “We were his ghostwriters.”

Four years after the sunny April day the students and their families went in search of God, the book is on store shelves, the school appears to be saved and Mecum is telling its story to all who will listen.

“It wasn’t really the money, but it was the publicity,” Mecum said of the school’s now rapidly growing enrollment. “It built just an immense sense of confidence and faith. …

“The children have learned that God is everywhere, and they have learned about the pursuit of a dream. We tell them to dream big, but we never do it right in front of them.”

She fulfilled her dream of becoming a published author, a dream that took root when she was 11 years old and reading Madeleine L’Engle’s “A Wrinkle in Time.” Now her book has an endorsement from L’Engle on the back cover.

When it all started, in the fall of 1996, Mecum didn’t know the school needed to be saved. She had just moved to the rural sugar town with her husband, a chief signalman in the U.S. Navy, and their two sons, and begun working as a literacy teacher at Our Lady of Perpetual Help, “the sweetest school in the world,” she said.

She fell in love with the students from the moment she learned that Mother Teresa had died. She was at a school Mass with her students, trying to hold back her weeping, when Kiley Kealoha, one of her fourth-grade students, pulled a ribbon from her hair and said, “It’s OK, Mrs. Mecum. You can dry your tears with this.”

“In that instant, they had my heart,” Mecum said. “My passion was that they would recognize a power in writing.”

For children to learn to write, Mecum believes, their writing has to matter.

“The magic began at that moment,” she said. “I had my students write letters of condolence to Mother Teresa’s order in Calcutta. Sister Nirmala wrote back to each and every child.”

In another assignment, Mecum asked eighth-graders to write about where they found God in their day.

Reading their answers, she was inspired. “It’s a book,” she exclaimed, leaping out of the shower to share her epiphany with her husband.

“The total vision was written in that moment,” Mecum said. “I knew we would write a book for real. I saw the scope—it would be a national bestseller. It was unearthly. I haven’t been able to sit still for three years.”

But the next day, her hopes were dashed when she brought the idea to Principal Dennis Sasaki. Instead of giving permission for her to find a publisher, he told her to get a grant to fund the project.

“A grant means you’re going to do this tomorrow,” she said. “I wanted to do this yesterday.”

The book project sat on the back burner until the following March, when Mecum’s students won two out of three top prizes offered in a statewide writing contest. Then Sasaki told Mecum she could look for a publisher. The next day—Ash Wednesday—he told her and all the teachers that the school would likely close at the end of the year.

“I wasn’t ready for that tidal wave,” she said. “I had 11 students in my class. That’s wonderful for a teacher and wonderful for the students, but not for being able to keep a school open. We had nine teachers who were completely devoted to the students and each other. We had Auntie Vangie, the school secretary who couldn’t see a child go hungry if they forgot their lunch. You can’t buy that kind of love.

“I went home in despair. Well, not despair, because that means you have no hope. I went home and I asked God to save the school, if that was his will,” she said.

In the introduction, Mecum tells how she got the book project off the ground in six weeks, finding donors to give notebooks, pens, one-time-use cameras (and developing services), a submarine, a helicopter, a trimaran, a trolley, and, last of all, buses to carry the God-seekers across the island.

At one point, she called Sister Nirmala in Calcutta to ask for her prayers in making the project work. Sister Nirmala, who had been pulled out of chapel to take the telephone call, told her that of course the sisters would pray that buses could be found.

“More importantly, she said, the sisters would pray that the children would find God,” Mecum said. “She was thinking ahead of me.”

If Mecum thought she was in the homestretch after sending the children to find God, God had other plans. She learned that the local publisher who had agreed to put out the book didn’t have the resources for national distribution, after she got the Oprah Winfrey show interested.

She decided to look for a national publisher, one that could give the book the play it needed to introduce a whole world of people to the places where they could find God. But the search took months, months in which the children often questioned her about why they did not have a book.

“I was starting to grow quite terrified,” she said. “Three hundred people believed they could find God and take his picture. And there was no book.”

But when she doubted, she would ask God, and then she would see shooting stars and rainbows and know she had to stick to her vision.

“God sends nothing less than angels when you’re afraid,”

For Mecum, one of the angels was Wally Amos, founder of Famous Amos cookies, who wrote a motivational book that inspired Mecum. He offered her encouragement, and ended up writing the foreword to God’s Photo Album. Other angels were her agent, Roger Jellinek, and his wife, Eden-Lee Murray.

Soon, five top publishers expressed interest; HarperSanFrancisco published the book in April. For legal reasons, Mecum is the author. She is donating 70 percent of the royalties to Shelly’s Workshop, a not-for-profit that will use the money to build a preschool at Our Lady of Perpetual Help. She also serves as the volunteer “author in residence” at the school.

Mecum’s mission has not ended. On April 21, students from the school visited shops across Hawaii for book signings. To get them there, Mecum had to get 75 plane tickets.

“I called Gail Chew, the vice president of the Hawaii Visitors and Convention Bureau, and asked if she would help me get 75 plane tickets,” Mecum said. “She said, ‘Do you know what you’re asking? That’s $10,000 worth of plane tickets.’ I told her, if you say yes, the most important coincidences are going to happen.’”

She said yes, and as Mecum was leaving the office, the two women ran into the president of Hawaiian Airlines at the elevator. He donated the tickets.

Mecum firmly believes that if something is meant to be, all she has to do is keep trying, and someone will say yes.

“I have a stack of papers 16 inches high of ‘nos,’” from when she was first trying to put the project together, she said. “But they are all ‘yeses’ too, because every single one of them said they would pray for us.”