Last weekend I used $20 of the money Northside’s Mission Ministry sent me. A woman and her mother were driving through the parking lot at Lowe's in Gulfport last Sunday looking for gas money to get back to Louisiana. They stopped by me as I was climbing into my truck.
I stepped down and talked to them a while. It seems she and her mother and maybe some other family drove over to a family happening in the Gulfport area but it went wrong. I didn’t explore what went wrong. She said she had a box of CD’s in the trunk and would gladly sell then for some gas money to get home.
Standing there thinking about what to do about her request, I remembered the money I folded up and put in my wallet. Finally I overrode my suspicion and doubt after talking to them and gave them cash enough for gas (5 gal for $20!!!) to get to New Orleans. The woman not only left her phone number and name with me; she was so happy that she got out of the car and gave me a hug.
Later this past week, I realized that I need a prayer or two once in a while. Sometimes in a space of a day or two the job turns on you and really gets emotionally hard, obliterating the earlier joy over doing something to help someone.
In the last few days the weight of the misery of the people remaining who desperately need help to rebuild wears on me greatly. As I go family-to-family I realize how poor this remnant people in Gulfport and environs are who still really need help from Katrina's disaster. Their stories easily draw one into their situation. It spins my emotions almost like a whirlpool drawing me into a black hole of grief.
It is a dangerous thing emotionally and I have to be mindful of it constantly to keep it from getting out of hand. I cannot escape the pathos of it all and I loathe adopting a disinterested view in order to get the job done; however, sometimes I have to do it and I know it shows to the people I'm trying to help.
I’ve written earlier that I am working at the intersection of poverty and disaster. I have seen more of both first hand than most people believe exists in this wonderful society we have. The poverty hides in statistics and in city streets off the main drag away from the casinos. It gets lost in the government rules and regulations and in the naiveté of folks being old enough to remember when a dollar went very much farther, when you kind of knew who you could trust and who you couldn’t, and when there seemed always to be family to help.
I am told Mississippi has one of the highest home ownership rates is the States. I haven't verified that fact, but if it is true, when you go to many homes you see a different story as to what has become of homes that were really fine twenty or thirty years ago. Particularly when the owner is 70 or 80 years old, perhaps a widow or widower who has lived in and owned the house since childhood but now is trying to keep up with utility bills, maintenance, reconstruction, crooked contractors and maybe supporting another family member, all on maybe $400-$500 per month.
The homes I visited in the last few days leave me feeling so blessed (and guilty) to have some money in the bank, to be living in a small trailer, to have good health, a great family and few worries about the future. Here, I meet people who have no reason for hope but good reason to feel pointless futilty. Yet they cling only to the hope, as strongly now as ever. They cling to it so strongly that one can't wrestle it from their grasp.
I hear their stories of the illnesses and effects of the stress. I see a wife whose husband is in the hospital gravely ill. She walks in a kind of tentative, stunned daze as if she has post-traumatic stress syndrome.
I meet the sons who have come home to help. I see inexplicable willingness to trust again after paying their dear recovery grant money usually of a sum of money larger than they would ever be able to amass on their own, to an underhanded contractor to rebuild ther home and finding the contractor left town with the money. They willingly withstand this unabated disaster for almost three years. They carry so much hope after so long and eschew all bitterness. This bodes well for our their future and our own, if only we open our eyes and understand their lesson.
I visited two (African-American) families to assess what we could do to repair their homes this week. In one, the elderly husband invited me into the home. Both he and his wife are in their late 70's or early 80’s. She has had surgery recently. I am captivated by the many professionally done photographs on the living room wall. There are wedding pictures from the 1950’s or 1960’s, graduation pictures of children and granddaughter, a living room that is the very picture of a “middle class” family. I imagine rich life stories in these pictures.
Something has gone very wrong here.
The house is in terrible condition. For example, the 60 ampere electrical service has the old screw-in type fuses. No one thinks twice these days about installing 200 amp service and I'll guess my sons don't know what to do with an old screw-in fuse.
They need to use a gas water heater and range since the fuses blow if they try to run air conditioner and heater or washing machine at the same time. The walls are moldy fiberboard streaked by water from the leaky roof damaged by Katrina (since repaired). The ceiling is acoustic tile, the old twelve inch squares I saw in my Grandmother’s home over 40 years ago. The tile is moldy and mildewed.
Their adult son and his early teen-aged daughter are there. He had come down from the Nashville area after Katrina and both are living with his parents trying to help. I could sense the daughter's subtle but sullen teenaged angst. Does anything change?
Over the years of their life here they have made a number of improvements to the home. They installed a brick veneer and aluminum framed windows and had some re-wiring done. But they cannot keep up with the passage of time and the rising cost of maintenance and repair. I'll guess the mother and father are probably living on about that $400-500/mo. Social Security and maybe some other support brings in.
It is doubtful we will be able to find enough grant money to repair the house. The rules might even say the cost of repair is so high that the home ought to be torn down and rebuilt.
I wonder, with whose money?
The other case today was so much worse. I was trying to reach an elderly woman but she will not answer the telephone. I have to call her son on his cell phone. I arranged to drive out to meet him. He seems about 40 years old. He lives in a very small "shotgun" house next to his mother's who has almost the same floor plan. Somehow she has title to both houses, but all that will do is probably make it harder to get her help. By the way, she has early stage Alzheimer’s. She doesn't talk much. When she does I feel a sense of her sulleness standing at the other end of her life, not the angst of the teenage girl at the threshold of hers.
Both roofs had been repaired after Katrina, thank Goodness. But her home has an older addition that has shifted on the foundation from poor workmanship, or Katrina damaged it and the first volunteers did not detect it. Whatever the cause, the house has a broken back. The ridge board of the roof of the addition has pulled loose or broken so the whole roof slumps like an old horse swaybacked from too many years carrying a saddle.
The house itself is quite neat inside, as orderly and presentable as it can be given all that has happened. There is no insulation in the walls or ceiling. Light shines through the walls in places at the baseboards.
The son's place next door is a three room house. I guess I’ll call it that. Looking more closely I can see through the cracks in the floor to the dirt under the house. Of its former kitchen, living room, bedroom and bath, now it has only one livable room, the old kitchen/living room. A bed stands in the center of the room. Fabric, maybe a sheet, drapes over its windows for privacy. The windows elsewhere in this house are covered with plywood to keep out the rain and people. Building materials are stacked in the hallway and back room, a large closet.
He has run an extension cord from his mom's house to his for electricity. He is a bright, intelligent man, you can see it in his eyes and in his talk and in his compassion for his mother. He tells me that he came back to Gulfport right after Katrina to help her. He says he'd just gotten out of the service.
He has been collecting construction materials a piece at a time; lumber, plywood, electrical wire, whatever he can find in the throw-away piles of other rebuilding projects. He is trying to put these two houses back together. He tried to rewire the house but got scared and stopped. Many of us would have just given it all up, or suggested that he do so.
I lived in a bedroom like he is living in while remodeling my house, but not only did I just do it for a little over a year, I knew it would be completed. I cannot imagine how he has been able to live this way for a period of time only two months short of three years.
What strikes me is that each of these families is doing a pretty good job of holding a distressed home and family more or less intact. They are extremely polite and gracious. It is very clear that they expect the future to be better. They bring me into their homes as if I were a longtime friend. They offer me water to drink, beg me to come in and sit down to talk while they tell me all their stories.
They do have serious expectations. They always ask me when I think they will hear about getting help or when I'll be able to send someone over to start working. It is the only time I sense that quiet desparation, the only hint that they acknowledge their awareness of the crack in their world that uncontrollably bleeds in misery. All I can do is look sheepish, or down at the ground and explain the process, telling them that answer is in the hands of someone else in this process of recovery and relief.
It think it is true, these are the people Jesus raised up to us in his Sermon on the Mount. This is part of His message. These are people who cling to patience, hope, grace and faith when the World offers them nothing to justify it. These are people who somehow manage to find it easy to be meek even though they are in a very bad way. It is a difficult message to hear, and to see, and to share.
We hear all about the problems, the gangs and crime. The gangs are around comprised mostly I imagine of folks who have given up hope, or never knew it. You see them everywhere if you will just look closely enough. We see it here in Gulfport, you see it in Chattanooga. Whether it is here in Gulfport, or in the West Side over off Martin Luther King Boulevard in Chattanooga, in this mess of a city that we have created over the last 50 years lives a microcosm of Family comprised of people who are as faithful, loving and strong as we'll find anywhere and anytime.
They aren't like us. They are fighting a world gone wrong and refusing to conform to it. You leave their presence knowing that their eye is on a different prize all the while surrounded by a land of surfeit.
Then something out of the ordinary happens to uplift me. Later that same day I had to go over to Pearlington to work out a plan for someone we are helping there. On the drive back I am unavoidably reliving the thoughts I have just written about these two families in Gulfport while listening to the local NPR station that usually plays requested classical music in the afternoon. Someone had called in a request for Handel's Hallelujah Chorus while I was still about three or four minutes from my trailer. I sang along, between tears, all the way home into the driveway.
I do not know if I ever will be able to go back to living the well-off way I have in the past. I think I know two or three people in Chattanooga who are doing a really good job of using their money wisely to help people like these. They are people who don't hesitate to spend a lot of their money quietly and privately for good things that help us to a better way. They know who they are. I admire and respect their strength of character. They are doing something I do not know if I have the strength of character to do - to overcome the temptation to succomb to greed.
I cannot look at my good fortune (I have much more than I merit) in the same way anymore having experienced all this poverty, despair and unexpected hope. For me anyway, there seems to be only one way through that narrow gate.
Peace and Grace,
Henry
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