Day 226 - Dilemma

Well, the last few days have been a mixed bag.

First, one of the more unbelievable Presidential elections transpired six days ago. One that will most probably transform this country if we can do it before sliding back into that old cynicism that you can’t change the system.

Then, I had to use my four wheel drive twice already to get out of a ditch (in a truck whose manufacturer I do not prefer over my brother’s Dodge RAM).

Then, dear friends who have been with PDA as long as me departed for new beginnings (not a bad thing I keep telling myself).

Then, tumultuous challenges for staffing surge as strongly as ever.

Then, the imperative to aid those widows, homeless and poor sounds as fresh today as it did two millennia ago. A tragic circumstance with a homeowner repeats the past. What a week.

Here it is:

My friend Heather (see her blog: http://seektheking-pda.blogspot.com/) has been the village manager at Pearlington since last spring. She finally decided to follow the decision of Jeremy, also a good friend and who was the work site manager, to move on to the mission of the Lagniappe Presbyterian Church in Waveland.

It’s a really strong church with a committed construction effort similar to PDA’s. The members I’ve met are very gracious, have offered equipment and labor to pull our Pearlington pods out of the swamp after Gustav and Ike washed them into it. Theirs is a PCA church, but our collaborative effort shows thus far dogma can often just be a drag on friendship and fellowship when we are following a Call.

It really hurts to see Heather go, she has been one of our best managers and has a heart in the right place; the kind of person I call a “keeper.” I know her choice was hard and she struggled not only with this decision, but the greater decision of “what am I going to do next?” I’ll posit that she will find herself in seminary sooner or later.

In her next to last post she wondered, “I have sometimes joked that I wish God would post a big neon sign for me, to communicate His will.” I can only say Heather, walk the road and you’ll find the way. Or, as someone said, “If you are going to walk on water, you’ve got to get out of the boat.”

Stay close Heather, we all miss you.

Today I relived essentially a previous experience. (If you are reading these posts, you will know which one.) This repetition is an inexcusable one that on one hand makes me mad that some power repeated it and on the other makes me sad that we as a people have allowed it.

The e-mail from the case worker said simply, “Henry will you check on this case? This woman is really fearful about winter. She has no heat and has holes in her floor.”

By now, you know that I did.

I drove the twenty minutes or so to get to her home. It is out westward on I-10 towards Bay Saint Louis, not quite there, but close. I took an exit south and followed a winding road that my Google Map described, took the next turn and wandered a mile or so down a narrow road until I saw the house number on the mail box on the roadside.

There stood another mobile home, smaller, but clearly of a 1980’s vintage like the one I found in the north county a few months back. I knew before I even knocked on the door what I would find. With that air of foreboding, I knocked.

An elderly woman opened the door.

“Hi, are you Mrs. Mary Brooks? I’m Henry Paris of Presbyterian Disaster Assistance. Your case manager asked me to drop by. Do you remember my call?

She replies, “Yes,” in a coarse, faint whisper. She can only talk in a hoarse, raspy voice. An oxygen dispenser sits on the table in her living room.

“Come on in. Let me show you. Oh! I’m so worried, those idiots left me with a half-done kitchen, look at this floor, see the hole.”

There is a hole about eight or ten inches wide covered with duct tape. The kitchen has new appliances but the bar is only partially finished. The floors of this mobile home are clearly rotted. The roof sags and the roof leaks. There is evidence of mold.

“Come on, look at the living room. Over here by the TV, see how the floor gives.

“I am so afraid, I don’t have any heat except these space heaters. When I run them the circuit breakers trip. I can smell burning insulation.”

Standing in the door of the bathroom I see the floor vent is open to the ground. There is no AC ductwork here either. She leads me into her bedroom. There sits another duct open to the ground.

In a rain of cursing she rasps, “I paid that no good something $12,000 and he promised he would repair the floors and the roof, but he just disappeared.

“Look at the ceiling over on the wall next to my bed, water pours in every time it rains.

“My house was washed away by Katrina; it is completely gone. We got about twenty feet of water here. Afterwards I bought this mobile home for $4,000. My daughter said this was great, she helped me paint it and said it was a great deal."

“Mrs. Mary, how long have you lived here? When did you get this mobile home? Didn’t you have a FEMA trailer?”

“Yes I had a FEMA trailer first but they took it way.”

“Took it away? I don’t understand.”

“Well, they gave me $39,000 for a new home. I paid this mobile home dealer $20,000 for a mobile home but he hasn’t ever delivered.”

“Mrs. Mary, did you give him a check? Have you filed a criminal complaint?”

“No, I paid him cash. I carried a box with the $39,000 in it. I paid him cash right out of the box.

“I gave my poor son $5,000 to help him with his family. I gave my daughter some, and I gave some to a few others.”

“Mrs. Mary you can’t stay here. Can’t you stay with your son or daughter, or your sister?”

“My son lives in Dothan, AL and has ten kids, he can barely take care of them, hardly me. My daughter is so into drugs she doesn’t even know where she is. My sister will not take me in."

She told me about her chronic degenerative lung disease and her serious bouts of depression that required hospitalization. As we talked she lets on she has substantial mental issues. It explains her volatile emotions, teary then sobbing, later laughing.

She pointed out a small outbuilding, getting very teary again as she told me her boy friend who died two years ago, who she loved so much, used to go out there and stay to get away from her when she got so bad. It was the only time I saw her really laugh, and that only for a few seconds before she lapsed into her teary state again.

I stand there thinking of what I can say or do that will ease her mind, knowing that it is going to be almost impossible to find grant money for her. There is nothing that can be said. She got money to relocate or rebuild and with no one to give her sound advice, she lost it.

She has serious mental health issues and is living in a mobile home with no heat except three space heaters. That is the most dangerous thing you can put in a mobile home.

Isn’t here a Health and Human Services organization in Mississippi? How can her son and daughter just leave her here?

I do the math mentally. She got $30,000 from FEMA, gave her son $5,000, and some to her daughter and a few others, paid $20,000 for a mobile home that wasn’t delivered, bought this mobile home for $4,000 and then paid some would-be carpenter $12,000 to fix it, when the only “fixing” practical is to trash it or burn it and start over. That is more than the $39,000 she got from FEMA.

About a mess like this, my mother said it best:

"It makes me so mad I could chew nails."

But the anger fades as Mrs. Mary’s situation just saddens me and reduces me to impotency. I feel like sitting down on her steps and just crying for her.

It only takes a while working here to come to an accommodation of Mrs. Mary’s dilemma. Mrs. Mary is an icon for everything wrong about this hurricane’s aftermath; about how the State can sacrifice someone like Mrs. Mary in order to rebuild a port or a factory to make more jobs for better tax revenue and industrial growth; about children, about how well we live Christ’s command to help:

“…Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean; cease to do evil; learn to do good; seek justice; correct oppression; defend the fatherless; plead for the widow.” (Is 1:16-17)

One either inures oneself to Mrs. Mary’s tragedy, to the pathos of the poor and displaced and to His command; or one gives one’s soul up to the suffering and becomes one with their sorrow…and does something about it.

Peace and Grace