The man said, “It’s hard, I feel like God sometimes.”
It was early 2006 in low-lying Gautier, a city east of Biloxi that took on severe damage by the hurricane. He was standing before a makeshift table made of scrap plywood resting on sawhorses and a crew of thirty or so was waiting and watching patiently behind him. The group was still a little grimy and muddy from the work of the day before. Everything was soiled. muddy and moldy.
The table was covered with those square plastic crates; each crate was full of clipboards holding several sheets of paper covered with handwritten notes. The top sheet of each board had a street address and the work to be done at the house at the address. The worksite manager, well, he really wasn’t a work site manager then because this whole process had just begun a few weeks earlier and no one had the time to figure out exactly what an organization might look like, they just came. They just came for what reason? Some of them probably couldn’t really voice a reason, they didn’t come to be a writer or hold some longstanding internal theological struggle, they came because this is such a vast disaster and so many are suffering, they came because of an internal theological imperative, and this man is standing there looking at the table covered with plastic container filled with vertically stacked clipboards each holding a tragic story while he thinks about the thirty people standing patiently behind him and measuring their skills against this kaleidoscope of trouble before him on the table. Finally, with a little sigh he reaches out and pulls up a clipboard at random and reads aloud the work order, “Needs a roof. You guys can’t do a roof.” He puts that clipboard back in its nest and reaches for another one a few inches away, “House shifted about a foot off foundation, need to see if it can be moved back." " Too dangerous and needs heavy equipment,” he says, and slides that one back with another sigh.” He takes a third one. “House needs to be mucked out, tear out all drywall to studs.” He smiles and turns to the group, “You guys can muck out a house, here take this one.” The group leader, standing by the work manager takes the clipboard from him and notes the address. As he turns to marshals his group to the job, the work manager speaks to him in a low voice, “This job, sometimes I feel like Solomon, or God, I don’t know how long I can do it.” You can see the glint of a tear in his eye.
***
PDA has come a long way on the sacrifices of the people who came in the absence of organization, when chaos called. They gave much of what they had. They forged the beginnings of a program out of nothing but hope and a theological imperative somewhere deep within themselves. The beauty of action and commitment is we get better at it the longer and harder we work.
This morning I am about to step out into a new day, it is supposed to be sunny and in the 70’s. We have a village of 104 volunteers; all our jobs are organized; no longer on clipboards stuffed in plastic crates, but printouts from files on our personal computers. Each job has been reviewed and a work plan mapped out with a material list and as best we can, work assigned to groups by skills.
We have a way to go, we are closing this village on a month. As I look out over it, I see the image of that early worksite manager, the insurmountable glut of work on those clipboards, some of which still are in our village office, and that tear in his eye.
We couldn’t be here without his effort and those of the few who helped move a stodgy organization, as inflexible as ourselves because it is ourselves, to action. Hopefully we have further forged our process into an improved working response that we can carry forward to the next challenge. The weight of our choice for work today, the unmet need of the one we can’t help today, still lies heavy on my heart though.
No comments:
Post a Comment