Locked in place - Come to the Gulf and help for you will then know of the post-Katrina syndrome.
The volunteer related her story, "We showed up and looked at the house. The house had lost its roof and there was a lot of water damage. Mr. Hargrove had the roof fixed so at least things were dry. It was chocked full of stuff. It was hard to see how the family moved around. It looked like nothing had moved since all this was placed here after Katrina. Furniture, boxes stacked around and unmoved for the last three and one-half years. We had opened the door to a small room of the kitchen and looked in. It was the laundry room. It hadn’t been opened since the roof was put back on the house. It was terrible. All sorts of critters had been using the space. There was dirt and filth all around inside it."
We asked if we could start moving things in order to work on his ceilings and Mr. Hargrove said "ok.”
Mr. Hargrove watched the crew moving his belongings for a while and then spoke up, “Let me help.”
He started in with an activity he probably hadn’t shown since 2005. Surprisingly he opened the laundry room and started dragging out stuff and throwing it out in a pile in the yard. Before we left for the day he had it emptied of all the wasted things and had cleaned off and wiped down the first shelf I n the cabinet over the washer.
Louise is a dedicated single mother. She had just adopted her two pre-school grandchildren. She had her significant other live in a house where only a living room (garage conversion), bath and one bedroom for her and her significant other live. The other parts of the house still are damaged from Katrina. The dining room and living room are full of what belongings they saved from Katrina and so full as to b unusable. Her “significant other” is handicapped; he had a stroke a while back.
We left them with a fully restored home. I dropped off a lot of Christmas gifts given to me for that purpose by from Northside Presbyterian Church.
Mrs. P, working part time in D’Iberville with three children. The house is virtually empty of furniture. The house needed repainting, roof fixed, eliminate water inflow into the rear of the house from that roof problem. We did it all, and she was our first home blessing.
Mr. and Mrs. Pearson are in a bind, their house wasn’t even 25% restored when I met them. They has lost large sums of money on disreputable contractors and had some construction problems I only had a bare idea of how to fix. We managed to get a Salvation Army grant and with the help of CARE, a Pennsylvania Mennonite relief group we rebuild that construction problem. Last week my good friends from Fountain City Presbyterian Church, on their 13th trip down and 56th house, dry walled 95% of the house. A good crew from Youngstown is finishing what remains this week. It is looking like we will get them into their house soon.
Mr. & Mrs. Seale were living in a molding, 100 yr old home in Gulfport. We successfully got funding and with some of our own resources stripped the home to studs and refinished it. It has taken six months but we should have gotten a certificate of occupancy yesterday or today. We’ve become good friends and I’ve learned lot about the dedication of a son to his parents.
Preaching at Trinity PC in Fairhope was my first foray into ministry. I still remember the lady who walked up with a check for our mission effort that I thought was for $500 but was for $5,000.
I can’t get the woman with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease out of my mind. She lives in a mobile home without central heat, spent $30,000 of her FEMA money of a new home, her children and this worthless mobile home. The man never delivered the new home - she paid cash. Her caseworker doesn’t like her so she gets no access to even the little public resource that might be available.
I remember the majestic home on thirteen foot piers that is slowly crushing the supporting girders holding the house on the piers, yet the owner, caught between insurance company fraudulent contractor and MEMA insisting on taking his cottage back insists on moving in rather than letting us fix the problem before the next major storm that may destroy the house.
There were the days on the bayou out at Jimmy’s home, eating shrimp or crawfish and talking about what we had done in Pearlington and where the future may lead.
There are the special people I’ve met as village staff, Heather, Jeremy, Leslie, Mark, Michelle, Jessi, Michael and others. There are the volunteers from Philadelphia, New York, Ohio, Minnesota, Arkansas, Davison, Virginia and North Carolina.
There is the group from Utah led by a pastor’s wife who announced, “I won’t work on that house, it is nicer than my own,” and whose youth volunteers apologized for the behavior of the adults.
There is the fellow in Pascagoula whose kitchen floor and bedroom walls we repaired who brought us po-boy shrimp and crawfish sandwiches for lunch and who wrote us checks every week for offering from his meager social security, a giving of proportion probably greater than almost any of us give. He would apologize if the check were late.
There is Larry who helped me learn more about Pearlington so I could figure out when I was helping good folks and who to watch out.
I helped as we struggled to set up our efforts for Ike relief in the Galveston area.
There has been the outpouring of support from my church, Northside, and the rock and roll effort to apply and gain admittance into seminary.
There has been for me the most profound humiliation by my pride as I watch and help people who by all rights should have given up; a humiliation of us as a people as we fail to really work to help those in need as I drive down US49 or I-10 and read the billboards advertising the next big entertainer or music group or the loosest slots in town.
There has been for me an assurance, a reaffirmation of the goodness of humankind as I see the suffering show more bravery and hope than I have mustered, as I see volunteers return as changed lives.
And finally, I heard someone in Louisville say ruefully last week as staff reductions were discussed, “You aren’t in the Presbyterian Church you were born into.” I see a glimmer of hope that this church is being changed by these volunteers and the needy they help into something more than the “church we were born into” as they live the Good News Jesus preached.
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