Day 406 – Compassion and Change

I’ve been in Pearlington much of all the week before last and again last week. Driving back and forth to Gulfport isn’t much fun, it is pretty much a ghost town.

There are only four people left around Orange Grove. Two of them are dismantling the village, one doing the last odd jobs on clients’ homes and the last our village manager who is trying to get through his exams at the local college.

Pearlington, though, faces a lot of challenges. The work site managers haven’t done a very good job summarizing the cases so one has to get them to visit and then prepare work summaries. The upside of this is a much closer, compassionate relationship with the clients because the activity becomes more of an informal, family-level interaction.

I worry that after I’m gone (not that I am so important but I sense a difference in philosophy), the next work managers will just push through and that family-relationship that sustains compassion may be lost.

The three cases that really worry me are Mrs. Alice, Terry and the woman in Waveland that a group in the Arkansas Presbytery is helping. More on the latter two later.

Thanks to the Mennonites initially, and to several volunteer groups, we have made great progress on Mrs. Alice’s house. We have gotten the roof repaired, the porches repaired and installed all the drywall (Thanks to the Fountain City PC crew for the drywall installation), finished and primed it.

The groups from Canada and California really helped this week. They managed to get the interior mostly painted and they crew is installing the subfloor over the existing one. The original floor is pretty well warped and delaminated in places from water damage.

The contractor who set the house backup didn’t do a very good job leveling the home and some floors are pretty out of kilter. Because of time, we had planned to put in a new subfloor but leave as-is the areas of the floor that are out plane.

We had a skilled crew and as usual, small miracles happen when good people start a job.

As they looked at it, they determined to shim in these unlevel places using ripped 2x4’s. I’m always nervous when a crew starts some thing so significant because I worry they will not get done in a week and I’ll be left with a relatively unskilled crew the next week to finish some skilled work.

This crew worked like madmen and manager to get all the unlevel places fixed and covered with subfloor. They only could tack down the subfloor, the next group will need to carefully nail down all the edges and go down the stud/shims in the floor. Then the flooring can start.

My worry about the team that did the leveling was unjustified. Knowing we have set a mid-June objective to be done if at all possible, they said they wanted to come back from California in a couple weeks and finish.

The REAL worry is the comment by the fellow setting up the move of Pearlington to Diamondhead, “I hope they don’t try to come back in May, we need to set up Diamondhead and they will not have any place to stay.”

The sad conflict between compassion and organizational woodenness persists, hopefully compasssion will prevail.

I am going to send a note to them about where they may stay with a local family in town to get this done.The sad conflict between compassion and organizational woodenness persists, hopefully compasssion will prevail.

We should always seek to sustain compassion. I'm slowly figuring out this is the key to what PDA's mission should be for the long haul and good of the church.