You know how writers get “writer’s block” sometimes when they can’t think of anything to write about? I had a hard time coming up with anything interesting to say this week. I thought about writing about the fact that I inherited two mink coats from my mother-in-law but can’t wear either one no matter how cold it is because my daughters say it’s politically incorrect. Then I thought about writing a comparative analysis of Hillary Clinton vs. Barack Obama that pointed out the edge in any political race will go to the candidate with the better hair. While he doesn’t have much, at least it always looks the same, an advantage Hillary doesn’t have. Plus men have pockets. I’ve always thought men held an advantage simply because they have pockets.
But neither one of those subjects seemed very exciting to write about. So I decided to go back to Pearlington, Mississippi.
The idea sneaked up on me. I’ve been telling people for a long time to “just go.” After our last trip to Pearlington I told Beaven that these mission trips are such good physical exercise we needed to find a way to keep it up after we leave. Then I found a blog written by a guy named Canada Jon who does a lot of work in Pearlington. He wrote about the power of just one person to make a difference. I noticed my calendar is empty for the next couple of months. This alone is an incredibly rare situation worthy of note. It was all kind of like a sign from God or something. So I decided to “just go.” I’m leaving tomorrow morning.
Pearlington has a goal to have the town up and running by the 2nd anniversary of the storm. The town is small enough that I think they could do it. And the town is poor enough that it can only be done with volunteer labor. I’d like to be part of that effort.
Once I started thinking about just going by myself, I remembered what Ila Hitt said when somebody ask her why she went on one of these trips to help with the hurricane recovery. She said, “I have the time, the money and the energy to go. It would be a shame, no—it would be a sin, not to go.” I couldn’t get that phrase out of my mind.
Beaven has got to be the world’s most understanding husband. Or maybe he just wants the TV to himself for a while. At any rate, he’s encouraged me to just go ahead and go. He told me that he would hold down the fort; make sure our granddaughters stay spoiled and keep our dogs and cats happy.
The whole trip is something I’ve never done before. I’ve never driven ten hours alone. I am notorious for my bad sense of direction. I could conceivably end up at the Grand Canyon. I’ve never been away from home and alone at the same time. I’ve gone plenty of exotic places but always with someone I know.
I have no idea how long I will stay. I might last only a week and get homesick. I reserve the right to run back home with my head held high, knowing I found my limits. I also might stay a couple of months. I do have some idea of where I’ll stay but that’s about all I know for sure. I don’t know what I’ll be doing. I could be hanging drywall or painting or building another deck.
To me, these unknowns are part of the adventure that faith takes you on. I leave those details in God’s hands and trust that everything will work out. I am open to what God wants to use me for and for whatever God wants to show me. I hope I’ll be able to see clearly enough to write about it when I get home in a way that will touch people and help them understand things better.
In the meantime, somebody please remind Beaven to water the plants. Also, he bought a new computer and it was delivered today. If he calls anyone in a couple of days and asks if you’ve seen me, remind him where I am.
About Me
- Jane
- I'm pretty much a typist for the Holy Spirit. I try to put those things into words in a blog called Jane's Journey. I have another blog for recipes called My Life in Food. Also Really Cool Stuff features Labyrinths and other things like how to fry an egg on the sidewalk.(first step: don't do it on the sidewalk, use a skillet) Come along with me as I careen through life.
Monday, January 22, 2007
Tuesday, January 16, 2007
"Nothing Means Green"
If you read last week's post and worried about the picture of the car in the ditch, I figured out how to post the photo. Well, actually, I didn't figure anything out. But it worked this time. So go back to last week to see the picture of the car in the ditch.
Now, for today's business: our tour of New Orleans- (however, I don't have any pictures today; not because I'm incompetent but because it rained for most of the trip.)
We found a guided tour of New Orleans through the St Charles Ave Presbyterian Church. They have a program called RHINO (Rebuilding Hope in New Orleans). I especially wanted our young adults to see the city first hand and with someone who could tell them what they were seeing.
It wasn’t hard to get the impression the St Charles Ave Presbyterian Church is a large and wealthy congregation. It’s in the center of New Orleans and stands on just about the only part of town that didn’t get flooded. However, they suffered wind damage to their roof and are in reconstruction mode themselves. The tour was conducted in our rented van and was led by a church member. There’s no telling how many of these tours Laurie Becker has done but she was just bursting with information.
Laurie used to work for the Dallas Times Herald and her daughter goes to Trinity College in San Antonio so she has lots of ties to Texas. Her husband is an attorney so we pretty much knew she lived in the nice part of town when she referred to her own neighborhood. She had the most relaxing way of keeping a running commentary from the front seat of the van all the way to the back while giving Damon driving instructions at the same time. I don’t know how she did it. My brain would have exploded.
The tour started out in the wealthiest part of the city, the Garden District, also called “the sliver on the river” now because there was a small sliver of land above the water line. She talked a little of how the street cars will not reopen until 2008 because the falling trees took down the power lines. St Charles Avenue is high ground and where private boats brought people who had been rescued from their rooftops.
When Damon stopped at a traffic light showing neither red nor green, waiting for something to happen, Laurie said in a very off-handed way for him to continue through the intersection; that “nothing means green.” This was just one of many examples of how all the rules have changed in this city. This became one of the most quoted memories of our trip. Nothing means green.
A few minutes after seeing this area she told us that from that point on in our tour of New Orleans we should think of ourselves as being in a boat because for the rest of the tour all the areas of the town we would see from then on were only reachable by boat after the water rose.
The tour went from neighborhood to neighborhood, getting poorer as we went. The first area we saw was the University area, an upper class neighborhood with two story homes. Laurie said these people were able to live on their second floor but the bottom floors were gutted. That meant cooking out of a microwave and washing dishes in the tub.
We were starting to see flood lines on the houses. There are no FEMA trailers here because one of the rules is that you have to put it entirely on your property and there’s no room in the small front and back yards here. There’s also a FEMA rule that you can’t put a trailer in a flood zone. (Well, duh.) That explains the lack of trailers in New Orleans as well as the 15,000 unused trailers parked on an airport runway in Hope, Arkansas. Our recent college graduate, Kyle Wilson, said he has flown over them many times during his training to become a pilot.
She explained the FEMA “X”s . A few days after the mayor declared a mandatory evacuation of the city the search and rescue teams entered every single house in New Orleans. Consequently, every house has one of the X’s spray painted on it, including her own. The date is when the team entered the house. The next section is the team who entered. “CA” meant the team from California, etc. The third section told of any hazards found like rats or snakes. And the fourth section gave a number of dead bodies found inside. There was another marker also for any pets found. “FW” meant they found a pet and “Fed and Watered” it. Sometimes they would write “Needs pickup” to come get the dog or cat.
Laurie called New Orleans a city of canals, “just like Venice but without the gondolas.” The canals are normally used for drainage. The town sits so low that when it rains they have to pump water out to avoid flooding. But during Katrina these canals brought water into the city instead of away.
The politics and history swirling around New Orleans make for its own nastiness. There was a terrible flood in 1927, that time from bad rains. The Caernarvon levee was intentionally blown up, some say to save the wealthier parts of the city. In 1965 Hurricane Betsy hit and the levees were overtopped by storm surge that was two feet higher than the levees. Over 80 people were killed in that storm . And even during Katrina, Jefferson parish flooded because the pumps were intentionally shut off. Laurie told us this was a decision by the parish president made in order to allow those workers to evacuate. Many times human error has caused as much misery as the weather. Needless to say, New Orleans has a hard time trusting their politicians.
New Orleans has many multi-generational families of all economic classes. They all ask the same questions. If I re-build, how high do I build? If they declare this a flood zone will I have to re-build on stilts? What good is insurance if you can’t get anything from them? As we drove out of Jefferson parish and into Orleans parish we saw a sign that said “Armed Special Services on Duty 24 hours a day”
Fifty Eight. That’s the number of breeches in the levees. 58 places where the water came through the levees. She took us to see two or three of these. We couldn’t actually see the levees other than a high mound of dirt or concrete. Instead ,we saw the damage the breech made. At the 17th St. canal breech there was a row of houses still standing except for the gap directly in front of the breech where the water blew a house off its foundation and left only the concrete.
Laurie told a little of the human cost, the few stories here and there that accumulated to make the big picture. Her family veterinarian moved away yesterday. Her pediatrician committed suicide a few weeks after the storm. Their church has lost two of their three ministers.
In Lakeview, a solid middle class neighborhood, we saw houses with holes in the roofs where people had become trapped in the house and escaped through the roof.
Among the forgotten victims of the flood are the trees and vegetation. The flood waters, besides containing water from the sewage system and industrial waste also brought salt water from the ocean and left it there for days. New Orleans has lost ten percent of their trees from damage by the salt water bath. At one point Laurie and her daughter were trying to figure out what color to use to describe the trees and grass. It wasn’t green and it wasn’t yellow or brown. They decided to call the color “dead.”
We went by the marina where it looked like, in her words, “ a small boy had thrown his play boats down in anger”. There was still a jumble of boats piled up on top of each other.
Laurie told us “I’m learning about what ‘home’ means to people.” She has talked to people who lived in Houston for a while with better housing, better jobs and better schools who have come back simply because “it’s home.” For a while she read up on social engineering and how the academics would bring the city back. Years ago when the wealthy blacks couldn’t live inside the city they built homes for themselves on the outskirts of town in a separate neighborhood. Some of the homes were large and beautiful; they had their own country clubs and social life. Laurie thought the city could now shrink to a smaller city and those blacks could move closer in and live in a mixed neighborhood. But they don’t want to. It’s not home. So, she has decided social engineering doesn’t work and the city must come back naturally. But nobody knows what that will look like. “I’m not real big on odds anymore.”
By now in our tour we were in the Lakeview neighborhood. Some of the houses were in the process of rebuilding. Laurie said she expected that as property values fell, people would find bargains and everyone would be able to move up a notch. The pioneers in this neighborhood had signs in their yards proudly proclaiming that they believed in their city and were staying.
In the Gentilly neighborhood the houses got poorer. And not all the people who lived here were renters. Some of the homes had been paid off generations ago and passed down in the family from parents or grandparents. The downside of this is that since they owned the homes outright there was no mortgage company to require them to carry insurance. Without insurance, they lost everything.
Periodically Laurie would say about a neighborhood that she felt good about them, felt that they would come back. But then she might get to another neighborhood and say that she was worried about it; that she didn’t know if they would make it. You could tell she loves her city.
We continued on to the ninth ward. I found out that New Orleans is divided into wards and every neighborhood has a number but some of them go by names also, like the Garden District or the Lakeview neighborhood. The Ninth Ward is just called by its number.
We saw Fats Domino’s house. And Musicians Village where Winton Marsalis and Harry Connick Jr are joining with Habitat for Humanity to build new houses there. The houses are small and different vibrant colors. It’s about the only new construction we saw.
Laurie gave us some statistics. The loss of life followed the same demographic percentages as the city. Sixty-two percent of the city was black and roughly 62% of lives lost were black. But among property losses the blacks suffered more than whites. Some of the empty foundations we saw were not because houses were washed away but because they were in such bad shape they were bulldozed. She fears the loss of the character of the town as well as the loss of small businesses. Some have closed. The city is still 80% devastated. They need paying customers.
At the end of two hours driving around like this she reminded us that we were still in a boat. Everything we had seen had been in water so deep that it was only accessible by boat. But now we were about three miles from the Super Dome. She wanted us to “get out of the boat” and imagine the people who heard that they could go to the Convention Center or the Super Dome for shelter. We were to imagine the walk. It was days after the storm and we were hungry and thirsty. We were walking in water up to our chests. It was 109 degrees. The water was a cocktail of sewage, motor oil and industrial waste. There were snakes and rats swimming in the water with us. And we were carrying our baby in a plastic basket. What did we expect to find when we got to the convention center? I immediately thought of getting a shower. Others thought of changing the baby’s diaper or of eating. And, of course, we all knew what awaited them at the Convention Center.
It was a vivid experience. I have never seen so much damage in my life. I doubt there is anything in New Orleans that’s not affected by the storm. If there was, we didn’t see it.
There are more ways to help with the recovery from this storm than you could imagine. Take a group or go alone. Some places restrict teams to those over 18 but some accept 16 years or older. Here’s a few websites to look at:
St Charles Ave Presbyterian and RHINO: http://www.scapc.org/
Presbyterian Disaster Assistance: www.pcusa.org/katrina/
News of all groups helping in Pearlington, Mississippi: http://pearlington.blogspot.com/
Check them all out. Sign up and go.
Now, for today's business: our tour of New Orleans- (however, I don't have any pictures today; not because I'm incompetent but because it rained for most of the trip.)
We found a guided tour of New Orleans through the St Charles Ave Presbyterian Church. They have a program called RHINO (Rebuilding Hope in New Orleans). I especially wanted our young adults to see the city first hand and with someone who could tell them what they were seeing.
It wasn’t hard to get the impression the St Charles Ave Presbyterian Church is a large and wealthy congregation. It’s in the center of New Orleans and stands on just about the only part of town that didn’t get flooded. However, they suffered wind damage to their roof and are in reconstruction mode themselves. The tour was conducted in our rented van and was led by a church member. There’s no telling how many of these tours Laurie Becker has done but she was just bursting with information.
Laurie used to work for the Dallas Times Herald and her daughter goes to Trinity College in San Antonio so she has lots of ties to Texas. Her husband is an attorney so we pretty much knew she lived in the nice part of town when she referred to her own neighborhood. She had the most relaxing way of keeping a running commentary from the front seat of the van all the way to the back while giving Damon driving instructions at the same time. I don’t know how she did it. My brain would have exploded.
The tour started out in the wealthiest part of the city, the Garden District, also called “the sliver on the river” now because there was a small sliver of land above the water line. She talked a little of how the street cars will not reopen until 2008 because the falling trees took down the power lines. St Charles Avenue is high ground and where private boats brought people who had been rescued from their rooftops.
When Damon stopped at a traffic light showing neither red nor green, waiting for something to happen, Laurie said in a very off-handed way for him to continue through the intersection; that “nothing means green.” This was just one of many examples of how all the rules have changed in this city. This became one of the most quoted memories of our trip. Nothing means green.
A few minutes after seeing this area she told us that from that point on in our tour of New Orleans we should think of ourselves as being in a boat because for the rest of the tour all the areas of the town we would see from then on were only reachable by boat after the water rose.
The tour went from neighborhood to neighborhood, getting poorer as we went. The first area we saw was the University area, an upper class neighborhood with two story homes. Laurie said these people were able to live on their second floor but the bottom floors were gutted. That meant cooking out of a microwave and washing dishes in the tub.
We were starting to see flood lines on the houses. There are no FEMA trailers here because one of the rules is that you have to put it entirely on your property and there’s no room in the small front and back yards here. There’s also a FEMA rule that you can’t put a trailer in a flood zone. (Well, duh.) That explains the lack of trailers in New Orleans as well as the 15,000 unused trailers parked on an airport runway in Hope, Arkansas. Our recent college graduate, Kyle Wilson, said he has flown over them many times during his training to become a pilot.
She explained the FEMA “X”s . A few days after the mayor declared a mandatory evacuation of the city the search and rescue teams entered every single house in New Orleans. Consequently, every house has one of the X’s spray painted on it, including her own. The date is when the team entered the house. The next section is the team who entered. “CA” meant the team from California, etc. The third section told of any hazards found like rats or snakes. And the fourth section gave a number of dead bodies found inside. There was another marker also for any pets found. “FW” meant they found a pet and “Fed and Watered” it. Sometimes they would write “Needs pickup” to come get the dog or cat.
Laurie called New Orleans a city of canals, “just like Venice but without the gondolas.” The canals are normally used for drainage. The town sits so low that when it rains they have to pump water out to avoid flooding. But during Katrina these canals brought water into the city instead of away.
The politics and history swirling around New Orleans make for its own nastiness. There was a terrible flood in 1927, that time from bad rains. The Caernarvon levee was intentionally blown up, some say to save the wealthier parts of the city. In 1965 Hurricane Betsy hit and the levees were overtopped by storm surge that was two feet higher than the levees. Over 80 people were killed in that storm . And even during Katrina, Jefferson parish flooded because the pumps were intentionally shut off. Laurie told us this was a decision by the parish president made in order to allow those workers to evacuate. Many times human error has caused as much misery as the weather. Needless to say, New Orleans has a hard time trusting their politicians.
New Orleans has many multi-generational families of all economic classes. They all ask the same questions. If I re-build, how high do I build? If they declare this a flood zone will I have to re-build on stilts? What good is insurance if you can’t get anything from them? As we drove out of Jefferson parish and into Orleans parish we saw a sign that said “Armed Special Services on Duty 24 hours a day”
Fifty Eight. That’s the number of breeches in the levees. 58 places where the water came through the levees. She took us to see two or three of these. We couldn’t actually see the levees other than a high mound of dirt or concrete. Instead ,we saw the damage the breech made. At the 17th St. canal breech there was a row of houses still standing except for the gap directly in front of the breech where the water blew a house off its foundation and left only the concrete.
Laurie told a little of the human cost, the few stories here and there that accumulated to make the big picture. Her family veterinarian moved away yesterday. Her pediatrician committed suicide a few weeks after the storm. Their church has lost two of their three ministers.
In Lakeview, a solid middle class neighborhood, we saw houses with holes in the roofs where people had become trapped in the house and escaped through the roof.
Among the forgotten victims of the flood are the trees and vegetation. The flood waters, besides containing water from the sewage system and industrial waste also brought salt water from the ocean and left it there for days. New Orleans has lost ten percent of their trees from damage by the salt water bath. At one point Laurie and her daughter were trying to figure out what color to use to describe the trees and grass. It wasn’t green and it wasn’t yellow or brown. They decided to call the color “dead.”
We went by the marina where it looked like, in her words, “ a small boy had thrown his play boats down in anger”. There was still a jumble of boats piled up on top of each other.
Laurie told us “I’m learning about what ‘home’ means to people.” She has talked to people who lived in Houston for a while with better housing, better jobs and better schools who have come back simply because “it’s home.” For a while she read up on social engineering and how the academics would bring the city back. Years ago when the wealthy blacks couldn’t live inside the city they built homes for themselves on the outskirts of town in a separate neighborhood. Some of the homes were large and beautiful; they had their own country clubs and social life. Laurie thought the city could now shrink to a smaller city and those blacks could move closer in and live in a mixed neighborhood. But they don’t want to. It’s not home. So, she has decided social engineering doesn’t work and the city must come back naturally. But nobody knows what that will look like. “I’m not real big on odds anymore.”
By now in our tour we were in the Lakeview neighborhood. Some of the houses were in the process of rebuilding. Laurie said she expected that as property values fell, people would find bargains and everyone would be able to move up a notch. The pioneers in this neighborhood had signs in their yards proudly proclaiming that they believed in their city and were staying.
In the Gentilly neighborhood the houses got poorer. And not all the people who lived here were renters. Some of the homes had been paid off generations ago and passed down in the family from parents or grandparents. The downside of this is that since they owned the homes outright there was no mortgage company to require them to carry insurance. Without insurance, they lost everything.
Periodically Laurie would say about a neighborhood that she felt good about them, felt that they would come back. But then she might get to another neighborhood and say that she was worried about it; that she didn’t know if they would make it. You could tell she loves her city.
We continued on to the ninth ward. I found out that New Orleans is divided into wards and every neighborhood has a number but some of them go by names also, like the Garden District or the Lakeview neighborhood. The Ninth Ward is just called by its number.
We saw Fats Domino’s house. And Musicians Village where Winton Marsalis and Harry Connick Jr are joining with Habitat for Humanity to build new houses there. The houses are small and different vibrant colors. It’s about the only new construction we saw.
Laurie gave us some statistics. The loss of life followed the same demographic percentages as the city. Sixty-two percent of the city was black and roughly 62% of lives lost were black. But among property losses the blacks suffered more than whites. Some of the empty foundations we saw were not because houses were washed away but because they were in such bad shape they were bulldozed. She fears the loss of the character of the town as well as the loss of small businesses. Some have closed. The city is still 80% devastated. They need paying customers.
At the end of two hours driving around like this she reminded us that we were still in a boat. Everything we had seen had been in water so deep that it was only accessible by boat. But now we were about three miles from the Super Dome. She wanted us to “get out of the boat” and imagine the people who heard that they could go to the Convention Center or the Super Dome for shelter. We were to imagine the walk. It was days after the storm and we were hungry and thirsty. We were walking in water up to our chests. It was 109 degrees. The water was a cocktail of sewage, motor oil and industrial waste. There were snakes and rats swimming in the water with us. And we were carrying our baby in a plastic basket. What did we expect to find when we got to the convention center? I immediately thought of getting a shower. Others thought of changing the baby’s diaper or of eating. And, of course, we all knew what awaited them at the Convention Center.
It was a vivid experience. I have never seen so much damage in my life. I doubt there is anything in New Orleans that’s not affected by the storm. If there was, we didn’t see it.
There are more ways to help with the recovery from this storm than you could imagine. Take a group or go alone. Some places restrict teams to those over 18 but some accept 16 years or older. Here’s a few websites to look at:
St Charles Ave Presbyterian and RHINO: http://www.scapc.org/
Presbyterian Disaster Assistance: www.pcusa.org/katrina/
News of all groups helping in Pearlington, Mississippi: http://pearlington.blogspot.com/
Check them all out. Sign up and go.
Back to Pearlington
This was probably the best mission/youth/church trip I’ve ever been on and I’ve been on a lot. It was almost like I had handpicked the people who came. Maybe God was feeling especially generous with me on this one.
We took a small team composed of our pastor (Anne Clifton), a contractor who runs his own mission trip each summer to Mexico (Damon Renaud), three hardy and enthusiastic college youth I’ve known all their lives (Chelsey Fields, Kyle Wilson and Stephen Cottingham), then a couple of retired geezers-Beaven and myself. Seven people is the perfect number to use a 12-passenger van. You take out the back seat at the rental place and use the back for luggage. The drive is so much more fun when everybody is in the same vehicle.
I brought a portable DVD player and we watched a couple of movies. The one we enjoyed the most was “Little Miss Sunshine” which is about your typical dysfunctional family taking a long trip in a van. Their clutch goes out mid-trip and they end up having to push the thing to start then run along side of it and hop in when it changes gear. We kept intending to try this the whole week. The closest we came was periodically Damon would start without Stephen and yell out the window at him to “Run, Stephen!”
Maybe you had to be there. But the gist of the experience is that we had a lot of laughs. We had the kind of laughs you get by trusting and loving each other.
For our third trip to the Gulf Coast we went back to Pearlington. We fell in love with the town the last trip and I’ll try to explain why.
The town, except it’s not really a town, is so small and compact that you can get a real feel for it. You can drive around in 20 minutes or less and see it all. The streets are numbered in one section so if you know Shirley Thompson on Eight Street and your project is on Ninth Street you can just walk over to check on her. It’s a poor town that was poor before the hurricane but it’s so friendly that it feels rich beyond words. The Missionary Baptist Church serves lunch to all the volunteers in Pearlington and it’s the best example of Southern cooking you will see. On Fridays they always have fried fish and it’s everything I dreamed it would be. It was only topped by the fried chicken I got on Saturday.
One day on our way back from lunch we saw a white car in a ditch. The water drainage in Pearlington is by way of deep ditches by the road. The ditches are well over three or four feet deep. They’re so deep that one time on our last trip, Ila Hitt fell in it and she just disappeared from sight. One minute we saw her and the next minute she was gone. I still laugh at the memory. My point is that this ditch was deep enough that you thought to yourself “There’s no way they can get this out.” And who do you call? Pearlington isn’t the kind of place that has AAA offices around the corner.
But what Pearlington does have is people. The poor city slickers who ran off the road were amazed when every single car that came by stopped and got out to help. After much head scratching, enough folks had stopped that they were able to just lift the car up and out of the ditch.
Our assignment this time was the best we’ve ever had: we were to build a deck for a lady named Angel. What kind of church wouldn’t be thrilled to be working for an Angel? It was a big enough job (500 square feet) to challenge us but we had enough people and enough time that we knew we could do it. And it just so happened that a deck is the next thing on my To Do list for Beaven so I was overjoyed to have him work under Damon’s expertise.
But the best part of working in this town is being able to go back to check on what you did on your last visit. On our last trip we began the drywall work on Shirley Thompson’s house but we never got to finish. It’s always hard to leave and go home if you haven’t gotten to complete your project. So one of the first things I wanted to do in Pearlington was check on Shirley’s house. And, because the town is so compact, I could just walk over to her house from where we were working. I was excited to see Shirley standing out in front of her house. And, as an added bonus, Evelyn was standing there talking to her. We did a little work on Evelyn’s house last trip—mostly just standing around trying to figure things out. We were sent to pour concrete supports for her deck but it never worked out.
I was able to talk to both ladies and get an update. I will be able to go back to Angel’s house on our next trip to see her sitting on the deck with her neighbor watching the world go by while her son plays.
She got the money for the deck through a grant. Angel ordered the deck in a kit from Lowe’s who delivered everything she was supposed to need. But Lowe’s didn’t provide instructions beyond a picture of what the finished deck was supposed to look like. So the first day Damon spent some time counting bolts and lumber to work backwards and figure out how to build it. Once he had a plan in his mind we started digging post holes. Then we mixed cement to pour for the foundation. Gradually, it came together. Rain threatened to hold us up a couple of times but it never made us stop before we were ready.
Angel had evacuated before the storm but her neighbor stayed and told us what happened. She started her story with the phrase we had already heard many times: “I was here for Betsy and I was here for Camille.” She thought she would just ride this one out like she had all the others. After the initial wind and rain stopped she went outside to look around. This was the eye of the storm. She was standing in the street when the eye passed and said the water came down the street “just like you were filling your bathtub.” They all piled into the family boat that had sat unused for years. The water got so high that the boat was at the same level as the power lines thirty feet above ground. They used the wires to pull themselves over to the school. I asked her if she lost any of her family that day. She told me they could hear her nephew screaming until he drowned. There were no tears in this story. It’s been 16 months. Maybe all the tears have been shed. But she told me that if the nephew had been with her son, he would have been able to save him. He had already pulled a grown man up out of the water.
I developed what I call my “spoon obsession.” Everybody told me the same thing: the hurricane came and just blew everything away. They would point to the woods and say their whole house had disappeared. I understood that the rubble had been bulldozed and carried away but I was sure there would be some small piece of the household left. I took more than one walk in the woods looking for a spoon or a plate or maybe a soggy videotape. I never found anything left by the hurricane. It still puzzles me. Out of entire houses full of “things” why didn’t at least a few of them turn up? Was the storm that violent that it carried things away more completely and farther than I expected? Did the people comb the woods that thoroughly in the last year, that they found every single spoon? I had heard one story of a guy who had a plastic box of his military records show up two miles from his house. Where were all the spoons?
I finally found the closest thing to what I was looking for on our last day. In Angel’s front yard I looked down and found embedded in the dirt the unmistakable shape of the metal brackets that hold the ceiling fan blade. I guess it had broken off the motor and off the wooden blade. All I could see there in the mud was the metal bracket. That was all that was left.
Next week, I’ll report on our fantastic guided tour of New Orleans. It was a lot of what I had seen on TV but now I’ve seen it in person. Everyone needs to see it for themselves.
In the meantime, I found a great blog to check out:
http://pearlington.blogspot.com/
The thing I like about it is that is shares the news from all the different agencies working in Pearlington. I read in one blog that some people have a goal of having the town rebuilt by the second anniversary of the storm. I think that’s an attainable goal if we don’t slow down. It will be just eight months from now. When are you going?
We took a small team composed of our pastor (Anne Clifton), a contractor who runs his own mission trip each summer to Mexico (Damon Renaud), three hardy and enthusiastic college youth I’ve known all their lives (Chelsey Fields, Kyle Wilson and Stephen Cottingham), then a couple of retired geezers-Beaven and myself. Seven people is the perfect number to use a 12-passenger van. You take out the back seat at the rental place and use the back for luggage. The drive is so much more fun when everybody is in the same vehicle.
I brought a portable DVD player and we watched a couple of movies. The one we enjoyed the most was “Little Miss Sunshine” which is about your typical dysfunctional family taking a long trip in a van. Their clutch goes out mid-trip and they end up having to push the thing to start then run along side of it and hop in when it changes gear. We kept intending to try this the whole week. The closest we came was periodically Damon would start without Stephen and yell out the window at him to “Run, Stephen!”
Maybe you had to be there. But the gist of the experience is that we had a lot of laughs. We had the kind of laughs you get by trusting and loving each other.
For our third trip to the Gulf Coast we went back to Pearlington. We fell in love with the town the last trip and I’ll try to explain why.
The town, except it’s not really a town, is so small and compact that you can get a real feel for it. You can drive around in 20 minutes or less and see it all. The streets are numbered in one section so if you know Shirley Thompson on Eight Street and your project is on Ninth Street you can just walk over to check on her. It’s a poor town that was poor before the hurricane but it’s so friendly that it feels rich beyond words. The Missionary Baptist Church serves lunch to all the volunteers in Pearlington and it’s the best example of Southern cooking you will see. On Fridays they always have fried fish and it’s everything I dreamed it would be. It was only topped by the fried chicken I got on Saturday.
One day on our way back from lunch we saw a white car in a ditch. The water drainage in Pearlington is by way of deep ditches by the road. The ditches are well over three or four feet deep. They’re so deep that one time on our last trip, Ila Hitt fell in it and she just disappeared from sight. One minute we saw her and the next minute she was gone. I still laugh at the memory. My point is that this ditch was deep enough that you thought to yourself “There’s no way they can get this out.” And who do you call? Pearlington isn’t the kind of place that has AAA offices around the corner.
But what Pearlington does have is people. The poor city slickers who ran off the road were amazed when every single car that came by stopped and got out to help. After much head scratching, enough folks had stopped that they were able to just lift the car up and out of the ditch.Our assignment this time was the best we’ve ever had: we were to build a deck for a lady named Angel. What kind of church wouldn’t be thrilled to be working for an Angel? It was a big enough job (500 square feet) to challenge us but we had enough people and enough time that we knew we could do it. And it just so happened that a deck is the next thing on my To Do list for Beaven so I was overjoyed to have him work under Damon’s expertise.
But the best part of working in this town is being able to go back to check on what you did on your last visit. On our last trip we began the drywall work on Shirley Thompson’s house but we never got to finish. It’s always hard to leave and go home if you haven’t gotten to complete your project. So one of the first things I wanted to do in Pearlington was check on Shirley’s house. And, because the town is so compact, I could just walk over to her house from where we were working. I was excited to see Shirley standing out in front of her house. And, as an added bonus, Evelyn was standing there talking to her. We did a little work on Evelyn’s house last trip—mostly just standing around trying to figure things out. We were sent to pour concrete supports for her deck but it never worked out.
I was able to talk to both ladies and get an update. I will be able to go back to Angel’s house on our next trip to see her sitting on the deck with her neighbor watching the world go by while her son plays.
She got the money for the deck through a grant. Angel ordered the deck in a kit from Lowe’s who delivered everything she was supposed to need. But Lowe’s didn’t provide instructions beyond a picture of what the finished deck was supposed to look like. So the first day Damon spent some time counting bolts and lumber to work backwards and figure out how to build it. Once he had a plan in his mind we started digging post holes. Then we mixed cement to pour for the foundation. Gradually, it came together. Rain threatened to hold us up a couple of times but it never made us stop before we were ready.
Angel had evacuated before the storm but her neighbor stayed and told us what happened. She started her story with the phrase we had already heard many times: “I was here for Betsy and I was here for Camille.” She thought she would just ride this one out like she had all the others. After the initial wind and rain stopped she went outside to look around. This was the eye of the storm. She was standing in the street when the eye passed and said the water came down the street “just like you were filling your bathtub.” They all piled into the family boat that had sat unused for years. The water got so high that the boat was at the same level as the power lines thirty feet above ground. They used the wires to pull themselves over to the school. I asked her if she lost any of her family that day. She told me they could hear her nephew screaming until he drowned. There were no tears in this story. It’s been 16 months. Maybe all the tears have been shed. But she told me that if the nephew had been with her son, he would have been able to save him. He had already pulled a grown man up out of the water.
I developed what I call my “spoon obsession.” Everybody told me the same thing: the hurricane came and just blew everything away. They would point to the woods and say their whole house had disappeared. I understood that the rubble had been bulldozed and carried away but I was sure there would be some small piece of the household left. I took more than one walk in the woods looking for a spoon or a plate or maybe a soggy videotape. I never found anything left by the hurricane. It still puzzles me. Out of entire houses full of “things” why didn’t at least a few of them turn up? Was the storm that violent that it carried things away more completely and farther than I expected? Did the people comb the woods that thoroughly in the last year, that they found every single spoon? I had heard one story of a guy who had a plastic box of his military records show up two miles from his house. Where were all the spoons?
I finally found the closest thing to what I was looking for on our last day. In Angel’s front yard I looked down and found embedded in the dirt the unmistakable shape of the metal brackets that hold the ceiling fan blade. I guess it had broken off the motor and off the wooden blade. All I could see there in the mud was the metal bracket. That was all that was left.
Next week, I’ll report on our fantastic guided tour of New Orleans. It was a lot of what I had seen on TV but now I’ve seen it in person. Everyone needs to see it for themselves.
In the meantime, I found a great blog to check out:
http://pearlington.blogspot.com/
The thing I like about it is that is shares the news from all the different agencies working in Pearlington. I read in one blog that some people have a goal of having the town rebuilt by the second anniversary of the storm. I think that’s an attainable goal if we don’t slow down. It will be just eight months from now. When are you going?
Wednesday, January 03, 2007
Back from Mississippi Again
OK, we're home. But I'm still looking for my coat that had my keys, credit cards and iPod in it that I lost before we even left. I could tell you a long story that would lay all the blame on the dog but I know you don't want to hear it. I've got to find the coat before I do another thing today.
I can tell you that we had the best trip ever. The people are just as nice as ever. The rebuilding in Pearlington goes on. Probablly the highlight of the trip was a guided tour through New Orleans that I can't wait to tell you about.
In a nutshell: It's just a mess. Most of the city was destroyed and rebuilding is slow. And if you're going on a trip like this, be sure to take some college kids with you.
I've got to go wash now. Anytime I ever lost anything my mother always told me to clean my house and I would find it. I'll be back tomorrow.
I can tell you that we had the best trip ever. The people are just as nice as ever. The rebuilding in Pearlington goes on. Probablly the highlight of the trip was a guided tour through New Orleans that I can't wait to tell you about.
In a nutshell: It's just a mess. Most of the city was destroyed and rebuilding is slow. And if you're going on a trip like this, be sure to take some college kids with you.
I've got to go wash now. Anytime I ever lost anything my mother always told me to clean my house and I would find it. I'll be back tomorrow.
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