Rebuilding after Katrina - Experiencing Christ

Anitra Kitts Rasmussen
Director of Communications, Covenant Network of Presbyterians
Photos: Cheryl Finch

On January 8, I traveled with four others from the San Francisco Theological Seminary as a Presbyterian Disaster Assistance work team assigned to D'Iberville, Mississippi. Charles Marks, SFTS Chaplain, led our group. Scott Shaefer, Vice President of Administration, and Cheryl Finch, Sharon La Tour, and myself represented the student body. Our journey lasted eight days. What we experienced will last a lifetime.

D'Iberville is a small town located just inland of Biloxi, only a couple of miles north of the casino barges that washed ashore in the twenty foot storm surge. The eastern wall of Hurricane Katrina passed over the town, with sustained winds over 114 miles per hour for six or seven hours. Many twisters were embedded in the storm, over 400 according to one account. St. Martin, a neighboring town, was completely leveled by water and twister. The sustained high winds pushed water inland, first dislodging or destroying barges and casinos along the Biloxi beach and then invading and swamping homes and businesses under first twenty feet of water along the shoreline and then half that several miles inland. Debris and bodies were washed inland from Biloxi into D'Iberville adding to the damage done by wind and wave locally. The water rose fast; those who did not evacuate (there was only twenty-four hours notice due to the last minute shift in the storm track) either found shelter in their attics or huddled in the wind on their roof tops after swimming out the front door.

The D'Iberville PDA camp, one of eight in the area set up and run by the Presbyterian Disaster Assistance program, was set up in September on a baseball field north of town. We slept in corrugated plastic cardboard shelters placed out in left field. We took turns preparing breakfast and lunch for the community and volunteers out by the D'Iberville Volunteer Center located at another baseball facility about a mile away. We cooked dinner for each other at the camp. The week we were in camp, there were over 100 other volunteers from Derry Presbyterian Church, Hershey; PA; Cross Roads Presbyterian Church, Leechburg; PA; Supplee Memorial Presbyterian Church, Maple Grove, PA; First Presbyterian Church, Charlottesville, VA; and First Presbyterian Church, Sheridan, WY.  We were just a few in a long line of congregations that have made the trip to the D'Iberville work site. As of  the end of November, 2005, over 3,105 work days have been logged by volunteers at this one site alone.

D'Iberville was hit hard by Hurricane Katrina. According to the D'Iberville Volunteer Center, over half the town's population of 8,000 was left homeless.  The citizens of D'Iberville were left to fend for themselves; neither the Red Cross nor the National Guard showed up for days after the storm. "On the second night we heard about a local restaurant giving away all their food since the refrigerators had failed," Irene McIntosh, D'Iberville resident and Volunteer Center Coordinator, recounted while preparing breakfast for volunteers and community members. "So we drove over to the warehouse and gathered up all these plastic grocery bags and filled them with cooked beans mixture. We took two pickup trucks and hooked up some flatbed trailers and hung some lanterns off the trailers and we drove up and down the streets in the dark with a loudspeaker calling out, 'Food, we've got food!' People just came out of the darkness to find us, they just crawled over piles of debris."

From the beginnings of that second night's improvised food distribution, Irene and her neighbor and long-time friend, Ed Cake, now run the D'Iberville Volunteer Center located in the middle of a brand new sports complex. Using a handful of computers and a constant stream of willing Presbyterian volunteers, Irene and Ed identify D'Iberville residents in need of food, clothing, and shelter and assign work teams to go out to residences to help muck out storm damage and then begin repairs. As of the middle of January, the database has over 1700 open records of homes and families in need. Over 400 of those records are roofing related.

Our first day's work was to finish ripping out the bathroom furnishings of a home that saw seven feet of water. It was heart-breaking to enter the mostly gutted home. We could see traces of the love and work the residents had put into their home of fifty years. We found it to be cathartic to pour our anger at the abandonment of these people into the removal of sheetrock, cabinets, tile, and the large cast iron bathtub. Across the street was a small, non-denominational church. We looked in the windows and saw the contents of the nursery scattered about by the water. A saturated bible lay opened on the desk in the water-drenched, mold-infused pastor's office. I couldn't see what page the bible lay open to, the air flowing out the window was too mold infused to linger.

Our second day's work involved clearing the yard of a widow with Parkinson's disease. She watched us with grateful eyes. She was alone in her living room during the storm. "I started singing 'Raindrops Keep Falling on my Head' when the living room roof began to leak," she said. Her house, thankfully, lay above the storm surge. As we dragged the limbs of trees out to the street, the city debris clearing crew swept it up. Free debris pick up was coming to an end within a week after four months of daily pickups.

On the third day our group split up. My colleagues went to a house that saw water damage to the top of their inside ceilings. They were home during the storm, as was a neighbor who videotaped the storm first from his living room and then from his attic through a hole he had punched in his roof. We watched the video on one of our last nights in camp. "I never thought I'd see white caps in my back yard," Leah Puzz said in a still unbelieving voice when she narrated her neighbor's video of the destruction to her family's home. During the storm, the family had to swim out of the house to get up on the roof. "We were getting pushed around by the furniture," she told us. "It can hurt you pretty hard when it starts to float."

Because they did not have flood insurance, the only insurance settlement they received was $2,000 for damage to the roof. Before the storm, houses sold for $100,000 to $150,000. Unable to pay for professional contractors, Leah and her family needed volunteers to help pull out damaged walls and begin to rebuild. While we were there we joined Presbyterians from Wyoming and Virginia to replace insulation and hang new sheet rock. We were fortunate to have experienced builders to supervise our work. We enjoyed playing with their two new puppies. The family, like many of their neighbors, lost their beloved dog in the storm.

I spent time going door to door in a trailer park that saw two mini-tornadoes during the storm. We were looking for people who needed help. Four months after the storm we found more than one family still living with blue tarps barely covering open roofs and walls. Several families said they were living with mold, water saturated possessions and walls. The team from Charlottesville Virginia found a woman whose bedroom was open to the sky and whose water was turned off because the pipes were damaged and leaking. When they first knocked on her door they found someone who could not speak without weeping. Deeply depressed, her hope for a different future seemed lost. Embracing her, the Charlottesville team set to work tearing out the damage and standing in line at the building supply store for new materials. The change in Mary, the owner of the trailer, was immediate and dramatic. Within twenty-four hours she was laughing and working with energy alongside the Virginians. By the time they left her with a roof and restored plumbing, she was preparing to look for work. Much like that first sign of spring - a daffodil that emerges from  a January snow drift, Mary had new hope and a desire to live toward a future with joy and energy.

Signs of the Resurrection, the New Creation that God promises us in Christ were everywhere in the midst of the desolate destruction. These signs were present, in part because we were present. Presbyterians, Lutherans, Baptists and more all showing up, all grabbing a hammer or a shovel and all making real Christ's loving concern for us in practical and meaningful ways. There is much yet to be done. D'Iberville and other communities from Texas to Florida need help. They need money and they need volunteers. "God has been in all the things we have done," Brian Johnson Associate Pastor of First, Sheridan WY said on the last night the group was in camp. "In the community, in the camp, in the people we were sent to be with. It was overwhelming for our folks to help them out and see some hope."

Gary and Lisa Lyon, Co-ministers of the newly formed Cross Roads Community Presbyterian Church in Leechburg PA concurred. "Emails just started flying around when the storm happened. It wasn't an if we were going but a when we were going," Gary said. When asked what was the memory they were going to take with them Gary immediately replied, "The blessings we received from the other groups, from the residents of D'Iberville."

On our last night in camp, new volunteers arrived from several churches in the St. Louis area. Now old hands after seven days in camp, we ran them through th practicalities of how to make coffee and where to find the snack kitchen and the tool tent filled with gifts left behind by previous groups. Then we passed our love and our care for the good people of D'Iberville along to them. Our love? Surely it is Christ's love that remains in place in D'Iberville calling all of us to come and experience God's loving Spirit now creating the New from what was and is no more.

There is much work yet to be done. Please consider forming a work group and coming to help this spring and summer. Please keep PDA in your mission-giving budget. Please petition the federal government to do the right thing in these hard-hit areas. Please keep all of us, those who live in the areas hit by Hurricane Katrina, those who go to work in those areas, and those who support this ministry financially in your prayers. Together, we belong to Christ. Together, we experience Christ's love for us all.