Habitat for Humanity in Mississippi

             The South is not recovering very much yet from Hurricane Katrina.  Don and I spent our two weeks this year with Habitat for Humanity in Gautier, Mississippi.  We drove along the coast just to see what kind of progress had been made since last year when we worked with Habitat in Slidell, Louisiana.  The answer is very little.  I could have taken the same pictures I took last year.  The most noticeable change is all the “For Sale” signs.  The Gulf coast is mile after mile after mile of houses blown apart or washed away, toppled trees, ands signs marking where restaurants or other businesses used to be.  This is one of the poorest parts of the country, and thousands of people lost what little they had.  It will take years to rebuild, partly because it truly was the worst natural disaster this country has ever known, partly because the South does not have the infra-structure and resources that many other parts of the country have.  People have been living for over a year in FEMA trailers.  Many people who had homes do not have money to repair them because their jobs have also been blown away.
          
This was in Biloxi at the volunteer center in an old stadium.  The red line on the sign way above our heads was the Katrina high water mark in the middle of the city of Biloxi. 
         Our campsite was behind a storefront church called the Refuge.  There was just wilderness behind us and concrete around us, but the church put in full hook-ups for volunteers.  We met Monty and Susan who quit their jobs in Indiana when they felt a call from God to work with Convoy of Hope doing hurricane relief work.  They muck out and repair homes of hurricane victims.  They have lived in a borrowed 24 foot travel trailer since February.  What dedication!  It was just them and us back there—kind of disappointing not to have more neighbors. 

            Monty arranged for us to go to a New Year’s party at noon at Billy Joe’s houseboat on the Pascagoula River.  There is a Teen Challenge group home in Pascagoula down the coast for girls and women in drug/alcohol rehab.  Billy Joe puts on parties for them and whoever else who wants to come every holiday except Christmas when the women go home.  The New Year’s dinner had fresh catfish, barbecued chicken, wild boar that he recently shot, hush puppies, black-eyed peas, fabulous cornbread, and about eight desserts that people brought.  The wild boar (which they announced as pork) was darker and a bit tougher than pork, but otherwise similar, not too strong-flavored.  It was served with barbecue sauce, so the flavor was not clear to me.  Billy Joe is a genuine old Mississippi bayou man.  He lives on the houseboat about half the time and spends his days hunting and fishing the bayous for catfish.  When he has a freezer full, he puts on a fish fry as a fund raiser for Teen Challenge.  The houseboat is about 70 feet long and homemade.  It has a big covered porch with beat-up furniture and loads of trophy horns and heads and mounted fish and alligators and goofy signs.  There are pictures and clippings on the walls and clutter everywhere, but it is the kind of people and place that welcome everyone.
   
            Don and I worked on one of seven houses Habitat is building in Gautier.  We did vinyl siding most of the time, as we did last year.  For two teachers with no professional construction training, we are getting pretty good at vinyl.  At least we didn’t have to take pieces down and redo them like we did last year.  Now instead of detailed instructions for each new application, the supervisor would say, “Don and Jean, go put J channel and soffit material under the porch ceiling,” and we actually knew what to do.  We also insulated the walls (nasty stuff—insulation) and roofed the tool shed.  Habitat does not build garages, just a basic house and small, wooden tool shed anchored into the ground in case of another hurricane.  Don’s New Year’s resolution was to not drop a two-by-four on my head like last year, and I am happy to report that he kept it.  No black eyes this time.
  
            We met some great people again.  Our site supervisor, a woman named Kim, and our construction boss, a young guy Bryce, both are in AmeriCorps—like the Peace Corps but in America.  Both gave up their former lives for at least a year to work on Katrina rebuilding for very little pay and rooms in the volunteer dormitories in Biloxi.  Retirees have parked their RV’s there for months to work.  It makes a person humble to volunteer only two weeks.
            We are back now in the frozen north and back to the stress of a new semester starting at Concordia.  After I retire in May, we hope to do more Habitat builds.  It just makes so much sense to us—help poor people one at a time to improve their lives with (as our construction supervisor last year said every day after the morning devotions) “a hand up, not a handout.”