Many natural disasters occur far away, but that was not the case with the damage caused by Hurricane Katrina off the Gulf Coast. Under the guidance of Rev. Terry Hastings, two teams of grunt workers, from Knox and St. Andrew's, both in Stratford, Ont., and other local churches, left in the wee hours one November night last year on a two-day drive to Orange Grove Camp in Gulfport, Mississippi. The eye of Katrina directly hit Gulfport on the night of Aug. 28, 2005. Orange Grove volunteer village was hastily set up after Katrina by Presbyterian Disaster Assistance (PDA). PWS&D, which sanctioned our group, works closely with PDA to co-ordinate volunteer groups from Canada.
The group was scheduled to work for one solid week of first-stage restoration, a term used to describe the labour necessary to completely remove the interior of a home right down to the superstructure. Black mould was everywhere in flood-ravaged homes and everything had to come out. More than 600,000 homes along the Gulf Coast were destroyed and required either demolition or first-stage restoration.
Rev. Rob Congram of Baden, Ont., wrote this reflection following his mission trip. It represents only a small part of his total experience during our trip to Gulfport:
"Rev. George Barnett was the minister of Long Beach Presbyterian on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. He is 60-something, has a southern drawl and there is warmth about him. He kind of reminds you of Colonel Sanders but not as rotund. Eleven weeks earlier Katrina took his church, his house, his livelihood. Infinitely more devastating — some members of his congregation didn't make it through the storm. On our first Sunday morning in Mississippi he tells us this: 'Material things can be replaced … and most of what we have we don't need,' and then his voice breaks and fails as he tries to speak of his friends. He is broken-hearted and grief-stricken. He is trying to be faithful to God but the weight of his life is crushing him.
"As you contemplate the loss experienced by those who survived Hurricane Katrina, you see that in part it is a loss of innocence — as William Butler Yeats wrote in his poem The Second Coming, 'innocence is drowned.' Gone is the illusion that we have sovereignty over our lives — this Western Protestant notion that somehow we have control of our destiny doesn't amount to much when your house is under water.
"William Hazlett wrote: 'No young man thinks that he will ever die.' And to some extent that is true of us all. And so we live our lives like drunken sailors — lurching from one thing to the next, believing that we have a bottomless reservoir of days. The people of the Gulf Coast have been divested of ideas of earthly immortality. Our lives, and the lives of those around us, are frighteningly fragile," Congram wrote.
As I write this, plans are made for the departure of a group of 17 people in late February from St. Andrew's, Stratford, for a week of work at Orange Grove volunteer village. The expected life span of the village is three years; such is the magnitude of recovery. PDA operates five such volunteer villages along the Gulf Coast from Biloxi, Mississippi to New Orleans. Maybe God is calling you to organize a team. It will change the lives of those desperately seeking hope out of chaos.
