In November 2005 I was able to volunteer with the relief effort from Hurricane Katrina in the town of D’Iberville MS. I went with four other local people through the Eno River Unitarian-Universalist Fellowship. The other folks were Audrey, Jeff, Jennifer, and Barbara. We spent just over a week working hard and helping many people.

 

Nov. 13, 2005

We got off to a late start on Sunday which was always the plan since some of our group had some things to get done before leaving. I had to ride in my car alone because we had an odd number of people and needed to take my pick-up truck for work. Personally I didn’t mind as many times I prefer to be alone and driving is one of those situations as there is no pressure to entertain the person who is riding with me. I also like to change up my listening from time to time to keep myself alert, this probably is annoying to others who might be in the car with me. In this situation where I really didn’t know the other people who were on this trip I must admit there was some social anxiety involved with meeting them as well.

We stopped in Spartanburg, S.C. for a meal at a restaurant called “Stax Omega” which is a local diner with “breakfast all day”. It was pretty tasty for a spot beside the highway. Supposedly its owned by a local Greek family and there are a couple more locations in the area. After we ate we lost each other on the highway which was OK because we all had the directions to a hotel just south of Atlanta which we had already arranged for the night. I arrived first because of my lead foot and had to go through the pain of finding the hotel which chooses not to have a sign despite being hidden behind some trees. I made sure to call everyone with some more details on its location. Time for bed and hit the road early.

 

Nov. 14, 2005

Up early and for whatever reason the drive to D’Iberville seemed shorter than it should have been. We started to see blue tarps on roofs just outside of Mobile, Alabama. It got worse the closer we got to the water and more to the West. Mostly though, those areas all had wind damage which I was to learn is nothing compared to storm surge flooding damage. In D’Iberville the storm surge was as high as 25 feet, in Biloxi it was 30+ and most of the houses that were in those storm surge paths are all gone.

We pulled into D’Iberville and up to the camp in which we would be spending the week. It is run by the Presbyterian Disaster Assistance program which I was to find out is a very large and well-funded organization. We dropped off our things in tents and went directly to the D’Iberville volunteer center. D’Iberville has started their own non-profit to cope with the effort and to better take donations and receive volunteer help. This is who we would be working for. We met “Kay” who organizes all the volunteers. She is a firecracker of a woman who dresses like she is 16 and has the energy to go with it. I would guess she is in her upper 40s. She has had a stroke which has left her left arm all but useless and given her a distinctive limp. She does an amazing job and I don’t envy her for the number of times her phone rings. Kay used to be a school teacher at the middle school (which was totally destroyed) but decided to turn in her resignation when she saw the amount of work that needed to be done. She says the “Lord” told her to do this even though they can’t yet give her a salary and she lost her house and car. She’s an amazing person.

After meeting Kay and getting the run-down we chose a random neighborhood near the volunteer center and drove through it to see some of the damage. Most houses had RVs in the driveways where the people currently live. Of the RV people most had to have multiple visits by the health department when they hooked their RVs up to the water and sewage lines and they all complain about it. Many houses in that neighborhood had a big “X” spray-painted on the front of them to signify that they would be destroyed, nothing could be salvaged. Others had their insurance company names and an address of where the residents live now, if they weren’t out front in a trailer, or in the back yard in a tent. It was a sobering sight but I was to learn that it would only scratch the surface.

We headed back to camp and immediately made the Presbyterians nervous by not going to their nightly devotional. I overheard the new camp manager (and evangelical Floridian) talking to the old camp manager (who would leave the next morning) that he thought we “didn’t accept Jesus as our Lord and Savior. The older camp manager said “George, we aren’t here to convert people, we are here to help the victims and we shouldn’t care who joins us.” We would get a bit of a cold-shoulder from George for the rest of the week but, to try to give him some credit, I think he tolerated us. Still, I give the old camp manager more credit because he is correct, the important part is helping the people of D’Iberville. Supposedly the old manager got some crap for bringing in a Jewish group... whatever.

We ate a meal with the Presbyterians which was just OK. It was spaghetti with meatballs and the meatballs were a little suspect to me. We were all wiped out and immediately went to our tents for the night after dinner to read and sleep. I tried to read but the Presbyterians kept singing... I tried to sleep but it was too bright. The camp is on a baseball field (like just about everything else, good thing D’Ibervillians liked baseball) and the overhead lights are on until 10:30 every night. Even then the lights from the two surrounding fields, where FEMA was temporarily housing homeless residents, stayed on all night long. It was bright enough to read by and I found that at about 3:00am I was tying a sleeve from a shirt around my head to make a blindfold. That worked.

 

Nov. 15, 2005

Up early to the sounds of people stirring. We are off to the volunteer center to get our assignment for the day. Kay told us that we would be working at the P.O.D., the Point of Distribution. The P.O.D. is an old grocery store that is being used as one of many places where people come to receive goods that have been donated to the relief. The P.O.D. is packed to the rafters with crap. Some of it very useful and much appreciated and some of it utter trash. We were assigned to sort through a large stack in the middle of the store. I was the mule and simply carried the boxes of things that the others sorted. It was long and tedious plus the floor was disgusting as it was flooded during the storm. Anything that touched the floor was to be trashed by order of the health department.

We learned a great deal about donating to disaster victims. For many people it is simply  a way to get rid of old shit they don’t want anymore. I found a box that was stuffed with odd sized and colored curtains which must have been from the early 60s and were moldy. The box said “Curtans God Bless You” and I simply tossed it in the trash along with hundreds of other useless items that people didn’t want. You know... these folks don’t even have windows anymore!! Trust me, the storm victims don’t want it either, despite their situation. We watched people laugh at some of the items we put out for them. What I learned is that nice, new things are very valuable and really touch people. We found boxes of new underwear by some guy from upstate New York and everyone was excited including us. Make your donations useful or simply give cash, otherwise thousands of dollars will be spent trashing your useless crap for you.

The volunteer clinic is right beside the P.O.D. so I went in to see if there was anything Cate’s practice might be able to donate to the cause. It is a tiny little structure made entirely out of blue tarp. Its very impressive for its size. There were three doctors there using up a week’s vacation to donate their time and expertise and two medical students helping out as well. All items were donated and it was running fairly smoothly due to the help of Bev, a graphic designer from New York. She could have fooled me into thinking she was a health-care professional. She ran a very tight ship. Bev gave me a long list of supplies which I gave to Cate on the phone and she was able to fill at least half of that list. Most of what they needed was medicines for asthma. There are large amounts of debris being burned off because there is simply no place to put it. The air is full of this and mold and it will get to even healthy-lunged folks. As an asthma sufferer I came fully prepared with medicines and a professional canister mask.

It was a long, hard day at the P.O.D. and my arms were cut and dirty from all the boxes I had to lift. I used a lot of sanitizer on them since those boxes were all on the floor. When we got back to camp we were told that we had to take down all the tents because there was a storm coming in that had gusts up to 50mph. I was a little skeptical of this but the camp was full of those large family tents that aren’t designed for bad weather so I can’t blame them for making the call. We collapsed all the tents and placed boxes of water on each one to keep them from blowing away. We then headed over to the Recreation Center (which is beside the volunteer center) where about 100 people would spend the night. The Rec Center had been used as a shelter during the storm so there were mattresses and cots there ready to go. The Presbyterians wanted to separate the men from the women because they obviously aren’t adults like we are but we decided to tolerate them this time and conceded. I predicted some sprinkles and a light breeze. We got only a little better than that. The night would be full of human noises and proved to be a hard one to sleep through.

There was a man staying there who looked just like Christopher Guess. His name is Bill and he works for Verizon up in northern Pennsylvania. Nice enough guy but it was hard for me not to stare at him and think about Christopher Guess. My friend Jennifer and I simply referred to him as Christopher.

 

 

Nov. 16, 2005

The man I slept beside in the Rec Center had sleep apnea and a slight case of night terrors. Oh yeah.

We learned two things on the 16th of November: 1) There are no coffee shops in D’Iberville (we were sick of cheap coffee) 2) We would be serving the Red Cross community lunches the rest of the week... on top of our other assignments. It is easy and doesn’t start until 11:30 but it is a little boring and doesn’t feel as importantly hard as clearing out someone’s house. Still we got to meet some community folks who have no money and thus no food as well as most of the volunteers who would also eat the lunches.

In the afternoon Jeff and I were asked by Truman to go muck out a local woman’s house. Truman is a volunteer from Indiana who is one of those guys who seems to know how to do a little bit of everything. He was one of the nicest guys we met the whole trip. Truman had met local resident Shelly Mason earlier when he first arrived to help out and had worked a great deal on her house. We were going to do the last room of her house which was her laundry room. We ripped out the drywall, ripped up the floor, and moved her washer and dryer to the curb as trash. She was sweet woman who told us her life story which was mostly tragic with a bad, violent marriage ending with Hurricane Katrina. When we were done she gave us both Sacajawea dollars as gifts. She said she loved those coins and loved us. She also said she hoped she and I were related, with our shared last name. Perhaps we are.

After helping Shelly all five of us were assigned to go to the Figsby’s house to clear away tree limbs and debris from the yard. The Figsby’s were nice New York State folks who had moved down South when their son ended up in D’Iberville. We cleared out their yard and left a huge pile in front of their house. Their house had already been gutted by another volunteer team and was nice and clean. Their son was living in a trailer in the driveway. He told me that he would be getting a total of $3000 from the insurance company to replace the roof, which in their eyes was all that was damaged since they didn’t do flood insurance. This, I found out, was a typical situation. While we were working, Mrs. Figsby found a huge box turtle and made it a small pool to lay beside and gave it some lettuce. We enjoyed having a mascot while we worked but by the end Mr. Figsby had decided to take it down to the waterfront and set it free.

Before we served lunch we had taken a drive down to Biloxi which was probably the most powerful part of the whole trip. Biloxi is gone. It looks like what I imagine a Nuclear bomb going off in the center of town would look like. Its hard to describe and harder still to represent with a camera. I wish I had more photos but I found myself staring with a slack jaw for most of the visit.

One of the scarier sights was seeing the giant casinos lying so far inland. All the casinos were boats due to Mississippi law requiring them to be on water. All of them ended up far from the water in town. Most where houses used to be. We would drive past one and think that that that building was hit hard by the storm and then slowly realize that we were looking at a boat, not a building. There was a neighborhood behind the casinos which is a large Vietnamese community. The majority of the community members were employed by the casinos. The neighborhood is simply gone. There was no way to take a photo because there was nothing there. There were some foundations and lots of trash, but there was no other way to tell that there had been houses there. One surreal scene was the electric company restoring the power-lines to the neighborhood... I’m not sure why, there are no houses that need it. Biloxi is going to be working for years to get back to something resembling a city, if they even try to regain their former glory.

I would learn that many in the Vietnamese community have not taken advantage of the FEMA and volunteer organizations help. This is both from communication difficulties and some cultural ideal where they are simply helping each other within their community. A touching sight was the local Buddhist temple which seemed to be untouched by the storm. There were hundreds of people living in their parking lot which had some innovative shelter. My interest in Buddhism plus the sight of people milling about in classic Vietnamese hats made this sight a very memorable one for me.

Our small sight-seeing trip put the whole thing into perspective and will be very difficult to forget. I feel for the people of Biloxi. I am very glad we were able to go see it with our eyes.

That night we decided it was in our best interests to stay back at the tent site. Most people who had been in the tents had decided to stay in the Rec Center because the temperatures were going to reach into the low 30s that night. We valued our peace more than our warmth. I knew where some blankets were and outfitted the whole crew with warm ones. I didn’t need one as I had brought my 15º sleeping bag along. The only bad part about it was the smell filling up the bag when I buried my head inside to escape the cold... I needed a shower bad. The quiet made it all worthwhile.

 

Nov. 17, 2005

It was a cold night last night but not too bad with my winter sleeping bag. The morning started off for me with some work in the volunteer office working on their computers. They had a laptop that was having some very strange problems and when I ran the HP diagnostics that came on it I found that the hard drive was slowly failing. Each test resulted in less and less hard drive capacity - it was screwed. After I found that out I did some data-entry for them until the rest of my team returned from some work in the P.O.D. They returned in time for our serving the Red Cross lunch around 11:30 which we did. The lunch was some sort of mystery meat that was labeled “Ham” but was is no way ham or any other pork product unless it was some organ. Everyone asked us what it was and we always answered that the yams and green beans were very good, which they were. For what its worth, if you ever find yourself in a disaster area the Red Cross should be your last option for food. If you want a large organization try the Salvation Army, their meals are pretty good. Better yet, if you want good food just find some firemen, those boys know how to cook!

After lunch Jeff and I were asked by Truman to spend the afternoon repairing the tarp-walls that surrounded the Red Cross feeding area. The walls had been up for over a month and had been beaten repeatedly by winds and rain. The task was extremely difficult as the wind was blowing steadily. This made grabbing any of the tarp material very difficult and hanging on to it even harder. We had to be ingenious about the task, as most people in the area are about just about everything that has to be fixed. Since I had brought my truck with a tarp to cover anything we needed to in the back I had some plastic “clamp hooks” that are designed to grab hold of tarp material. We rigged up some ropes to clamp the tarp to so it wouldn’t blow in and out so strongly. Of course the tighter we pulled the material the more it became a sail which put even more pressure on the material so we had to keep it somewhat loose. There is a reason why walls have stud-work.

When we finally got done the afternoon was just about over and we all got back together and went to a local bar called “Henry’s Too” with Truman. We were able to learn more about Truman and how he was able to spend so much time in Mississippi (he had been there since the storm). He had been in the propane business for many years and had sold it off the previous year for much more money than he ever expected. He was semi-retired now and dealt RVs in the summertime (which explained the super-nice RV he lived in). He said he wanted to retire to the South, somewhere with history and some rolling hills where he could keep horses. I suggested he give central or western Virginia a shot as its steeped in history, is beautiful, and is already “horse country”.

After drinks and “goodnights” to Truman we went back to camp to prepare dinner in the baseball field-house as was now our routine. The FEMA camp in the field next to ours has security guards employed and we were starting to get to know one of them “Rahol” (pronounced like Raul). Rahol is originally from Bangladesh and was living in Biloxi when the storm hit. He had a limousine service which got most of its business from the casinos. He lost his house and most of his cars in the storm so had taken the security job and was living in a FEMA trailer with his cousins. He had saved one of his stretch cars and was still taking fares on nights when he wasn’t working security.

The day’s work seemed lighter today and wasn’t as “hands-on” with the public as we hoped for. I think we are all hoping for a little more mucking work as it is so intently personal work for victims. A great deal of that work is already done and it turns out we are here during a bit of a phase change. Once all the mucking work is done in a house a moisture meter has to be used on all the studs to see if its wet enough for mold to grow. Once it is dry enough to meet the FEMA standards they can start to rebuild. Right now D’Iberville is waiting on FEMA to provide it with more moisture meters so they can start the testing in earnest. Slowly the rebuilding projects will start to appear. There are still some mucking jobs though and we are hoping to find them even though it is terribly hard work.

 

Nov. 18, 2005

This would end up being one of the hardest work days yet. It started off in the P.O.D. and it was “food day” which is the most popular day as one might expect. The P.O.D. officially opens to the public at 10:00am but they were lining up more than an hour early. Again I was a “mule” bringing up boxes of goods that were disappearing fast. It was tiring but when we saw all of the people who came to get food we were touched by the scale and by the people themselves. Luckily there had been a big truck of food that had come in the day before. If it hadn’t come in they may not have even had “food day” as the last one had cleaned them out of food items. There were two other “mules” which was a very good thing as some donations came in right in the middle of all that action. “Rick and David” were two guys who had, like many others, gotten an RV and driven up from the Outer Banks of N.C. after the storm. They were strange and interesting people and I was glad they were there to help once I saw the truck full of band-aids come in.

One particularly touching sight was when Audrey helped out a man who was on crutches pick out his food items. She read all the labels closely as he has diabetes and she was very kind to him. He was very appreciative and smiled the whole time.

About the time she had finished helping the man pick up his food items it was time for us to leave to go serve the Red Cross lunches. This was incredibly bad timing for everyone else who was working at the P.O.D. but it had to be done. Going from the confusion and clutter of the P.O.D. to the relative calm of the lunch was quite a dramatic change and provided us with a moment to catch our breath. Scooping out chicken and dumplin’s is much easier than lifting huge boxes of canned goods, even when it it gets all over your sleeve in cold weather.

We went back to the P.O.D. after cleaning up from the lunch and it was still moving along at a steady clip. The food had not run out yet too which was a big improvement over other food days according to “Miss Ruby” who runs the P.O.D. Just as we were getting back into the groove Jeff and I were sent back to our camp to help put up some temporary shelters (temporary but more permanent than the tents). When we got there we met Steve who is an architect and had designed the temporary shelters which were quite ingenious plastic boxes that accordioned in and out. When Steve saw us he said, “You guys look competent, we really need you.” Despite growing my head he was probably right in this comment as we looked around at the folks who were trying to erect the shelters, it was going slow and getting slower. Steve decided to send us to another camp where the work was going faster so we could learn more about how to put them together from people who knew what they were doing.

We drove about 30 minutes away following Steve’s directions. The other camp was further along but I can’t really say that their volunteers were much better in the end. Upon arriving there we had a similar situation to meeting Steve when we met Tom who is the chief construction guy for the shelter company. He told us that putting the shelters together was really easy and that he could tell we would be able to pick it up in a short amount of time. He said what he really needed our help with was the heating ductwork instead because no-one else knew how to do that and he had been working on it alone for a couple hours. He didn’t mind it when we both told him we had never done ductwork before. It wasn’t difficult in the long run but it was very hard work. The ductwork was the same as in any building where the shelters were then we hooked up flexible duct running to portable kerosene furnace heaters that were a safe distance away. Our crowning moment was the rig we set up to connect the flexwork to the heaters. It involved some fabricating with some extra ductwork metal. We were proud.

We had heard really good things about the cook at this camp and decided we would eat there. We even gave directions to the women to come out and join us. They made the drive and we headed to the large community tent only to find out that they had just run out of food. We were not happy and all piled back into the vehicles to find a spot to eat. All the usual American chain restaurants are available in Southern Mississippi but the storm has left so many of them understaffed that it is still a crap-shoot on whether they would be open or not. We tried two that had closed despite people still eating inside - that’s just the nature of the place with so few people to hire. So we went back to our field house and started working on some of our leftovers which turned out to be quite tasty and satisfying.

During the day we had heard about a health club in a nearby town that was letting relief volunteers come and take showers in their facility. We gave them a call and got the details and headed over to “Ocean Springs” to take showers. It was the best. They even had a steam rooms there and at one point while sitting in the men’s steam room with Jeff I said “I can’t believe we are actually taking a schvitz” which set us off into laughter. It felt so good that I nearly fell asleep in the steam room.

We headed back to camp and when we pulled into the parking lot we saw Rahol there with his stretch limousine. He told us all to pile in as he had to go get gas before his fare and had wanted to take us for a ride. So here we were, clean, smelling nice, and in a limo on our way to the gas station. It was a surreal moment for all of us and simply made us laugh. Jennifer and Barbara had never before been in a limo and I told them that they should try never to be in one again so that this can be their main association with them. I even gave Cate the classic “Guess where I’m calling you from” phone call to make sure the limo experience was perfect.

I think I slept deeper than any other night that week.

 

Nov 19, 2005

A change of pace this morning as we were moved from the Red Cross lunch to the community breakfast. The Red Cross doesn’t deliver breakfast to D’Iberville so the volunteers have taken it upon themselves and their donated food stuffs to make it for those without and for other volunteers. A woman named Karen from Delta, Colorado is the one who runs the kitchen (once again in a baseball field-house) and showed us what to make. We made biscuits and gravy which looked very suspect to me but garnered us with many compliments. For what its worth, it was frozen biscuits and Costco-sized cans of “sausage gravy” so there wasn’t a whole lot of credit to be had by us. A very large group of boy scouts had pulled into town the night before and we mostly served them. Knowing that we would be working on ductwork all day long Jeff and I took it upon ourselves to ask for a couple boy-scouts (the older, bigger ones) to give us a hand. We had no idea what their plans were or where the rest of them were going but we were successful in recruiting two strapping young lads (Jonathan and Chris) along with their father (Bill). We drove them the half hour back to the camp and worked until mid-afternoon. I am sure we would never have finished that day without the boy-scout help and I am really glad we took the initiative to grab them.

While putting up the temporary shelters we also enlisted the help of a couple of college students who were supposed to stay in the camp (help us or sleep outside was how we should have asked). Jeff and I rounded up Tara and Turner to give us a hand with the ductwork while the boy-scouts started assembling the larger, community shelters. Tara and Turner were from some small Christian college north of Pittsburgh. I don’t know what they feed the modern, Christian college student but they were good looking, hard working kids. When I was their age.... oh nevermind.

During lunch I talked a bit with Tom, the shelter company construction guy. I found out that the shelter business is a side project for him. His day job is as a fireman. He mostly does Haz-mat cleanup and had spent a little over a month in New Orleans trying to clean up the toxic flood sludge. At one point he mentioned how hard it had been for him to get time off to come put up these shelters. After some coaxing I got him fill me in on the business-side of the shelters in this instance. He told me that they were actually taking a bit of a loss but that it “is the right thing to do”. Indeed it is. Also, I am sure they took some photos and video of the shelters in use which should help them sell them to other customers. It was rather touching to hear anyway.

After finishing the shelters we headed back to D’Iberville to grab showers at the Rec Center (which was now empty, with one shower and a hundred people staying there it had not been an option before). It had been the first hot day we had had and the sweat was pouring off of us. After showers we convinced the women into going out to the movie theatre (which had been one of the first things to open after the storm). They agreed and we all went to see “Walk the Line” chosen only because the time it was playing. We all thought it was an excellent movie but later it did occur to me that it could have sucked and we still would have enjoyed it. Any chance to sit in a comfortable chair and escape for a couple hours was a good thing.

Dinner in the field house with our friend Charlee Brown and her dog Winnie (yet another person who got an RV and headed south after the storm) from California and then off to bed.

 

 

Nov. 11, 2005

What a surprise today! We went and mucked a house all day! After breakfast our man Truman told us about a house that needed some mucking. The house is owned by an elderly couple, the Diaz’s and they had gone through and cleaned out the whole house and only just learned that it would have to be stripped to the studs. Jeff and I decided that we would tell the camp folks that we would be mucking in the morning and then would come over to do the ductwork at the second camp, take it or leave it. Much to their disapproval they agreed.

The mucking was gruesome and hard work but when the elderly couple who own the house came by to meet us it made all the work worthwhile. They called us their “angels” many times and Mrs. Diaz hugged us over an over again. The wallboards, trim, cabinetry, doors, and flooring all had to be removed as it was all under water. There was black mold everywhere and we kicked up a large amount of dust while ripping out the drywall. I had my canister mask which worked perfectly though I still coughed up a lung later as the dust was on my clothes, in my hair, and covering my boots. Nonetheless, it was great to be able to get another job where we came in such close contact with those we were helping.

After lunch, as promised, Jeff and I headed to the second camp to start working on ductwork (ugh). When we arrived we were informed by Steve that they were missing the “T” junctions for the ducts and they wouldn’t be in until the following morning. We made sure that he knew we would be gone in the morning and he simply thanked us for being there and shook our hands. I was really relieved to not be doing ductwork again another day and I think Jeff was too. We saw our two college students, Tara and Turner, there putting the shelters together so we said goodbye to them as well.

We headed back to the Diaz’s house though first we stopped at the grocery store as we decided to make a big feast in the field house for our last night in D’Iberville. It was nice to be able to finish up the work at the Diaz’s house. The Diaz’s even dropped back by another time right as we were leaving. Once again they showered us with hugs and calls of “angels” which made us feel extremely good about the whole day, if not the whole week.

Jeff and I cooked up a mean dinner at the field house on one of the grills. We invited Charlee Brown and Winnie too and broke open some cheap wine. We were even able to give Rahol some dinner as he had been called back in to work that night.

I feel very good about the trip and I know that we accomplished a great deal not just for the victims of the storm but for future volunteers who will be coming in to do more good work. It certainly is good for the soul to go and do service for people who really do need help. I am completely worn out. I am tired from lack of sleep, my left arm is racked with tendonitus, I have the “Katrina cough”, and I have a ductwork insulation fiberglass rash. If I were to come down for a longer period of time it would be very important to pace myself more. We came in with so much energy and spent it all everyday from sunrise to sunset and are now paying for it. Still, I can’t think of a better way of tiring myself out.