CNN on Pearlington

CNN has new video on Pearlington from this morning's broadcast. Like the previous Pearlington reports, this one focuses on Denise Swanson and her children.

Keep the Story Alive

One year ago today so many things changed in my life and in the lives of the people around me and in the very landscape of my state that it is impossible to name them all. I wish I had something worthy to say now. As if to highlight the fact that life simply must go on, I've been so busy today that I've had almost no time to sit and reflect, and now that I am finally home and able to say something, I'm too tired to think what it is I'd like to say if it were even possible to come up with the words.

Today is the end of the blogging I promised to do for Pearlington, but it is not the end of this blog, and it is not the end of my efforts to help my neighbors on the coast. I leave you this evening with only one thought, and that is to keep talking about Pearlington and keep talking about Katrina in whatever way you can. The rebuilding efforts have only just begun, but it would only be human for many to now lose interest in "last year's news." Don't let that happen. Whatever your own part in this may be, do what you can to keep the story alive.

And thank you. Thank you , America. Thank you for your help, for your love and for your prayers and for your time. Thank you for everything you've done.

God bless you. And God bless Pearlington.

The Unknown Victims

Among the other events set to mark the one year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina tomorrow is the burial of the unidentified storm victims in Gulfport. This is such a poignant way to observe the passing of time and the passing of hope for answers. We can only wish now that we were truly ready to bury the Katrina casualties and move on. Too much is still torn apart with no real idea of when or how it can be put back together, though. We are recognizing the fact that the days have kept passing for one full year tomorrow, but we are not by any means telling the end of the story. Katrina's wake will live on for many years to come.

Race, Poverty, Tragedy

The Hattiesburg American has a good editorial today about the slow recovery of the disadvantaged from Hurricane Katrina. We've all heard the complaints of racism in the relief responses, and I've been wanting to say something about this, but I haven't been quite sure what to say.

Katrina was no racist. Everyone in her path took the same beating. The resulting deaths and losses are not about race; they're about human beings. Yet we all know that when everyone is hurting a pecking order emerges, and some get help faster than others. My neighborhood is close to a main road, but it was a week later getting power back than my sister's more affluent neighborhood. These things happen. When there are so many needs, it is impossible to get to everyone at once. Someone has to come first, and someone has to come last.

Were priorities set in the Katrina recovery based on race? I don't know. Fortunately for me perhaps, I didn't see any of the TV coverage that has evidently infuriated the rest of the country. I was spared the feelings of helplessness in watching tragedies unfold that I could do nothing about because I was cut off from the outside world by that same storm. In the first few days after the storm, we heard very little news. Even radio towers had been knocked down. We were just busy cleaning up and figuring out how to get by. We didn't know what other people were doing.

Perhaps because of that I don't have the same sense of outrage at the government response that others have expressed. The first time I knew of any FEMA supplies coming to my town was on Thursday, three days after the storm. If I understand correctly, that's about when they really started getting people out of New Orleans as well. At the time, it all made sense to me. I don't think they could have gotten to us any faster. The roads were blocked with so many thousands of trees that I still see it as a miracle that they got to us when they did. New Orleans would have had the added difficulty of bridges being destroyed. In the best of times, there are only so many ways in and out of that city. With bridges out and roads blocked, the obstacles to getting help through to New Orleans were beyond measure.

Of course we all hope that the government has enough resources to save its own people in the wake of disaster. It seems like something could have and should have been done faster and better than it was. How much of that is about race or poverty and how much of that is about lack of preparation and lack of fortitude to make quick and forceful decisions, I just can't answer.

Regardless of all of that, though, the poor have less to draw on to help themselves recover. The poor have fewer resources to lobby for their own causes. Thus, government answers to rebuilding concerns have been slower to reach them.

What we need from the government now is not just help with housing but help with economic recovery. In many cases, like in Pearlington, Mississippi, the infrastructure to provide jobs so that the poor and the under-prepared can even begin to start helping themselves is just not there. Failure to address that now will only mean that problems created by Katrina, as blind to issues of race and class as she may have been, will continue to grow rather than to diminish as more and more time passes.

Salvaged Art

Shown above is a Walter Anderson watercolor, "Reddy Red Head." It's just one example of Mississippi's great works of art that have been salvaged from ruined galleries and museums on the coast.

From the Clarion Ledger...

A new exhibition at the Lauren Rogers Museum of Art in Laurel is a Who's Who of
the state's artists and a reminder of the hurricane that almost washed it out to
sea.
Saved from the Storm: The Sarah Gillespie Collection at William Carey
University, Friday through Nov. 12, features works that survived the storm
intact and several works that have been conserved.
"It is a terrific overview
of Mississippi art. The collector did a tremendous job making sure artists were
represented, and goes into great depth in terms of particular artists," Lauren
Rogers museum director George Bassi said.
"It's the Who's Who of visual
artists," featuring big names both historical and contemporary, such as Karl
Wolfe, Walter Anderson, Theora Hamblett and more.
It's considered the most
complete collection of art produced by Mississippians during the 20th century,
collection curator Iris Easterling has said.

No discussion of relief efforts in Pearlington would be complete without mentioning Iris Easterling of University Baptist Church who worked tirelessly all through the year to make sure families had their FEMA starter kits so that they could qualify for trailers and to make sure children had Christmas presents and many other needs were met. And no discussion of Iris Easterling would be complete without mentioning her other tireless endeavor of moving the Sarah Gillespie Collection from the ruins of the coast to a new, safer home in Hattiesburg.

To read more about the Gillespie Collection, visit the William Carey web site.

And if you are in the area, don't miss the Gillespie exhibit at the Lauren Rogers Museum this fall.

Eyes on Debby

Debby is way out there, and it really doesn't look like she's going to become a problem for us, but any storm activity this time of year (as we approach the Katrina anniversary) bears watching.

Pearlington Project

Be sure to check out CNN's American Morning next Tuesday, August 29th (the anniversary of Katrina). Angela Cole of Project Pearlington will be featured telling about some of the work she has done in Pearlington.

For earlier CNN reports on Pearlington, go to the Project Pearlington blog and click on Media Coverage. It is well worth your time, and it will certainly give you a better understanding of what the folks in Pearlington have been through this year.

Poll Results In

Here is some information from the latest Gallup poll of Katrina victims.

Of the Katrina survivors who owned a home before Katrina hit, 80% indicate that this home is currently livable, including 31% who say their home is completely repaired, and another 49% who say it is livable even though it still needs repairs. That represents a small improvement from the 2005 poll, when 72% of those who owned a home said it was livable.

This is encouraging. It does show progress. I'm not sure how much it really tells us, though. I'd be very curious to see a break down of these numbers by county. Katrina had such a wipe scope that if answers given by people in Jackson, Mississippi are being averaged in with answers given by people in Waveland, Mississippi, the results are certainly being skewed. Like I said, I'd love to see a break down. I don't think recovery numbers in Pearlington come anywhere close to 80% of houses currently livable. I know other coastal communities as well as parts of New Orleans are also very far from matching these percentages.

Still, it's nice to hear that progress is being made. Somewhere.

Glen and Karen Bazor

Cooperative Baptist Fellowship is helping Glen and Karen rebuild. Glen is pictured here at the saw, and Karen is watching. They are delightful people to work with, and they work as hard as anyone who comes along to help.

Glen is attempting to rebuild his landscaping business. This is not such an easy proposition considering that many of his former customers have been unable to return to the area since the hurricane.

The Bazors have three children, and an assortment of dogs, cats, and baby raccoons--all living in one FEMA trailer. Consummate animal lovers, Glen and Karen are also feeding strays that have wandered up and adopted them in the past year. It's very likely that these strays belonged to families that were unable to return. Luckily for them, they have found someone who really cares.

God bless the Katrina strays human and animal alike, and God bless people like Glen and Karen who are making a difference even in the midst of their own struggles.

50 in 50

From The Sun Herald...

JACKSON, Miss. - In response to the devastation Hurricane Katrina did to the Mississippi Gulf Coast, Vicksburg native Samuel Thompson ran - not from the problems, but for them.

Thompson, 25, of Vicksburg plans to complete his journey Saturday of running 50 marathons in 50 states in 50 consecutive days, all to raise awareness of the Mississippi Gulf Coast's continuing recovery from Hurricane Katrina.

I can't tell you how impressed I am. I'm finding it a strain at times just to keep up the blogging efforts for hurricane relief. This guy has made a true commitment.

Check out his web site, and note that in addition to running for the cause, he is also blogging.

Where Ya'll From

Canada Jon has been keeping track of where the volunteers have come from to come to Pearlington. You can see more maps like this one on his blog.

Pearlington is such a small town that most people in Mississippi had never heard of it before Katrina. It's very heartening to see how far and wide the love and concern for our little coastal towns has spread.

Thanks, ya'll.

At Least Some Are Recovering

The Grand Casino in Biloxi reopens tonight. It was washed across the highway by Katrina and was demolished over a period of months. The Beau Rivage is scheduled to reopen on August 29, exactly one year after the storm.

The returning casinos are something of a bittersweet sight. It's sad that these are the main businesses that can afford to come back. It's sad that they will be there to tempt and draw in people who have almost nothing to spend and everything to lose. Yet they represent much needed job opportunities and a critical tax base to the area if there is to be any recovery at all.

Welcome back, I say. Welcome back, monstrosities. Welcome back corporate tourist traps. We might not always love you, but we do need you.

Before and After

The Sun Herald's Before and After series features Pearlington today. Be sure to read the article about the house pictured above. It's a fascinating story.

Insurance Companies 1, Flood Victims 0

From Reuters....

Paul and Julie Leonard were awarded $1,228 to cover wind damage but lost their argument that their Nationwide Mutual Insurance policy covered flood damage associated with the storm, which they said cost them more than $130,000.

The case has been closely watched by thousands of homeowners who believe damage from floods swept in by Katrina along the U.S. Gulf coast should be covered under policies generally meant to cover hurricane damage.

Of course, this is not by any means the end of the story. There will be more court decisions to come. It is, however, a stark disappointment to those who have been holding out hope that the insurance companies would eventually be forced to pay out for some of the Katrina flood damage in areas where flood insurance was not required.

Stay tuned for further developments...

Update on FEMA Campers

FEMA is going to do its own testing for formaldehyde in its trailers. I had somehow missed that before. This comes after the Sierra Club issued a report of finding unacceptable levels of formaldehyde in FEMA trailers tested in Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama. It also comes after dozens of complaints from the residents themselves.

In the previous article that I linked to, there was a story about a couple that bought their own camper rather than continue to live in a FEMA camper after their pet bird became ill:

“We got up one morning and the cockatiel was lethargic, wouldn’t move, was losing its balance,” said Paul, a police officer in neighboring Waveland. “… (Later), the vet told us unequivocally, ‘Look, you either get the bird out of that environment or he’s going to die.’”

I've heard other stories of pets suffering respiratory problems in Pearlington. Those could either be cause by the toxins in the soil or in the trailers--or both. Everyone I've met in Pearlington has pets, and they all love their pets as part of the family. When you talk to someone about who they lost in the storm, they never fail to mention pets. I lost a brother, a nephew, and a dog, they'll say. The dogs always make the list of hardest losses.

Now many of those families are reunited with their pets, but the pets can't take the toxic environments of the FEMA trailers for long. Neither can the children. What we really have to be concerned about here are the potential life-long health problems the Katrina children are developing.

If anyone has any ideas about what to do to help, please share them.

Colleges Still Recovering

This picture is from the Pearl River Community College website. You can see more PRCC Katrina photos here. Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College also has storm damage photos posted online. USM's Katrina photos may be viewed here. And before and after photos of William Carey College's administration building are available here.

Unfortunately, I don't have any pictures from Jones County Junior College, my own campus, nor do I have any real information. The Hattiesburg American reports today that PRCC is now tearing down its coliseum. The article also mentions how long it is taking for even colleges to get processed through insurance claims.

I probably should know more about what's going on with storm repairs at my own school, but I don't. The buildings that were the most heavily damaged were not part of my normal stomping grounds. It was such a hectic year that I really didn't venture out exploring much. I do know that we never used the Home Health Auditorium again all year, and since it is our normal location for faculty meetings, I've just assumed it isn't repaired yet. But you know what they say about assuming. I'm making no claims. I just know that an enormous amount of work went into making it possible for us to even have school this year, let alone be back in the classroom only two weeks after the storm.

For more information about damage to Mississippi colleges, refer back to this September Chronicle article.

Toxic Trailers?

As if worries about mold in everything left behind by Katrina's flood waters and high arsenic levels in the soil due to industrial waste being dumped from the Gulf back onto land are not enough, hurricane victims are also suffering from the effects of formaldehyde in their FEMA campers.

Formaldehyde is commonly used in the particle board and wood panels of the small campers, and, for whatever reason, there seems to be a pattern emerging of real health problems caused by breathing in too much formaldehyde in the FEMA campers.

According to this recent MSNBC article,

The Department of Housing and Urban Development limits the use of formaldehyde-emitting products in manufactured homes -- setting a standard of 0.2 parts per million for plywood and 0.3 parts per million for particleboard materials. But the agency does not regulate travel trailers or motor homes, probably because it was never anticipated that people would spend long periods of time living in them, said the Sierra Club’s Gillette.

These trailers were a way to get out of a tent, and nothing more. They are not acceptable housing on a long term basis, and now it appears they could be creating health problems that will last far beyond the current crisis.

We've got to remain committed to helping these families get back on their feet in safe, healthy, secure environments. Interest in coming to the Gulf Coast to help appears to waning as we approach the one-year mark, but needs are escalating every bit as fast as they are being resolved. If there is anything you can do to help get a family out of FEMA trailer, please don't forget how much your help is needed. People are being embalmed alive in those things--literally.

Hurricane Cycles

There's no doubt that 2005 was an unusually active hurricane season. How often, after all, do we use up the whole alphabet and beyond on hurricane names? We're now 18 days away from the one year anniversary of Katrina, and we've only gotten as far as a Chris--only three named storms so far, which wouldn't seem like a reprieve at all if we hadn't been at Harvey by this time last year.

That terrible and terribly active 2005 season sparked lots of reports that we had entered a cycle of increased hurricane activity that could last another twenty years or so. It also brought up the question of whether global warming might be responsible.

Word from the National Hurricane Center is that there is "no consensus" on the issue of global warming's contribution to increased hurricane activity and/or intensity. On the other hand, Kerry Emanuel, an MIT professor, told NPR that after studying global hurricane patterns, he does see a clear correlation between warming ocean temperature and hurricane intensity.

I'm not scientist, nor do I pretend to be one on the Internet, but anyone who watches The Weather Channel can tell you that hurricanes get stronger in warmer waters. I don't know whether global warming is our culprit. I do know, however, that if Katrina was part of a pattern rather than an anomaly, we are far from prepared for future disasters. If nothing else, as a recent Pew study indicated, population growth alone in coastal areas will assure increases in damage caused by hurricanes.

We need to help storm victims recover, but we need to do more than that too. We need better plans for evacuations and for storm shelters. We need better building codes. We need to be proactive in repairing potential problems (like inadequate levees) before "the big one" hits. We need better communication and cooperation among all the various entities involved in storm preparation and recovery. In short, we need to learn our lessons from Katrina. We can't afford to be caught again and again by "the one we never thought would happen."

Water, Water

Water, water, everywhere,

And all the boards did shrink;

Water, water, everywhere,

Nor any drop to drink.

Coastal residents can definitely relate to Coleridge on these lines from "The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner." Flood waters destroyed virtually everything south of I-10, and in doing so created a drinking water emergency. In Pearlington, there was no city water system. Everyone used well water, and Katrina destroyed the pumps for those wells. The first step to normalcy (or the new normal) was to start replacing those pumps. FEMA was parking trailers by the hundreds in that field in Purvis while families by the hundreds still lived in tents because they had no basic services. FEMA required access to water and electricity before those families could get a trailer. University Baptist and CBF worked hard through the fall to help people get new pumps and get set up in their FEMA campers. We still have so far to go, but thanks to all of those efforts, the water crisis that has vastly improved in the past year.

Click here to read an account by John Earle of some of the work that went into establishing safe water supplies in Pearlington.

Ada and Sunnie Palode

Two of the most loving people I've met in Pearlington are Ada and Sunnie Palode. Pictured to the left is Ada with Charles Holmes of CBF. Below is Sunnie with two of their eight children and Bruce Greer, a volunteer from Denver.

Ada and Sunnie spent some time living in tents last fall before getting their FEMA campers. Obviously, ten people could not live in one camper, so Ada lived in one with the girls, and Sunnie lived in the other with the boys.

Ever considerate, Ada is a woman who understands the way to the hearts of tired, overheated teenage volunteers. One afternoon I saw her demonstrate this as she dragged out a box of freezer pops for a group that was positively drooping under what little shade there was to find at the site of Ada's new house. Faces lit up, and bodies perked up, ready to get back to work.

Ada is also the first to tell anyone who comes along that God is taking care of Pearlington, and God is taking care of her family. She's also the first to pass out smiles and hugs even in the midst of her own devastation.

Giving

You only have what you give. It's by spending yourself that you become rich.

It is in giving that I connect with others, with the world and with the divine.

~Isabel Allende

These are two of my favorite quotes about giving, and they both come from the same short essay by Isabel Allende shared with us via NPR's this i believe series. Allende comes to these conclusions as part of the process of accepting the death of her daughter. I love them because they are so close to my own beliefs, because they could have only come from a person who has learned her priorities in life the hard way, and because they exude such a spirit of redemptive hope in the face of great grief.

This is the kind of giving I've seen this year in the wake of Katrina. People continuously set aside their own overwhelming problems in order to help others. This is the kind of stuff that makes you believe in humanity. This is the kind of stuff that gives you a clear connection to the world around you and to the divine.

Pearl's Cafe

This is where volunteers gather in Pearlington for the evening meal. Now that the Red Cross and AmeriCorps have left, feeding the masses is a real cooperative effort. Groups of volunteers sign up to take turns cooking. Often, it’s burgers and beans, but sometimes the meals get quite elaborate. Various churches have sponsored fish fries, crawfish boils, spaghetti dinners, and all sorts of treats in the now infamous tent known as Pearl’s Café.

Recently, the tent has been air conditioned, making it one of the most desirable locals in Pearlington. I’m not sure who is responsible, but I have no doubt the air conditioning was contributed by some people who’d gotten their fill of working up a sweat by swatting flies and mosquitoes away from their food.

We Made It!

It’s now 5:00 a.m. on Sunday in Mississippi, and we’ve been blogging for 24 continuous hours. Whew! We made it after all.

This is the end of this particular blogathon, but not the end of this blog. I’ve decided to keep this up by posting at least one new item a day to this blog from now up until the Katrina anniversary on August 29.

I know a lot of people are on their last summer vacations before the new academic year starts up again right now. Keep spreading the word. There is still a chance for them to contribute when they get back to their desks and back to their blogs.

And once again, thank you. Thank you to everyone who contributed to this blogathon. Thank you to everyone who has given time, talent, and treasure to the hurricane recovery efforts. From the bottom of our hearts, we thank you.

The above picture is from West Hancock Fire and Rescue.

Not So Slow Churches At Work

Remember those signs you used to always see on the sides of the road? “Slow Men At Work.” Or “Slow Children at Play.” I remember a joke from childhood when someone threatened to put a sign in front of the church: “Slow Church at Worship.” I’ve seen my share of churches that deserved it too. Slow to change. Slow to take action. Slow to accept new people. Slow to try new music. Slow to get fired up about anything let alone an act of worship or of outreach.

One thing Katrina did was to shock the complacency right out of the local churches. Ask anyone from around here how we survived the first couple of weeks after the hurricane, and you’ll hear, “The churches saved us.”

Mississippi isn’t called the Bible Belt for nothing. There really is a church at every street corner. Those churches became the staging areas for what was by far the majority of relief efforts. Local churches passed out water, food, diapers, and other emergency supplies. They served meals and cleaned up debris. They checked up on the elderly and cut trees off of houses. They provided facilities for refugees and for relief workers alike. When some of their members started getting power and other utilities back, they did laundry for strangers and even offered places for people to take showers.

The whole world had turned to chaos as far as we knew. The traffic lights were out, and the roads that weren’t still blocked with trees were just an out and out free-for-all. The grocery stores were shut down. People would wait overnight in line just on the rumor that a service station might be about to get some gas. The cell phone and radio towers were down, and people had very little access to information. They had no way of knowing just how bad things were or how long it would take to restore order. In all of that, they were hearing rumors of lootings and shootings and all manner of crime that made them afraid to venture very far out.

As soon as supply trucks could get through, though, churches from all over the country started sending much needed aid to their local affiliates, and the local congregations came together to work day and night among the heat and insects and confusion just to get those supplies out to the people who needed them the most.

Katrina taught us many lessons. She taught us that we need to always be prepared to go without power, running water, bank cards, and 24-hour grocery stores for possibly weeks, or in the case of coastal residents, months at a time just in case disaster strikes. She taught us not to take our homes and families and conveniences for granted. Yet she also taught us that we aren’t in this life alone, and we don’t have to face tragedies alone. She taught us that the greatest strength in humanity is our caring for one another. She taught us what it really means to be God’s children.

Pictured above: Stacy of University Baptist handing out supplies after Katrina.

Katrina and the Media

We’ve heard a lot on the news this year about what the government did wrong in the face of Katrina, and I’ve heard a lot around Mississippi about what the media did wrong. Personally, I think they both have a lot to account for, but it’s the media I’m here to talk about at the moment, and the media, in my opinion, crossed the line into actually adding to the harm.

I missed the Katrina coverage in the immediate aftermath of the storm. I didn’t have T.V. for more than a month. I’ve only seen what’s been replayed or what’s been reported in the subsequent months. I have seen the results of that coverage, though, and I know that great damage was done by it.

When I talk to people who live in other places about the hurricane damage in Mississippi, the first reaction is often shock that there are still clean-up efforts going on. When I start to explain that the devastation was so massive that it will take at least 10 years to rebuild, I get confused, stammering, “But, but…why didn’t we hear about this? I thought the problems from Katrina were mainly in New Orleans.”

New Orleans, as horrific as the events there were and continue to be, is only a small part of the story of what happened in Katrina. And the horror stories of gang-bangers and thugs and rapes and fraudulent spending of aid money are only a small part of the story of what happened in New Orleans.

The media used the graphic nature of tragedies in New Orleans to run its own self-serving campaign against the government. They did this at the expense of the storm victims. That’s not to say the government didn’t make its share of mistakes. It is only to say that the media was so focused on sensationalizing government culpability that it failed to tell the whole story.

Reporters filmed people stranded on rooftops rather than using their helicopters to help in the rescue efforts. What’s worse, they harped so long and hard on the criminal elements among the storm victims that they turned a large portion of the public against doing anything to help.

Murderers using FEMA money to pay for jewelry and drugs is not the story of Katrina. Come to Pearlington if you want to learn some of the real story. Come to Pearlington and meet the kind of people who, when offered basic supplies for starting over, would say things like, “That’s okay. I already have a plate. You give those dishes to somebody who needs them more.”

And please don’t forget. When the government fails, and the media fails, the job is up to the people.

The New Normal

A few weeks after Katrina, people started bandying about the phrase, “the new normal.” We understood by then that the chaos was beginning to settle down into something we would have to recognize as normal, but it was like no normal we’d ever known before. In Hattiesburg, where I live, the signs of Katrina are abundant, especially for those who knew what it looked like before. I still get disoriented sometimes when I turn down a street that should be familiar to me. I have to double-check to make sure I’m in the right place because nothing looks the same. The main difference here is that there are so many trees missing that our whole landscape has changed. There are still houses being repaired and still blue tarps on roofs, but those kinds of signs are diminishing for us all the time.

In Pearlington, they have a long way to go to even catch up with their neighbors just a few miles to the north. Caved in houses and debris piles are still the norm for them. As are FEMA trailers, tents, and port-a-potties.

The psychological effects alone of living in a world that has been torn apart are enormous. When that world should be home to you but is unlike anything you’ve ever known before the anxiety and disorientation and fear wear and tear at you in ways most of us can only imagine.

Returning Pearlington to anything we’d want to consider as normal for a small town in America will take years. The commitment for outside help must be long term. If you can get to Pearlington to work, you’ll be needed for many months and years to come. If you can send money, it will still be needed even if it is a while before you have it to send. Most of all, though, remember that Pearlington needs your prayers. Those will be needed on an ongoing basis for a very long time to come as well.

Got Love Bugs?

No one who was in Mississippi in the wake of Katrina could possibly tell the story without a nod or two to the love bugs. They swarmed in before the clouds had even cleared and hung around for weeks smattering up every windshield and complicating every attempt to cook outdoors or even open a door or window in our sadly sweltering homes. It was surreal. It was a pestilence of Biblical proportions. It was worthy of any old Pharaoh whose borders needed smiting by the God of Moses and the Children of Israel. There was a shortage of everything, and amongst the long lines and people begging for ice to keep medications usable, there were also signs that said, “Can get love bugs off cars.” It was truly a sight to behold.

They say the love bugs had nothing to do with the storm, but I find that hard to believe. I’ve never seen anything like that before, and I’ve lived my whole life in Mississippi (unless you count a few years away at school).

Whatever the reasons, all I can say is somebody up there has a pretty twisted sense of humor.

Life and Death Go On

One of the most difficult, unfair things about Katrina is that the world can’t come to standstill while we recover. Not only do babies keep being born and people keep having birthdays and high school reunions and church potlucks, but all of the bad things that happen when we are least prepared keep rolling our way too.

My mother broke her hip right before Christmas after living in a gutted out house all through the fall. A vice president at my school was killed in a car accident after he and his wife spent the year displaced from their home. My friend just lost her father after spending a year going through constant ups and downs in trying to get into a new house after her home was destroyed.

In Pearlington, things are no different. Car accidents and heart attacks and fires have claimed lives. People have suffered illnesses. Children have had trouble in school. Puppies have been run over. In short, life has happened, and there is nothing anyone can do to change that.

Sometimes it gets to the point that you just want to throw up your hands and scream, “Haven’t we had enough, Lord? What happened to that no more than you can bear caveat?”

I wish I had something wise and immensely comforting to say. I’ve been to one funeral after another all summer, and by now I should have my sequence of comfort verses down—“Consider the lilies”; “I shall lift mine eyes unto the hills from whence cometh my help”; “I have fought the good fight. I have finished my course.” And so on.

I have no adequate response to the tragedies upon tragedies I’ve seen this year. If I were the preacher I’d have to say something about how God never leaves us or forsakes us, but I think it’s only natural that people wonder where God has been in all of this.

My only answer is that we’ve seen as much good as we have bad, and we have to hold on to that thought. We have to remember the lives of our friends, not their deaths. We have to appreciate how people came together to help each other, not the way the storm tore everything apart.

I learned this year that plants put out new growth when they’ve gone through a trauma. We had things that bloomed out of season last fall for that reason.

Maybe people do that too. And maybe that’s where God has been—preparing us for new growth.

2:00 a.m.

I am actually awake. I'll be getting started with the last few hours of the blogathon any minute now. Thanks, Joanna. Thanks for giving me a chance to sleep, and thanks for all of the wonderful contributions you've made to the blog!

Changing of the Guard

Joanna should be back on at the top of the hour to pull another shift while I try to get some sleep. I'll be back to finish out the night at what will be 2:00 a.m. my time and 3:00 a.m. her time. It will show up as midnight on the blog postings, though, because the time stamp is set to Pacific time, and I don't know how to change that. Here's hoping a Blogger nerd will come along and explain it to me at some point.

I can't even remember the last time I was awake on purpose at 2:00 a.m. This should be fun.

Marion Black

Marion and Shirley Black are nothing short of Godsends to Pearlington. Marion is a retired contractor and the CBF disaster relief coordinator for South Carolina. He and Shirley discovered Pearlington on their first trip to the coast to survey the damage. They are responsible for bringing CBF to Pearlington through their contacts with Steve Street and Greg Wolfe of CBF. They’ve also given immeasurable time, labor, knowledge, and love to the rebuilding efforts, having spent much of the year living in a camper in Pearlington at their own expense.

But enough of all that. They’ve been good friends to me. Much of my own time in Pearlington has been vastly improved by Shirley’s cooking and company.

Pictured above is Marion working on blowing insulation into Vickie Netto’s house. This is the best I could do. He doesn’t stop working long enough to have a proper picture taken.

What to Give, How to Give

I'm having a wonderful time writing about Pearlington and watching this fully-grown blog come to life before my eyes all in one day. I'd be glad I did this even if no one made a donation, but let's not forget we are here for the people of Pearlington. Here goes one more shout out for the donation link to the righthand side of the blog. Online donations can be made by clicking the "Make a Donation" button. Anyone who prefers to send a check can click on the University Baptist Church link also to the side of this blog to get the mailing address. Please be sure to mark checks for Pearlington.

As for how much to give, the answer is anything you can. I like the idea of going by the old walkathon rules and asking people to give a certain amount per hour or per post. We're aiming for 48 posts in 24 hours, so $24 sounds like a nice tidy amount to pledge either $1 per hour or .50 per post. If that's what you're able to give, that would be an excellent donation. If that's too much, though, $1, $5, or $10 donations also make a real difference.

As always, keep those prayers coming.

Thank you, and God bless.

What if it Happens Again?

Without fail, people who come through Pearlington to work or deliver supplies or just to survey the damage end up asking, “What will happen when the next hurricane hits?”

The answer is nobody knows.

It’s certainly a valid concern that we could be doing all of this work and spending all of this money only to have it all blown away again. Nothing like this had ever happened before in living memory or in recorded history, but it did happen once, and there is no guarantee it won’t happen again.

It’s a valid worry, but one we can’t afford to let sidetrack us. We can’t leave these people without hope regardless of how uncertain we are of how long our help will last.

There are, I think, a lot of people around Mississippi and elsewhere who don’t want to put the money into rebuilding. Let the Coast rebuild the Coast, they say. They don’t want their taxes and insurance to go up to pay for the high risk of other people living on the waterfront.

Maybe those are valid concerns too, but the fact remains that we have hundreds of thousands of people who have nowhere else to go, who have known no other home, and who need our help to start over.

In Pearlington, it would be an especial travesty if the locals could not rebuild. Pearlington remains one of the few places along the coastline that has no real commercialization. The end result of abandoning the families to whatever befalls them would be something like a casino buying up all of the love, pristine backwoods property and building up a resort community. I, for one, don’t want to see that happen. I, for one, would like to save as much of the Mississippi I have grown up knowing and loving as possible—despite the risks.

Insurance Companies

Ask anyone who got hit with Katrina’s storm surge who the big, bad wolf of the recovery effort is, and they will tell you the insurance companies. Over and over I’ve heard stories of families that got almost nothing from the insurance companies after their homes were totally destroyed. They are paying for roofs but not houses, and they are not even paying that much if the roof was smashed up when the house when tumbling off its foundation. A tree has to have fallen on or something that was clearly wind damage and wind damage alone. However they are justifying it, the insurance companies are just not paying up in the hardest hit areas.

Add to that insurance rates that are now skyrocketing.

And insurance companies that are bringing in their own “hired guns” as one commenter put it. According to this article they’ve commissioned a report that downplays the wind strength of Hurricane Katrina and gives them more ammunition to fight having to pay claims.

Give me a break. There was more wind damage than you’d expect from 115 mph winds 100 miles inland.

Then there is the anti-concurrent causation clause that insurance companies are using as yet another excuse not to pay.

Watch for lawsuits. Lots of lawsuits.

I realize the storm has been financially catastrophic for the companies as well. I also realize there is a certain risk people knowingly take on by choosing to live on the waterfront. But no one could have predicted what happened in Katrina. No one could have foreseen the force or the breadth of the storm surge. No could have guessed that Pearlington, several miles off the beach, would have been completely immersed in flood waters. It had just never happened before.

This refusal on the part of insurance companies to pay for houses damaged in the storm surge is just plain wrong. But it is what it is, and it leaves the rest of us even more responsible for helping our neighbors get back on their feet. Don’t forget when you consider what you might do to help that you and people like you really are the only hope many families have.

Vickie Netto

Vickie, the mother of two young children, lost her husband prior to Katrina and lost both her home and her job to the storm. University Baptist Church adopted Vickie and provided most of the supplies for her new home. CBF volunteers who came to Pearlington enjoyed helping to get her back on her feet almost as much as they enjoyed watching young Dalton “help.” Dalton, as it turns out, can hammer as well as half the grown-up volunteer workers.

The Furriest Refugees

We’ve all heard the stories of pets left behind in Katrina, and the experience in Pearlington was no different. Post-Katrina many people are working to open pet friendly shelters, not only for the sake of the animals, but for their families as well. Newspapers are now reporting that as many as 10,000 people may have refused to evacuate so that they would not have to leave their pets behind.

In Pearlington, Lucy Mitchell told me about a house where two pugs were left behind but somehow miraculously survived. They were inside a house that was under high flood waters. No one knows where they went or how they managed to survive. But when the family came home, they were still in the house, trapped in all the muck and debris.

Lucy’s alligator was not so lucky. They haven’t seen him again since the storm. He was most definitely an outdoor only friend of the family, having wandered up into the yard as a mere hatchling, and having grown up playing chase with the dogs and feeding on leftover hotdogs from the family BBQs. Aquatic he may have been, but a salt water creature he was not. Now he’s one more casualty to remind us that Katrina was hard on all life, human and animal alike, domesticated and wild alike.

Before Katrina, no one expected Pearlington to flood. People were not all that scared of leaving their pets behind. Now that they have witnessed the very real dangers to their four-legged babies, pet friendly shelters are urgently needed.

I’m not sure how that’s going to work. If another hurricane hits this year or even next year, we’ll need far more shelters than we’ve used in the past because everyone is in sub-standard housing along the coast. People died from sitting out Katrina in two-story houses that had survived many hurricanes before. We can’t have anyone choosing to sit out a storm in a FEMA camper.

I don’t know the answers, but I do know that pets matter. And people who care about their pets enough to stay in harm’s way for them matter.

Some people have been called to come to the coast to work in the recovery. Somewhere out there are people whose calling is to help prepare for the next storm. If that’s you, please don’t forget the pets.

Field O' FEMA

There is a field alongside I-59 at Purvis, Mississippi that has become a kind of local landmark in “the new normal.” It’s full of empty FEMA campers. Thousands of them. And it’s not the only field like this in the new “GO Zone.” I’ve seen this in Louisiana as well and seen news reports of this happening elsewhere.

Why, you ask? Why after nearly a year are there still undelivered trailers sitting empty while Katrina victims are already being told they’ve had their temporary housing too long?

WLBT in Jackson says it’s all a matter of good old American red tape.

The Sun Herald reports that some of those trailers in Purvis are actually the ones being returned to FEMA after families return to their homes.

For months, every time I drove past that field I thought “each one of those campers represents a family in a tent.” By now I think most people are doing slightly better than a tent, but I wouldn’t say that means everyone who needs a FEMA trailer has one either. Many people have simply not come back, and I’m sure that one of the reasons for this is the amount of red tape required just to get started in the starting over process. And I don’t know how many of you have been in a FEMA camper, but they aren’t exactly the Taj Mahal. Lots of families have way too many people crammed into one camper, and I have seen families even as late as this summer where part of the family was still sleeping in tents even though they had a camper to provide at least some shelter (along with one, tiny camp-sized bathroom for everyone to share). Still, by now most of the larger families seem to have more than one camper—boys sleeping in one and girls sleeping in the other, or dad and the older kids in one and mom and the younger ones in the other.

At any rate, I don’t know what the field o’ campers is about in Purvis, but it’s beginning to look a lot like government inefficiency to me.

Ken Short

Ken Short is one of the more remarkable people to be met in Pearlington, and he’s not at all shy about telling you about everything he and his neighbors have been through and what they’ve managed to do by working together and pretty much anything else you want to talk about. CBF helped Ken some by sending volunteers and supplies, but he and his wife Cathi basically rebuilt their home themselves. They worked long and hard and were among the first in Pearlington to move back into a completed home. Through all of that they helped as many other people as possible, including Jesse Dickens, their 87-year-old neighbor whose home was also destroyed. Ken also decided to become a Christian in the aftermath of Katrina after talking to various church volunteers who came to work on his home.

As more than one Pearlington volunteer has discovered, sometimes listening to people is the greatest gift you can give--or receive.

The above photo is from the side of Ken’s rebuilt house.

How I Spent August 29, 2005

(Apologies for length)

I live in Hattiesburg, and every time there is a hurricane headed toward Gulfport, directly to my south, my mother calls and insists that I evacuate to Brookhaven. Just looking at the map, you might not understand what’s supposed to be so much safer about Brookhaven. It’s a little farther away from water, but only a little. What the map doesn’t tell you, though, is that during Camille, formerly known as the Mother of all Hurricanes around here, Hattiesburg got a bit of a whipping that Brookhaven did not. Hattiesburg is more likely to feel the effects of hurricanes, though I’ve never felt like Hattiesburg was really in danger before. People from the coast evacuate to Hattiesburg after all. We only have to worry about losing power for a couple of days. No big deal. No need to worry. The only reason to leave here is to miss the possible discomfort of a day or two without cable TV and hot showers.

Still, on August 29, 2005, I was in Brookhaven with my family, not home in Hattiesburg. I didn’t evacuate because of the storm. I went to Brookhaven after work on Friday to spend some time with my nephew who was visiting from Virginia. Max had a flight out from Jackson on Monday. As it turned out, though, we both got stuck at my parents’ house a little longer than anticipated. And as luck would have it, my house in Hattiesburg had no more damage than missing shutters. My parents were not quite so fortunate.

All afternoon Sunday, August 28 my brother in Virginia was calling to beg us to leave Brookhaven and go at least as far as Kosciusko where my mother’s sisters live. Evacuate Brookhaven for a hurricane? Come on. That’s unheard of. Besides, by that time, it was too late. Brookhaven sits right on Interstate 55, one of the main evacuation routes from New Orleans. Traffic was already nearly at a standstill, and the people to the south of us were much more desperate to find a safe place to wait out the storm. Evacuating was just not an option.

My mother and I discussed what we’d need from the store. We had flashlights, radios, batteries. We had some snacks and bread. We had plenty to get through a couple of days, and we decided we didn’t need anything more from town than a couple of bags of ice. If we lost power for more than two days, after all, we would be ready for a hot meal, and we’d just go into town then to go out to eat and get more groceries.

Never in our wildest imaginations would we have considered that downtown Brookhaven would still be without power after several days. Never would we have considered that there would be nowhere to buy groceries or gasoline. It would have never occurred to us to wonder how long it would take for FEMA to show up with ice and supply trucks because it never occurred to us that we would need any help from FEMA.

By Monday morning it was obvious that Katrina was bearing down. This one had not turned like Ivan or any of the others we’d recently dodged. We were scared for what would happen to our coast. We were not scared for what would happen to us. Nothing in our collective experience could have prepared us for what would happen.

My brother kept calling to ask us to take his son somewhere safe. We finally agreed to go to my uncle’s house where there is a basement. My mother and I sat in her den early Monday morning talking about how we didn’t see the need to leave the house, but we decided we would just to make my brother James feel better. We spent Tuesday shoveling insulation away from the furniture in that same room after the ceiling had crashed in.

Only Max packed to go to my uncle’s house for the day. He took a flashlight, a battery-operated TV, and a Nintendo. We all told him repeatedly to leave the Nintendo behind. We kept telling him there was no point in taking it, and he was just cluttering up the car. When we returned to the house that night, though, and found standing water in the room where the Nintendo had been, Max was the first to speak up. “See,” he said, “everything happens for a purpose. There was a reason to save the Nintendo.”

The day at my uncle’s house is a little bit of a blur. I remember that we had a hard time keeping Max in the basement. He didn’t want to miss anything. The more the winds picked up, the more excited he got. At one point, I handed him my cell phone and told him to call his dad and tell him we were okay. Max did call his dad. He said, “You won’t believe it. Trees are snapping off like pencils. They’re coming down everywhere.” Then the cell phone signal went dead.

I also remember that at some point before we lost the phones a neighbor called to say that shingles were flying off the roof at my parents’ house. My 74-year-old parents then got in their car and drove the three miles or so to their house in winds strong enough to break trees like pencils. In fact, they couldn’t get all the way to the house in the car. Trees were already blocking the road. They did all of this just to cover my mother’s dining room furniture with plastic.

As it turned out, my parents managed to navigate through a hurricane without getting hurt, and most of their furniture survived the storm, but the house itself was not as lucky. Shingles came off the roof, the attic filled up with water, and the water seeped down through the walls or in places crashed right down through the ceiling bringing everything in its way with it.

Before the storm was really even over my father was up on the roof nailing tarps in place. The house later had to be gutted, and they spent most of the year living in one room while everything else was being repaired.

We had no real access to information at that time because the power was off, the cell phone towers were down, and the radio towers were down. I remember that I kept saying, “If it’s this bad here, I hate to think what it’s like in the places the hurricane was actually supposed to hit.”

I had no idea.

Even the next day, I had no idea. I drove from Brookhaven to Hattiesburg on Tuesday right after the Monday hurricane. It was nothing short of a nightmare. I still get chills just thinking about it. If I had understood the extent of the damage, I would not have ventured out, but I remember telling my father earlier in the day that I was going to go, but I was going to wait until later in the afternoon so that the roads would be cleared. None of us had any concept of the days, weeks, and months that would go into clearing those roads.

Still, by Tuesday afternoon, an amazing amount had been done considering the number of trees and power lines clogging the roads. It was actually possible, if not advisable to drive from Brookhaven to Hattiesburg. Of course, the path I had to take did not always follow the road, and often it was only possible for one car at a time to go around a particular tree. And when I say often, I mean about every ten feet or so.

Later, I heard someone on National Public Radio talk about flying in a helicopter over Mississippi during this time. She said, “I think everyone in Mississippi must own a chainsaw and a tractor. They were all out there working as hard as they could to clear the roads.” Her perception could not have been far from the truth.

Because the story of what I did on August 29 is tied up with what I’ve done every day since then, I find it impossible to know where to begin or end. That day the winds were more terrible than anything I’d ever seen before. Trees were indeed snapping off like pencils, one right after another. But I was never scared during the hurricane. It never occurred to me that we could be in danger or that people far inland would die in Katrina. That just doesn’t happen. I didn’t know to be afraid of it.

I became afraid afterwards, though, and the first two weeks after Katrina were the real horror story. There was too much damage to understand at once. Every new day in the immediate aftermath was a new nightmare as we began to get more and more of the picture, yet at the same time every day took us that much closer to something resembling normalcy.

It’s a blessing that we could not see the news. This was our own home turf that was in absolute shambles. We couldn’t have handled understanding the extent of the devastation all at once.

Sheds For Jesus

I found this picture here where it was obviously posted by a Pearlington volunteer. I don't know anything about the white shed that claims to be for Jesus, but the shed to the right looks exactly like the ones I must have seen in about 100 places in Pearlington, 120 to be exact, according to this article from the University of Virginia website.

I knew someone had donated those sheds, but I wasn't sure who. I'm glad I had the occasion to look into this.

These sheds were as inspired as they were kind. They gave people a way to get electricity to their lots even when they were living in tents. And they give people living in FEMA campers a place to keep full-sized washers, driers, and refrigerators.

That, my friends, is what we call a Godsend around here.

Katrina's Scope

When I was in Chicago for the CCCC conference, I sat on the airport shuttle next to some people who struck up a conversation about Hurricane Katrina. A woman from New Jersey was quizzing a man who said he was from Baton Rouge, Louisiana. When I interjected a comment about the ongoing impact of the hurricane, she asked how close I lived to where the hurricane hit. I said I lived in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, and that I was right in the middle of the hurricane area. She brushed me off with, “You couldn’t have really been affected there,” and went right back to questioning the guy from Baton Rouge.

To get a sense of the irony and injustice I felt at this, take a look at the wind maps from Katrina. Note that Hattiesburg is in the red part, the area where Katrina was still a major hurricane when it hit. Baton Rouge is not.

Weather Underground Wind Map

Photos From Katrina Wind Map


Even those of us who live here can’t really understand the scope of Katrina. The storm was not just devastating in a limited area. It was devastating and enormous. Damage to the entire Mississippi coastline was catastrophic. Whole towns, including Pearlington, Waveland, Bay St. Louis, Long Beach and others, were literally washed away. Due to the large number of downed trees, damage was immense far inland. In Hattiesburg, it was estimated that 80% of the houses and businesses had significant damage. Granted, this is not the same as 100% of the houses uninhabitable or non-existent, but it was unprecedented and traumatic and massive enough to change forever the shape of our town.

So when you start to question why the clean-up is taking so long, why we’ve still got so much left to do, why so many people don’t seem to have really been helped at all yet, why the government response has been so inadequate, just stop to consider how widespread the damage really is. Don’t worry if you really can’t imagine. Those of us who are here to witness it can’t either.

Me Again!

It’s my turn to do a few more hours of blogging while Joanna (Rosa G.) takes a rest, and since I neglected to say anything about myself this early a.m., maybe this is as good a time as any.

My name really is Sharon Gerald. I teach English at Jones County Junior College in Ellisville, MS. I got involved in the work at Pearlington through University Baptist Church in Hattiesburg, MS, and I got involved in UBC right after and because of Hurricane Katrina. Previously, I’d been sort of drifting along not really going to church anywhere. When the hurricane hit, though, I wanted both a place to go to church and a place to make a difference. I went to a couple of other churches asking what I could do to help before I tried UBC. Both places said they didn’t have anything for me, not because they weren’t doing anything but because they didn’t know me. When I went to UBC for a morning worship service, the pastor asked me if I wanted to help, and that’s the story of that. I’ve been volunteering in Pearlington off and on all year, and I’ve really come to love the town and the people there. I hope I am able to convey a little of that love through this blog.

We have to thank Joanna, though, for putting the bug in my ear about this blogathon. It was her idea, and I’m really grateful for her support as well as the creative energies she is bringing to the project.

Thanks to everyone who has contributed, and don’t forget every little bit helps!

Faith Without Borders

Without a doubt it’s the faith-based organizations that are really getting the job done on the Gulf Coast. And one of the most inspiring things I’ve ever seen is the way all of these people from different churches, different parts of the world, different races, and different political viewpoints are all working together toward a common goal—all united by the common belief that to serve God is to serve others.

I ran across a blog recently called "They Will Know Us By Our T-Shirts.” I love it. The hardest hit areas have been swarming with busy little Christian worker bees all year, and most of them have come with their church T-shirts. I wish I had a good picture to show what lunch-time in Pearlington looks like when the fellowship hall at the Missionary Baptist church fills up with Methodists, Presbyterians, Baptists of all different stripes, and a variety of other faith-based volunteers. Better than that, I wish I could take everyone I know there to feel what true communion, true unity of purpose is like.

Canada Jon, as they call him in Pearlington, has established something called The Coalition of Disaster Relief Agencies in Pearlington. The code of conduct for this coalition pretty well sums up the attitude of all of the volunteers I’ve met there.

Take a look. For those who may have been burned out in childhood by the more mean-spirited variety of evangelism, this is truly refreshing and inspiring

Post-Katrina Mental Health

Some statistics from Forbes--

§
One survey found that 68 percent of female caregivers had a mental health
disability because of symptoms of depression, anxiety or other psychiatric
disorders.
§
Another survey found that 19 percent of police officers and 22 percent of
firefighters reported symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), while
26 percent of police and 27 percent of firefighters reported major depressive
symptoms.
§
A crisis-call center in Mississippi handling inquiries mostly from people
dealing with depression and anxiety reported a 61 percent increase in volume
between March 1 and May 31, 2006, compared with the period just after the
hurricanes, Oct 31 and Dec. 31, 2005.
§
The deputy coroner of New Orleans recorded almost a threefold increase in
suicide rates, from nine per 100,000 to 26 per 100,000 in the four months after
Katrina hit. And the murder rate in New Orleans, which fell in 2005, has risen
by 37.1 percent above pre-hurricane levels for the first half of 2006.
§
In Louisiana, mental health counselors supported by federal government agencies
made 158,260 referrals. This doesn't include people who sought support
independently.
§
Recent estimates suggest that only 140 of 617 primary-care physicians have
returned to practice in New Orleans. Only 100 doctors along the Gulf Coast area
are participating in the Medicaid program, compared to 400 before Katrina hit.
§
And estimates also suggest that only 22 of 196 psychiatrists continue to
practice in New Orleans, while the number of psychiatric hospital beds has been
sharply reduced: as of June 14, the authors said, there were only two
psychiatric beds within a 25-mile radius of New Orleans.

This is why we have to offer what hope we can.

Looting No Laughing Matter

This Santa has been standing by the side of the road in Pearlington for most of this year as a warning to looters. The looting signs are prolific and often quite creative around here, and for good reason. Hurricane victims were left with nothing but rubble. You'd think they'd be respected enough to at least salvage their own broken dreams out of that rubble without interference from thieves. Not so.

My friend who lost her home to Katrina also lost the very last of her possessions to looters in Laurel, Mississippi, including the tools she and her husband were using to clean up the mess.

Still, there've been enough tears, and sometimes it's time to laugh at our own expense.

By now most are probably familiar with the beer looter, now known as "Lootie" in what has become a real internet phenomenon.

The picture of Lootie that hit the news last August has now been photoshopped in what must be hundreds of ways by now. There is even a Lootie game.

We can laugh, yes. But that doesn't detract from the seriousness of the crime, and in Louisiana some looters are learning that the hard way as a judge has recently sentenced them to 15 years in prison.

There is also the way looting plays into the more serious issues related to hurricane preparations and recovery to be found in one of the other internet phenomena of the "black man looting, white man finding" news articles.

It is hard to judge people who steal food in the height of an emergency. It's a little easier to condemn people who steal their neighbors only remaining hope of keeping a few tokens of their homes and memories in the aftermath.

Any way you look at it, looting is a serious problem. I wish I had an answer, but I don't really see that there is one.

College Days

University Baptist Church is planning some college work days in Pearlington this fall. We don’t have all of the dates worked out yet, but we are picking Saturdays that do not conflict with USM’s home football games. Some of our church members with construction skills have volunteered to come along as supervisors, so construction experience may be needed, but it isn’t absolutely necessary. If you’ve got the heart for helping, someone will be there to show you what to do.

If you are a college student or you know a college student who lives in this area and might be interested in joining us, email me or contact the church for more information.

sgerald109 at Comcast dot net

Why Weren't People More Prepared?

Aside from all of the questions for FEMA, plenty of people have been asking why individuals didn’t do more to prepare for Katrina. Why didn’t more people evacuate? Why didn’t more people stock up on necessary supplies?

I can give you several reasons. Frances, Charley, Ivan, Jeanne, Emily, and Dennis. As I’m sure you recall 2004 and 2005 were abnormally active hurricane seasons. Over and over, we were told to keep an eye on the Gulf. Over and over, we stocked up, closed schools, evacuated low lying areas, and waited for absolutely nothing to happen. Hurricanes said to be headed for us kept veering off in other directions, and everyone had preparation fatigue. Nobody here really thought Katrina was going to be all that bad; neither did we think she was headed for us.

Here is something I posted to a blog just two days before the storm: “Looks like we might be starting another semester out by taking a hurricane break. Prayers and well wishes to those of you in Katrina's path.”

I didn’t think I was in Katrina’s path even on Saturday. “Here we go again,” I said.

The first I heard that Katrina had turned toward us and gained massive amounts of strength was Sunday morning at church. I was with my parents in Brookhaven, not because I’d evacuated Hattiesburg, but because my nephew was visiting from Virginia. Max got the added benefit of going through a major hurricane thrown into his summer vacation with his grandparents, and I had not done a single thing to stock up on supplies.

By the time we got home that day, my brother was calling asking us to please go farther inland, but by then it was really too late. We were on the New Orleans evacuation route. We couldn’t have gotten very far very fast in the snail’s pace traffic headed north on I-55, and if we’d tried we would have slowed down people who had no choice about evacuating.

That afternoon, my mother and I discussed what we might need. I went to town and got a few drinks and a few bags of ice. And I felt silly doing that. We really thought nothing would happen in Brookhaven. Even in Camille, previously known around here as The Mother of All Hurricanes, Brookhaven had felt very few effects.

I had no way of knowing that I would cry the next time I saw a fresh head of lettuce in a grocery store, or that my parents would spend the whole year gutting out and rebuilding the house we thought was perfectly safe.

People weren’t prepared because no one believed anything like Katrina would happen. Nothing could have prepared us for this. I imagine the next time a hurricane heads our way, there will be quite a frenzy at Wal-Mart in the preceding days, but Katrina broke all patterns of expectation. Before she came along, nothing anyone could have said would have convinced us to fear a storm like that was even possible.

Wellesley at Pearlington

Contributed by Nancy Ratliff

It is noteworthy when students from an Eastern women's college have the concern and enthusiasm to spend a week of their winter vacation to work for Habitat for Humanity in Slidell, LA - mudding out houses and rebuilding damaged homes. And yet my alma mater, Wellesley College in Wellesley, MA, sent nineteen students and staff, including the college president, to Slidell in January to work. I got in contact with them and met them at the church where they were staying and brought them to Pearlington to see the little community my church, University Baptist Church, has been helping since shortly after Hurricane Katrina blew through, leaving unimaginable devastation in her wake.

The students were overwhelmed with the destruction, were amazed at the distribution of goods from Pearl Mart, and were touched by the people they met who were trying to recover amidst the debris and confusion around them. We ate supper in a tent with residents of Pearlington. Two of this Wellesley group came back during their spring break to spend a week working in Pearlington and getting to know some of the people there.

In June another group of nineteen came from Wellesley to work in Slidell, and from the stories they had heard from the January group they wanted to do something for the children in Pearlington. They planned an exciting Fun Fair for the Friday they were down here. I made arrangements with the First Baptist Church in Pearlington for the Wellesley group to use their facilities. They were so gracious to allow us to use their air-conditioned rooms and their grill. The Wellesley group brought hamburgers and hotdogs to cook along with the trimmings, planned several fun crafts - face painting, cookie decorating, flower creation, etc. - played games with the children and gave many prizes. About 50 - 60 children and parents came and enjoyed an afternoon away from a cramped trailer. As always, the givers received more blessings than the ones whom they served. The Wellesley students and staff went back to their homes for the summer with warm memories of a tiny community in South Mississippi almost lost to a horrific storm. Their lives have been changed forever.

Charles B. Murphy Elementary School

Click here for a teacher’s memories of Pearlington’s school.

Now, Charles B. Murphy is the empty field shown in this picture.

All but the gym and the library have been torn down at this much beloved school. The children of Pearlington are being bused to school in Kiln, a little over 20 miles away. And yes, that's the Kiln that is the home town of Brett Favre.

Throughout the year, the school has served as headquarters for volunteer efforts. The gym is still being used as “Pearl Mart,” a place to distribute food and supplies to the needy and a place to coordinate volunteer efforts. The library is being used as a bunkhouse for volunteers. Additionally, there are volunteer huts built by the Navy Seabees sitting on the old football field, along with RVs, tents, a food tent, showers, port-a-potties, and a laundry shed.

Everyone speaks with such fondness of Charles B. Murphy School. It was a great little neighborhood school, and I haven't met a Pearlington local yet who isn't sad and angry over the fact that it is gone.

Busing elementary children to a town twenty miles away is only a temporary solution. Hancock County will eventually rebuild, but they have no plans to rebuild in the same location, and they are far away from beginning construction no matter what they do. The children of Pearlington will still be educational refugees for perhaps several years to come.

If you would like to help the children of Pearlington, they do need school supplies and school uniforms. You can contact Laurie Spaschak at Pearl Mart for more information:
mississippilaurie at yahoo dot com.

Volunteers Needed

Volunteers are desperately needed in Pearlington. With the one year anniversary approaching and a new school year starting, people are just not signing up for mission trips to the Gulf Coast like they have been this past year. Please understand that there is still so much work to be done, and there are limited funds. The only real hope of recovery is through volunteer labor.

We need people with construction skills and people with muscles. If you have the know-how to build a house but just don’t feel like you can do the work like you once did, grab a few teachable college students and come on over. You can supervise while they work. Likewise, if you have the muscle power and the stamina but just lack the experience to feel confident about volunteering, find someone who does have building experience to bring with you.

If you’d like to help but just can’t get to the coast for whatever reason, there are still things you can do.

(1) Keep the story going. Let as many people as you can know what’s needed on the Gulf Coast and what they can do to help.
(2) Have a fund raiser. If you can’t help build, help buy building supplies. Every little bit is as appreciated as it is necessary.
(3) Help query charitable organizations for possible grant opportunities. As much as anything, we need people who can help connect those in need with the people who have the resources to respond to those needs. If interested in this, please let me know. sgerald109 at Comcast dot net.
(4) Send supplies. If you know of a group coming to the coast to work, send food, cleaning supplies, Home Depot gift cards, school supplies or whatever you think the people of Pearlington might be able to use with them.
(5) Actively recruit volunteers. Suggest in whatever outlet you have that people who are able come to the coast to help out. If you have a blog, blog about it. If you are part of a church or civic organization that does volunteer projects, talk to people at home about adopting Pearlington as a project.
(6) Pray. The people of Pearlington and the people all along the Gulf Coast region need as many prayers as they need drywall screws. Please don’t forget them.

The volunteers have been coming to Pearlington all summer, but they are especially needed after the school year starts this fall. Please do what you can to spread the word.

My First Trip to Pearlington

My first time in Pearlington was last fall several weeks after the hurricane. I rode down in a Jeep with Phillip Reynolds, the pastor of UBC, Mike Ratliff, a member of UBC, and Jan (I’m sorry I forgot her last name), a secretary from Mike’s office who was, like me, looking for a way to help. I still get teased because Jan and I struck up a grand conversation on the way down to Pearlington and didn’t say a word on the way back. By that time we were too busy passing out from exhaustion in the back seat.

I thought I was prepared for what I would find in Pearlington. I’d been cleaning out storm damage from my mother’s house and my friend’s house for weeks. I’d driven to Waveland and seen first hand how our beautiful beachfront had just been wiped out. All of South Mississippi still looked like a war zone at that point, and I thought I was getting immune to its effects.

Nothing can really prepare a person for the level of devastation I saw in Pearlington, though.

Homes in Hattiesburg that needed gutting out were bad, but they weren’t packed full of mud and gunk from the Pearl River. And when I was working on them, they hadn’t had time to gather mold or maggots.

Early in the summer this year, I overheard a group of high school student volunteers from New York talking about gutting out a house in Pearlington. One of them said, “We made the mistake of opening the refrigerator,” and I cringed and gagged just listening to them. I had seen what Pearlington refrigerators looked like last fall. I had no interest in learning what they’d become by summer.

Our group split up that first day in Pearlington, going to about three different homes to work on shoveling out mud, pulling ruined furniture, clothes, and other belongings out to the road for the trash, and trying to find something we could salvage for the family. The home I worked on belonged to an older woman who was with relatives out of state. She was unable to even begin to figure out what to do about her flooded house on her own, but her grandson was there that day, and he worked beside us all day. He’s the one who told us that the family “went swimming” when the flood waters came in. Miraculously, they survived—the children, the elderly, the disabled alike.

I don’t think anyone could go to Pearlington and not care about the people there and what they’ve been through this year. That first day I left feeling not just that I should go back but that I must go back. Not just for them but for me as well. We get our best blessings in this life out of what we are able to do for others. Pearlington is one place where you can truly see what you are accomplishing day by day, hour by hour, minute by minute.

If you have a chance to go to Pearlington and don’t take it, you are only depriving yourself.