Come And See The Nothing

This is an e-mail I received yesterday from Kelly, my best friend from high school. She is in Mississippi this week doing relief work with Hurricane Katrina victims. Please read her stories ... they are the stories of the people whose lives have been forever changed by a natural disaster, and even more so by our governments lackluster response to their plight. You know, I gave money to the Red Cross right after Hurricane Katrina, and at the time I felt like I had done my part. Hearing about what is going on in Mississippi makes me realize that I have done relatively nothing ... and it makes me want to get on a plane today and go help these people.

Greetings from Long Beach, Mississippi. For those receiving this email that I haven't spoken to in a while, I'm down here in Mississippi on a week long mission trip to help with the reconstruction in the wake of Hurricane Katrina (see here: www.campcoastcare.com).

I came down with a group of eleven people from two parishes in downtown Philadelphia. It's an absolutely amazing experience, I'm working really hard and having so much fun. There are 150 people living in the gymnasium of a small private school that survived the storm, and frankly, that's working surprisingly well. The food sucks, but the people are amazing. There's a table that's set up all day long with refreshments...water, coffee, sweet tea, fruit, other snacks. And on that table, there sits a plate. And on that plate, there sits about 4 corkscrews. And those corkscrews are possibly the most well-used tools in the whole camp. We bust our butts all day, say Evening Prayer before dinner, and then we start the party. I love Episcopalians!

Miracles, both big and small, happen here every day. I helped build a roof. That's pretty miraculous. And I'm telling you, people, I am a badass with the air compressing nail gun. Seriously. People around camp are like, "That's the girl with the nail gun." In two and a half days, my team of three men from Minnesota, two lesbians from Philly, a charming tax lawyer from Alabama and I tore down and rebuilt a roof that had been destroyed when a tree fell on a man's house.

Our host was a hard worn gentleman named Herman who had a sweet heart and made us chicken gumbo in thanks for his new roof. He lost the love of his life in Hurricane Camille, his wife left him for a bottle just before the storm, a tree fell on his house (which was a one bedroom where he'd been raised with his three brothers), and his nephew was killed in a car accident about a month ago when an 18-year-old volunteer worker ran through a stop sign. He was in no physical shape to get up on the roof with us, but he kinda wandered around the foot of the building offering us sweet tea and saying things in a very thick accent that we couldn't understand but could tell by his grin were supposed to be funny...so we laughed anyway.

I've also been helping finish drywall in a house that belongs to a young family of five. The entire neighborhood, which is a couple miles inland from the beach, was flooded with over ten feet of water because it lies between a river and a runoff, both of which overflowed. It's a development of one story ranch houses, and none of them are inhabitable at this time. But the house we're working on is about a month away from completion. Were hoping to start the painting tomorrow, but all the appliances, kitchen and bathroom tile, and other plumbing stuff still need to go in.

The first day we were working there, we met the mother of the family and the kids. They were so nice. We asked the mom where they were staying, and she said they lived in a FEMA trailer that belonged to her father about half an hour away. I asked if she had applied for a trailer, and she said she had back in September. Every week, she calls and asks about it, and every week they tell her that she's on the list but they don't have it yet. She's pretty confident they'll be back in their house before the trailer ever comes. In the mean time, there are six of them living in this trailer a bit north, and trying to make it work. She looked at me, standing in her half completed house holding her infant daughter in her arms, and said, word for word, "The government hasn't helped us at all. It's been the people. The people have helped us."

The individual stories go on and on, but there are a couple of larger stories down here that I don't think people on the outside are hearing. Like the fires. I'd never heard about the fires before I got here. But I have seen four, large uncontrolled fires since Saturday. I mean, we're not talking even close to Texas panhandle big, but this could become a very serious problem. Apparently there is so much organic material in the landfills that some of them are spontaneously igniting. And in every wooded area (and down here there are a lot), about a third of the trees have been uprooted or broken in half. The whole area is under a fire ban, but some people still try to get rid of their debris by burning it, and it tends to get out of control. All day Monday we watched and smelled the smoke as about 500 acres burned about 10 minutes away from Herman's house. That fire almost got his nephew's place. There are so many dead trees...it's like stocking a neighborhood with kindling.

In six days, at a major area relief site, I haven't scene a single Red Cross. Not on a worker or a truck. There is no indication that they're here.You also don't hear about the state of the FEMA trailers. You hear that there aren't enough and that people can't get to them (my favorite is that you can't put a FEMA trailer in a flood zone but of course all the people who need them LIVE in flood zones). But a lot of the trailers got wet in the aftermath of the storm and they have serious mold problems. In the group from Philly we have an RN, a med student, and a neurologist who've spent most of the time working at the medical clinic. Only 2% of the doctors from the area have come back. And they spend a lot of their time dealing with people who have staph infections from living in the FEMA trailers.

The first day we got here, we went to visit the rector of St. Patrick's parish (and an old seminary friend of one of the priests we came with). Rev. David Knight lives in Pass Christian, and his church was destroyed in the storm. He gave us some perspective. Before the storm there were 9,000 homes in Pass Christian. After the storm, only 500 of them were inhabitable. Five hundred. One hundred percent of the businesses in Pass Christian are closed. In his parish, which had an approximate attendance on Sunday mornings of 140, 32 families had their homes completely destroyed. About half the people in town have said they will not return. There is no longer a tax base and they're looking at having to lay off some of the teachers, most of whom live in trailers on the grounds of the one school that wasn't uninhabitable.

There is a sense here that Mississippi has been overlooked when it comes to publicity about the storm. No one seems bitter or angry about it, they would just like their story to be told as well. 160,000 homes in Mississippi were either destroyed or unlivable. A retired clergy member who moved here about three years ago from the Diocese of New Mexico pointed out that 160,000 homes is approximately the size of Albuquerque. Or Boston. A city was wiped out here too, it's just stretched out along 30 miles of coast. That priest now refers to his home as "the third slab from the street."

Yesterday, after we completed work on the roof, we decided that we would drive down to the beach. Since I've been here, that's the question everyone asks..."Have you been down to the beach yet?" Highway 90 runs parallel to the shore and is the street on which many of the beautiful, old homes used to be. They say that to get an idea of what really happened here, you have to drive down Highway 90. All week I'd been wondering to myself, "If the beach is where it's bad, then why are we all working inland?" Yesterday, I found out why.

The guy who drove us down there was one of the gentlemen from Minnesota. John is 72 years old and a total and utter rockstar. This is his second trip to Camp Coast Care. His first was in October when he accidentally cut two tendons in his wrist during a demolition job. He went back to Minnesota while his wrist healed and his wife had her knee replaced, and then they both came back for their second trip this week. He'd been down to the beach on his first trip, and he took us in the same way he'd gone. We came off I-10 and headed toward Waveland. As we drove south, we saw gas stations that had collapsed in on themselves and tractor trailers that were thrown into the woods. We saw cars that had been crushed by houses that had been crushed by trees that had uprooted.

It was awful, it was horrifying, and it was too much. Then we drove up to the train tracks. The tracks were on a brief but high man-made hill...probably 10 feet above the road. We stopped and couldn't see what was on the other side. Then John turned around and explained that this hill was what SAVED all the houses we'd just seen because it had acted as a sea wall and stopped the water.

So we drove over the tracks.

And there was nothing.

The tracks were three blocks back from the beach, and between the beach and the tracks, there was not a single house standing. There are not even partial walls or parts of roofs. There are bare concrete slabs. Everything is now at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. They don't send us to work on the beach because there is nothing to work on. You will see pictures of stuff. Church steeples laying on their sides in the road, buildings that no longer have walls...just roofs, enormous trees laying on the ground with roots exposed. But all of the pictures will be of stuff. No photograph, no tv footage, no explanation in an email can help you understand the nothing. Three blocks back, for thirty miles. You cannot understand, and you must weep.

There is a palpable fear here. Not of looting, that seems to have past. Not of the next hurricane season, though Gulf water temps are oft discussed with much tension. No. People here are terrified that the rest of us will forget. That the fifteen minutes of the gulf coast tragedy will pass and that we'll leave them to eight long years of recovery by themselves. That the money and the volunteers and the prayers will stop coming. I ache for their fear. And I ache for my own inability to comfort. It doesn't take much to come here. All it costs is your plane ticket or your gas. You don't even need much time...two and a half days can put a roof over somebody's head. We meet twice a day as a group 150 strong, and every time they implore us to come back and bring our friends.

So please come. Come and see the nothing.

Then do something.