Pics from Mission to Mississippi


Abstract:
We've just returned from a 4-day trip to MIssissippi to help out where we could. Our team spent the first two days putting up tarps. It is hot work, and a wet tarp might as well be coated with teflon. Luckily, we had no falls, and only minor injuries during the whole trip. Just about every house without a metal roof needs patching or re-roofing.

Body:


That's me in the red hat.

If we ever build a house, we will most certainly be getting a metal roof instead of shingles - I didn't see any damage on houses that had metal roofs, but there were thousands of blue tarps over shingled roofs.



One of these sites used to be Trent Lott's house, the one about which Bush made the awkward comment about rebuilding. I don't remember which one it was - they all looked pretty much the same. It's the houses just a few blocks away that break your heart. Trent's got more than one place to live, but some of these folks saved their whole lives to buy a retirement house near the ocean, and now they have nothing.

The first day we were there, we moved a ruined antique piano out of a lady's house. She said, "I was just a 12 year-old country girl who wanted a piano." She turned away because she could not watch us lug it down the driveway. There were lots of memories outside on the trash piles, waiting for trucks to come by and take them away: wrinkled and swollen family Bibles, broken lamps, boxes full of photographs. Yet nearly everyone we met kept saying, "we're so lucky. We're so blessed." We met one lady who floated to safety in her refrigerator.

When we went out to eat one afternoon, we filled up the church bus at a local gas station:


It was not as expensive as I had expected.



Bishop Hope Ward said that many plants were fooled by the wind, rain, and cold of the hurricane into thinking that winter had already come and gone. They were going through "second spring," blooming and producing fruit out of season. At first I thought that she was simply a speaking metaphorically about new growth replacing what the storm had destroyed, but then we saw this fig tree - producing figs in October. I'm sure there is an Easter sermon here somewhere.



One pastor said to his congregation before he left: "Y'all pray for us. There are 300 Methodist pastors going down to Biloxi, and some of them will have chainsaws." N

Dantzler United Methodist Church hosted us. Their church building was built in 1914, and it has some of the most subtle and beautiful Art Nouveau details I have seen in a church:



These are Tiffany windows. One of their coolest features is that they open. Functional art - what a concept!

The glass shoji-type screens can be folded to create classrooms, or opened up to create overflow space for the sanctuary. They let in so much natural light that there is really no reason to use electricity during the day. I wish that we still made things according to that kind of form/function philosophy.



All in all, our three district teams tarped 8 houses and mucked out two. Not bad for twenty people in only two-and-a-half workdays.



We didn't get photos of the houses we mucked out. It would have seemed awkward taking pictures of the guts of someone's home, with the damp and moldy drywall torn off the studs, and the piles of ruined belongings laying on the curb. Some of the torn out houses looked like new construction. The skeletal frames were all ready to be cleaned, bleached, and re-walled.

We will probably be taking a team from my church at some point. There will be years worth of recovery work and rebuilding to do.

Posted: Fri - October 7, 2005 at 10:21 AM           |

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