For Such a Time as This - Answering God's Call to Serve

The first envelope arrived in October 2009. As registrar for Southern Comfort’s March 2010 mission trip to New Orleans, I was excited to see the registration was from someone I did not know. It still amazes me that people continue to respond to the need to help rebuild following Hurricane Katrina, now more than four years after the storm.

Southern Comfort started when Sandi, a central New York woman, thought to herself, “I have to do something!” as she watched the horror unfold on television in the aftermath of the hurricane, which we all thought at first, “missed” New Orleans. She is active in the Presbyterian Church and quickly organized a Mission and Ministry Team from the Cayuga Syracuse Presbytery that would travel to Mississippi to do what they could in October – not yet two months since the hurricane. She didn’t have a clue what she was starting. And the storm didn’t miss New Orleans or any of the other communities along the Gulf Coast. The damage and destruction stretched from Alabama through Mississippi, across Louisiana and into Texas. It went inland 10 or 15 miles in some places, affecting everyone and everything. Lives were changed – even lives in upstate New York!

October 2005 - D'Iberville, Mississippi
Sandi’s group of 5 women stayed at one of the first Presbyterian Disaster Assistance (PDA) Volunteer Villages, in D’Iberville, Mississippi. In response to the hurricane, PDA quickly decided to establish self contained headquarters for volunteers who would travel to the Gulf Coast to lend aid. This was to avoid burdening local churches with the task of rebuilding their churches, their homes, and their livelihoods, while simultaneously playing host to an almost endless stream of volunteers. Eventually, there were villages scattered across Mississippi and Louisiana. And Southern Comfort would visit several of them over the course of the next few years.

On the first trip, they slept in leaky pup tents pitched on a ball diamond in D’Iberville, Mississippi. They helped at the Red Cross feeding center, eating there themselves. They handed out School Kits – those bags of school supplies church ladies have been assembling for decades to send to school kids around the world. This time, the need was in our own back yard and Sandi revealed that she was told to hand them out only to kids. Yet adults, whose homes and possessions had been flooded to the roof rafters, were desperate for anything like a dry piece of paper and a crayon with which to write information such as insurance agents’ phone numbers or instructions, and she handed them out to nearly everyone, asking, “Do you HAVE a child?” “Do you KNOW a child?” Practically before she returned to New York, another trip was being planned for February 2006 – 6 months after the hurricane.

February 20006 – Gautier, Mississippi
It was a total of 36 volunteers that assembled in the PDA Volunteer Village, a collection of little plastic huts clustered at the edge of a cow pasture on the outskirts of the small Mississippi town of Gautier. Because of a long standing cooperative mission relationship with the central New York Presbyery, five people from Campaeche, Mexico rendezvoused with us there, in addition to a small group of people from the Houston, Texas area. (Somebody there read a copy of an upstate NY church newsletter, and that’s how that connection was made.)

The devastation along the coast was nearly overwhelming. We drove the coast road, which was passable since debris had been cleared, but saw mile after mile of totally destroyed homes and businesses. Where houses once stood, only a staircase or brick porch remained. Clothing, plastic and other debris hung tattered from the live oak trees, which had been stripped of their leaves. Some of our group did the back breaking, heart breaking work of helping muck out houses. A couple crews helped families at the rebuilding stage, and many of us helped run the Volunteer Village – answering the “office” phone, pulling out work requests and trying to match the skills (or lack of skills as the case may be) to the jobs that needed to be done. Others used one of the vans we had rented to go shopping each day, and cooked food for the 100 plus volunteers in the make shift kitchen set up in the corner of our dining tent. We showered in a trailer outfitted by a church in the Carolinas with two sets of showers along the side, and a sink room on the end. We stood elbow to elbow beside men shaving as we dried our hair or brushed our teeth. We slept in huts that leaked when it rained, and sloshed our way across the village to the dining tent, and one of our volunteers prayed one night, “God I ask your help for all those sleeping in less comfortable surroundings than we have here.” We knew we’d be back.

October 2006 – Luling, Louisiana

October 2006 saw a group of 28 travel to a suburb of New Orleans, and stay at the PDA FISH Camp, in Luling, LA. All of us mucked out houses on that trip – there was a sense of urgency – we were told there was a looming deadline after which the municipality would no longer pay the fees for hauling away debris. We discovered NOLA in October can be both HOT and HUMID – and later, it turned cold to the point of wearing a hat to breakfast, which made the mucking out a bit easier to handle. Or maybe after a week we had just become used to tearing all the possessions out of a house - walls, ceilings and floors included - and piling them at the street for the refuse trucks to haul away.

April 2007 - Jefferson Parish, New Orleans, Lousiana
April 2007, a group of 4 returned to New Orleans, staying in the Jefferson Parish and doing some rebuilding work on homes – yes, even a group of four can make a difference!

December 2007 – Luling, Louisiana

A group of 17 descended on Luling once again, and this time, helped rebuild two houses. Laura, whose Upper Ninth Ward home was just a shell, was thrilled when the crew installed a front door over the plywood-covered opening, “You’ve made my house a home!” She served red beans and rice, sweet bread and fried chicken when our entire mission team worked there on a Saturday, painting the newly installed siding, and preparing porch poles for painting.

March 2009 – Pearlington, Mississippi

Nineteen people went to Pearlington, Mississippi - surely one of the most unique communities I’ve ever visited. This trip gave us an intense feeling of community as some of our crew were close enough to walk to their job sites and we all gathered each day at the local Baptist Church, to eat lunch prepared by the pastor’s wife, Miss Idella Rawls. She’s been putting on a weekday noontime spread for local folks and volunteers ever since the hurricane. People come in the back door, circle the room to be served, sit at tables, and stand up, leaving their chair to used by the next guest. It is a study in miracles, how that woman serves hundreds of meals each week, in a tiny church kitchen without running water, using a standard kitchen range and refrigerator. They eat on paper using plastic cutlery, but the pots and pans are washed in a shed out front – I hope the health department doesn’t look too closely at the water temperature, and lack of prescribed three bay sinks for washing, rinsing and sanitizing dishes.

The Village hosts a weekly Neighbors' Night when families whose homes are being worked on are invited to the village to share the evening meal, and tell their stories. The high point of the week was to hear about Hezekiah’s joy in seeing all the lights turned on in his house for the first time since the storm, or hearing of Socks, the dog, being able to climb independently a new set of stairs to the new deck on his owner’s elevated house.  Before the volunteers came it was accessible only by an extension ladder, and Socks' owner had been carrying this medium sized dog up and down the ladder. Again, it was clear that God wasn’t through rebuilding and restoring the Gulf Coast.

March 2010 – New Orleans, Louisiana

So now we prepare to return, this time to a new PDA housing unit in the eastern suburbs of New Orleans – closer to the work that remains to be done. (A frustration when staying in Luling, which has since been closed, was the long commute to get to the worksites. The hurricane badly damaged the eastern side of the city, leaving the western suburbs largely untouched. That’s where they could put the first NOLA PDA village – there was electricity and municipal water and sewage there, and it wouldn’t be restored to the hardest hit areas for months.)

Our deadline for registrations is this week - we expect to hear from a few more people, and look forward to meeting the folks God calls together for this trip. I love contemporary Christian music, and am reminded of a song by Wayne Watson that speaks of being in a particular place for a specific reason:

For Such a Time as This

For such a time as this

I was placed upon the earth

To hear the voice of God

And do His will

Whatever it is

For such a time as this

For now and all the days He gives

I am here I am here

And I am His

For such a time as this