05596
Nov. 4, 2005

Elbow-grease Presbyterians    

Volunteers from around the U.S.
flock to Gulf Coast to do the dirty work

by Evan Silverstein

LONG BEACH, MS — For Cathryn Rolfe, the hammer-and-nails chorus at Long Beach Presbyterian Church is the sweet sound of recovery.

     Rolfe, a member of First Presbyterian Church in Nashville, TN, was one of an army of Presbyterian volunteers contributing to relief efforts all along the hurricane-ravaged Mississippi Gulf Coast.

     “The main thing that you’ve got to say: You cannot believe the devastation down here,”

     In nearby Gulfport, and in other towns including Biloxi, Pass Christian and Pascagoula, Presbyterians have grabbed their chain saws and pitched in — clearing debris, shoveling mud, tearing out drywall.

     Presbyterians have arrived in the hurricane zone in cars, buses and trucks, often towing campers or trailers stocked with food, water and clothing for the victims. They are fixing up roofs, ripping out rotten, hurricane-soaked floors, tearing out sheetrock and ministering to survivors who have lost their homes and everything they contained. They are repairing damaged churches, preparing meals, handing out supplies.

     “We’re doing God’s work down here,” said Dan Grimes, a Presbyterian Disaster Assistance Team (PDAT) member deployed in Gulfport. “From a community standpoint, they appreciate us. They speak to us on the street: ‘Thank you.’”

     While some volunteers can work in the region for just a few days, others stay for weeks. New volunteers arrive daily.

     The cleanup phase will end soon, and the rebuilding will begin.

     “How soon, I don’t know,” Grimes said, considering the scale of the disaster. “It will vary with each community. In one area of Biloxi, they’ve already cleaned out a grid and started the process of rebuilding.”

     Grimes, who also responds to disasters for Church World Service, helped hire staff for three “tent villages” established by Presbyterian Disaster Assistance along the Mississippi coast.

     Each camp has about 30 dome-shaped tents that serve as housing for rotating work teams from

View the video of the camp in Gautier. 

     “The amount of damage that was done is just horrific,” said Brian Jensen, a 21-year-old Presbyterian college student from San Clemente, CA, who stayed at the Gautier camp. “I wanted to come down and help out with anything I could do. Just to make one person smile a day would make me happy and satisfied.”

     Another PDA tent camp is in hard-hit D’iberville, MS, just north of Biloxi. The other is in Gulfport, west of Biloxi. More such camps are planned for the Gulf Coast as part of the PC(USA)’s biggest-ever domestic-relief response.

     Presbyterians of all callings — from advertising executives to country songwriters to speech pathologists — are answering the call. There is still plenty of work for them all.

     Rolfe said assistance of any kind is welcomed in hard-hit Long Beach, a town of about 17,000 people. In fact, she said, help is needed just about everywhere in the devastated region. 

     “We don’t care where you’re from, and we don’t care what your skill set is,” she said. “If you can use a broom, you can clean.”

     Rolfe’s congregation in Nashville started sending work teams just after Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast on Aug. 29. Each group serves a four-day stint wherever it is most needed.

     On one recent day, Rolfe scrubbed a kitchen at the Long Beach church while volunteers from Chestnut Level Presbyterian Church in Quarryville, PA, pried tiles from a classroom floor ruined by flood water and consumed by mold. 

     “It’s an experience I’ll never forget, because the need is so great,” said David Miller, a 67-year-old retired carpenter from the Pennsylvania church. “You just can’t imagine it unless you come here. … Pictures don’t really do it justice.”

     Outside, volunteers from another Nashville congregation, Westminster Presbyterian Church, were building makeshift showers for the volunteers.

     Piles of debris were stacked in front and alongside the Long Beach church, but its main building weathered the category-4 hurricane surprisingly well. Another building was blown off its foundation and set down 20 yards away.

     With its flock scattered across the country, it isn’t clear when or whether the Long Beach church will again host a congregation.

     “I know our mission trips overseas are important,” Rolfe said, “but these are our neighbors, and you need to get off your duff and forgo your own comfort zone and get down here, because you cannot imagine the mental and emotional devastation.”

     More than a dozen PC(USA) churches were damaged or destroyed by

     There are crumbled houses pushed off their foundations and cars and boats deposited on lawns. Uprooted trees, some reduced to splinters, lie over debris fields that once were bustling neighborhoods. The ground is strewn with personal items such as coffee mugs, trophies, clothing, books and pictures.

     Lindsey Carr, another volunteer from Nashville’s First church, wore a double-charcoal filter mask as she picked up ruined hymnals, toys and other refuse at the Long Beach church and tossed it into a wheelbarrow. She said “willing hands and hearts” are needed in the hurricane zone.

     “We just need help,” said Carr, a church staff member. “There are tons of supplies, but often supplies just sit — because there is no one to do anything with them. The people here, I would imagine, are so close to being burnt out. We just need lots of hands, lots of people.”

View video of Moderator Rick Ufford-Chase's visit to the Gulf Coast.  

     Helping with the cleanup should be a priority for everyone, said Jamie Ferrugia, a country music songwriter who belongs to Westminster Presbyterian Church in Nashville. He came to Long Beach with a fellow parishioner who’s an engineer and another Nashville man who’s an advertising and marketing executive — both experienced homebuilders with Habitat for Humanity.

     “I think it’s an important part of our faith commitment,” Ferrugia said while pounding nails into the wooden base of the temporary showers. “I think as human beings we’re called to do that. Not just as Presbyterians, but certainly as Christian people.”

     Presbyterians say they hope to make a difference in the lives of the survivors.

     That’s what a dozen members of First Presbyterian Church in Greenville, NC, had in mind as they worked at a city-operated feeding program at a D’iberville recreation center. Hurricane Katrina left thousands homeless there and in neighboring St. Martin.

     “We not only wanted to come down here and work, we wanted to come down here and bring supplies,” said David Chappell, a volunteer from the Greenville church. “They said they needed bath towels, so we bought a thousand bath towels and a thousand washcloths.”

     “We’ve enjoyed ourselves and met a lot of great people,” he said.

volunteers, but … also feeding folks who lost their homes. It’s been very rewarding.” 

     Lunch and dinner were provided by the Red Cross, but breakfast was compliments of First church in Greenville: Fresh-baked biscuits, shrimp, sausage, grits, bacon and scrambled eggs.

     The Greenville group used a corner of a storeroom to create the only shower in town with hot water. It was named “The Neely Shower Facility” in honor of First church’s pastor, the Rev. Bill Neely, a PDAT member.

     At a distribution center in D’iberville, Presbyterian Faye Atchison was handing out baby formula, diapers, canned goods, toilet paper, blankets and clothes.

     “This has just been special, working here,” said Atchison, a member of Mechanicsburg (PA) Presbyterian Church. “They keep saying ‘Thank you, God bless you.’ It’s really been wonderful.”

     Presbyterian Lila Miller also was working at the POD — Point of Distribution — center.

     The two women were among 26 Presbyterians and other Christians from Carlisle Presbytery who took a bus to the area, stopping along the way to sleep at a Presbyterian church in Tennessee.

     During their six-day stay in Mississippi, they said, they witnessed the enduring hope of many victims, some of whom have been living in tents since the storm and have no prospect of returning to their homes anytime soon.

     Miller, who worships at Camp Hill (PA) Presbyterian Church, said one woman told her that she had lost everything but was thankful that she and her mother were alive.

     “She told me that’s what’s important,” Miller said. “She said, ‘I’ll make it.’ They’re survivors. I think a lot of the people who are coming through here are living in a surreal world, and it is almost impossible for their minds to take in the devastation they have suffered.”

See more photos from Evan Silverstein's trip.