roof,” Sunderland said by phone over the sound of popping nail guns.
Thanks to the work of Sunderland and the students and about 500 other volunteers from around the country, scores of hurricane-damaged homes in East Biloxi and elsewhere on the Mississippi Gulf Coast are slowly being restored to pre-storm condition.
The work was part of a recently concluded six-day roofing “blitz” organized by Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) officials to aid hurricane survivors.
The blitz, which took place during the week after Christmas, fixed up homes in Biloxi, Long Beach and Bay St. Louis, all in Mississippi.
The volunteers, most of them Presbyterians, came from as far away as Ontario, Canada, to participate in the $250,000 effort, which was coordinated by Presbyterian Disaster Assistance (PDA), Mississippi Presbytery and Westminster Presbyterian Church in Gulfport.
Most of the building materials used in the effort were bought with contributions raised through a PDA appeal issued shortly after Hurricane Katrina. So far, the disaster-response agency has raised $20 million for church rebuilding, pastoral support and general community work, according to PDA’s coordinator, Susan Ryan.
“I hope it’s only the first of a regular activity,” she said of the roofing blitz. “I’d love to see us doing blitzes every month.”
The December blitz volunteers replaced or fixed roofs and made other repairs to about 75 homes.
George Bates, disaster-recovery coordinator for Mississippi Presbytery, said 35 roofs were repaired or replaced, and anticipated that seven more would be completed by the end of this week.
“Now that we’ve gotten a roof on it, either our volunteers or other people can go into that house and start the next phase,” he said, “which is rewiring it and hanging sheet rock and getting ready to paint so those folks can move back in.”
The Rev. Mark White, a PDA adviser from Seattle Presbytery who also helped with the blitz, said volunteers made minor electrical and plumbing repairs and installed sheet rock in about 25 houses and removed debris from a number of yards and streets.
“Water levels were up high in these homes,” he said. “Now that they’re getting their roofs on, we decided to go through and start changing some of the electrical boxes and receptacles, knowing that they’d been damaged by the salt water.”
Blitz volunteers included about 180 folks from East Tennessee Presbytery, including University of Tennessee students, and about 150 high school students and adults from the Christian Reformed Church in Ontario.
“Nobody’s doing roofs down there, especially for the uninsured and the underinsured,” said Steve Benz, executive of East Tennessee Presbytery. “That’s what we thought would be the next step, and a very important step, and something that we could take ownership of.”
White said the volunteers also included 85 members of First Presbyterian Church of Deerfield, IL, outside Chicago; 10 from Neelsville Presbyterian Church in Germantown, MD; and representatives of PC(USA) congregations in Kentucky, Florida, Virginia, South Carolina and North Carolina.
College students also came from the University of California, Los Angeles; Cornell University in Ithaca, NY; and George Washington University in Washington, DC.
Bates said Presbytery of Mississippi officials were so pleased with the roofing effort that it is planning another blitz for March 18-25, when many college students are on spring break, and yet another next summer.
“We’re going to keep on roofing,” said Bates, an elder at First Presbyterian Church in Natchez, MS. “We’ve found our place in life. We put roofs on houses.”
The Presbyterian-led relief effort involved volunteers from a range of religious backgrounds, including Methodists, Lutherans and Baptists and more than 130 Jewish volunteers from 16 campus Hillel organizations.
The Jewish group’s participation was coordinated by Weinberg Tzedek Hillel, a Washington-based international public-service organization, in partnership with Westminster Presbyterian, which has been organizing relief projects since the hurricane struck.
The church provided equipment and materials.
Although most of the volunteers were construction-work novices, Sunderland said, they quickly adjusted to long hours on rooftops.
The Jewish volunteers prepared their own meals and slept in the church building.
“They have turned our kitchen at the church into a total kosher operation,” Sunderland said. “It’s been a really great multicultural experience for our congregation and for the young people ... from the Jewish groups.”
During the blitz, First Presbyterian Church in Bay St. Louis, Handsboro Presbyterian Church in Gulfport, and Long Beach Presbyterian Church in Long Beach also housed workers, White said.
Some stayed in PDA-sponsored volunteer camps at Orange Grove Presbyterian Church in Gulfport and Gautier Presbyterian Church in Gautier, MS.
Recovery assistance is still sorely needed. Evidence of Katrina’s destruction is everywhere, from the twisted remains of the Long Beach Wal-Mart to the floating Treasure Bay Casino barge in Biloxi that ended up on the beach, a half-mile away from its mooring.
White said one goal was to emphasize the PC(USA)’s commitment to rebuilding the damaged communities even though they are no longer in the national spotlight.
“That which they started they will now continue to do,” he said. “We plan to do roofing for a while. The cleanup, rebuilding and restoration of lives will go on for years, but hope has to be sustained daily.”
White was based at the camp at the Orange Grove church, one of five PDA-affiliated volunteer villages set up as part of the agency’s long-term response. The others are in Pearlington, MS, D’iberville, MS and Gautier. Ryan said PDA also supports a camp at Westminster Presbyterian in cooperation with the Gulfport congregation.
The camps provide room, board and work assignments for volunteers from Presbyterian churches around the country as they rotate in and out a week at a time.
Since the relief effort started, the camps have hosted work teams from as far away as Ireland, Malawi and South Korea, White said.
“I think one of the best things that I’ve seen is the slogan of Presbyterian Disaster Assistance that says ‘Out of Chaos, Hope,’” Sunderland said. “I think as Presbyterians we see a need and we are fulfilling that need.”
To register for future roofing blitzes, call Linda Bates at the Mississippi Presbytery Disaster Recovery Office at (228) 604-2424.
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