BRANDON, FL — Another team from my church (First Presbyterian Church in Brandon) returned from rural Mississippi this week.
It’s good that we have so many people traveling back and forth, showing slides and sharing stories. Otherwise it becomes too easy to slip into a, “Well Katrina was last year” mentality, and believe that things around the bayou must be settling back to somewhere around normal.
More normal perhaps for Deidre Burton, the single mother and volunteer firefighter our crews have been helping. But not really. Deidre's house may be near about squared away but it’s now nine months down the road and the majority of the community still looks like a tidal wave and a few dozen tornadoes rolled over just yesterday.
My friend, the Rev. Tim Black, is not a big fan of painting. But over in Mississippi he spent eight plus hours a day with a brush in his hand for a full week. He even painted after church on Sunday. He now has painter’s elbow, painter’s wrist, painter’s back, and a couple of pairs of painting pants he hadn’t planed on so designating but, well, paint happens.
Black doesn’t like mosquitoes either. Who does? And that includes gnats and deer-flies, as well as the ubiquitous no-see-ums. Yet the mission team shared a lot of quality time with the little pests every day until a welcome cold-front temporarily cleared the air.
Ronda doesn’t like camp showers, Sheri would be happy not hanging dry-wall for the rest of her life, Greg is not big on pulling soggy rotten trash out of decrepit houses. But they’ve been doing it, all of them and a bunch more, week after week and for no pay beyond the joy of helping.
Most of the real journeyman work seems to be getting done by volunteers, and the Pearlington camp is just one of 16 relief centers Presbyterian Disaster Assistance (PDA) has in place along the Gulf Coast. Black’s team shared space with close to 100 church members from all over the country. All the camps are operating at capacity, booked solid for the foreseeable future.
The biggest problem, and I’ve been hearing this from relief workers across the board, is that people on the ground are just now beginning to feel a sense of coordinated direction. Nine months in and communication is still scattered at best.
The acronym FEMA may have a big “M” for management in the middle, but synchronized administration is still a vision the federal government fails to grasp. For the money spent — and I don’t begrudge disaster victims a single penny — it looks like, dollar for dollar, folk like the Presbyterians and other faith-based efforts are producing a great deal more value for the money.
Like I said, money spent putting folk like Deidre and her children back in a safe dry home is capital I’m more than happy to invest. Unfortunately the other funds, and we’re talking about those bundles of dollars the government shovels into murky places where it is gift-wrapped for absentee profiteers, well, that happens to be our money too.
Deidre is welcome to my disaster aid contributions, plus the good folk over at the Baptist chapel where the victims themselves help to feed my hungry friends. Just let us know what you need and we’re more than willing to chip in. It is more than a privilege to be a part of that ongoing story.
But the boatload of money they take out of our checks for Washington, DC, is every bit as real. It frustrates the grits out of me to see it flushed so readily via the incompetence of so-called professionals. FEMA has been outsmarted and outperformed at every turn by volunteers who know they can’t afford to waste a dollar — let alone a million — and so they don’t.
So Tim Black and my other friends came home tired but satisfied. They are hopeful in spite of the frustration, and they most definitely feel blessed. At the same time, however, they are all overwhelmingly conscious of the crushing weight of human need that remains.
Derek Maul is a free-lance writer and hard-core Presbyterian in Brandon, FL, who writes occasionally for the Presbyterian News Service and “Presbyterians Today” magazine.
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