This is just a glimpse of the work to be done all over the gulf coast. We were led to this backyard [husband and wife in their 80s] by a local man at the church who asked us if we could help them out. When we arrived there, the backyard was covered in pine tree branches and about 2-3 inches of pine straw. It took our team about an hour to completely clean the roof and backyard.
To me, the story in the gulf coast isn’t the storm anymore. The real story is seeing how the communities are helping one another and making life better, person on person. Hattiesburg was a perfect example… Even though they had so much damage on their hands they were mostly worried about finding small areas of the area and getting them supplies. In the neighborhood we worked in, 90% of the work had been done by neighbors. One neighbor helping another to help life get back to normal.
Take for instance where we went. This was an “un-official” distribution center that was supplementing aid from the big dogs like the Red Cross. This was a neighborhood that had figured out how to take care of themselves. A local priest made some phone calls and figured out how to help people in his town. I mean, we drove 36 hours to take them water… Whoa.
When we arrived we we told that the supplies we were bringing were desperately needed since many areas had no fresh water. The night before we arrived a man had been shot and killed at a similar distribution center over a case of water. Something similar happened over a generator as well. People were getting desperate and their impatience was starting to wear through. As we got to Laurel, MS we pulled over to the side of the highway and covered all of our supplies “just in case.” We had heard of car-jackings and things like this… So this scared us just a few miles from arriving.
But then something cool happened as we came into town… the power turned on. The people who had just been hanging out suddenly went inside to enjoy some AC. By the time we left something like 60% of the town had power back on. All of this made it much easier to do what we came for. We were told we might have a hard time getting to the church, we even arranged for a police escort… But we didn’t need it. God had that arranged for us.
What about the army? Yeah, as we came into Mississippi we started seeing convoys of the 82nd Airborne rolling into the gulf coast. It was both encouraging and scary. I thought “how big is this thing?” It’s big and it is clear that they will need all the help they can get, even from the army, to get things under control. As I thought about it I realized how perfect these military groups were to handle such a tragedy. They have the experience and equipment to make it work.
So… There is more to tell and reflect on. But I wanted to get down some of my initial thoughts.
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