Some Thoughts From George Written Wednesday Night...

Troy, Julia, Joe, and I ended up at a house this afternoon that had been partially damaged by Katrina. The photo on the left is not this house but is comparable in size and the extent of damage. Elaine and Mignonne had been there in the morning and Elaine stayed to finish her closet work. You can read about Elaine's experience in the previous post. Walls had been rebuilt, siding installed, new windows, sheetrock installed and we were "mudding" the walls in preparation for painting. So much had been done but what follows tells you how much remains.

The owner of the home had been living in a FEMA trailer which FEMA had taken back. Reasons unknown. No one knew where this man was. Work continued on his house as he sought some kind of temporary housing. As work began in the morning on this house, the electric company showed up to shut off the electricity for an overdue bill. The Camp Coast Care project supervisor asked the electric company employee to give her time to reach the owner of the house. She found his brother who went in to make payment and the electricity stayed on and work continued.

But this illustrates how for some residents here life stays on the "edge."

To get to this house we passed quite a beautiful landscape of a beach and large mansions facing it that had been rebuilt by the wealthy. Behind this facade of opulence stood the areas where we have been working. People without "deep pockets." People whose meagre housing was destroyed and rendered uninhabitable. These are the people that Camp Coast Care is helping.

As I biked around Bay St. Louis yesterday evening I saw the spotty nature of reconstruction - houses rebuilt here and here and here and then one boarded up. The ocean front of Bay St. Louis (a tourist town which derives most of its livelihood from that industry) looks even worse. It, of course, took the brunt of the storm (photo at left was taken right after Katrina passed). Facing the bay is a large picture of what it will look like when it is fully rebuilt. It seems a long way off in the future to me from where I sit today. But then each resident whom we have helped must have felt that way for days, weeks, months after the storm and things ARE changing.

The holes I was digging out today was for a house for a couple who had managed to get a grant and when it is completed they will have better housing than before Katrina.

Volunteers come and go. We do a little and rarely get to see the finished product. But the accumulation of the effort and the love is something that remains to be determined. Like the drop of water in a pond, it may seem like little is changing but in reality in ponds all over this part of the Gulf Coast the drops of water from volunteers from all over the country is actually making quite a splash. - George Glazier