In October, Gebetsberger, pastor of First Church in Corvallis, will lead her fourth mission trip to assist with the rebuilding in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. This trip, on behalf of Cascades Presbytery will bring 50 workers to stay at one of Presbyterian Disaster Assistance’s “volunteer villages.” They’ll fly from Oregon, rent vans, and get to work.
Once the world’s attention was plastered on New Orleans when Katrina slammed the city — and those images of people pleading from rooftops and huddled in misery at the Superdome remain blistered in our memories. But that was in August 2005 — three years have passed. And the message remains: “Let them know that we still need help.”
So Presbyterians, hearing that cry, keep showing up.
Walter Blumenfeld, a member of Guinston Church, a small country church in south-central Pennsylvania, has made 10 trips so far, taking unpaid leave from his job as an engineer. He volunteered initially to organize a Katrina relief trip “as the guy who’ll do it if nobody else wants to.” Nobody else did.
“I thought I was going to do it once,” Blumenfeld said. But “when you help people who really need help and appreciate it and it’s the Christian thing to do, it sort of develops a life of its own. … It really sucked me right into it.”
When Nancy Davidovich’s husband, John, asked what she wanted for her birthday the year after Katrina, she didn’t hesitate with her answer. She told him she wanted to go back to the Gulf Coast. Three weeks after Katrina hit, she and John had gone for a week to muck out houses.
“It was the hardest work we’ve ever done, but also the most rewarding,” Nancy Davidovich said. “We could walk away and go back home and be comfortable and safe and have a normal existence, while these people a year later still had nothing. It just called our hearts.”
She worked on the home of an elderly man in Biloxi who had been living in one upstairs room of his severely damaged home, and who was so depressed that his daughter could not get him to come outside for months. Over time, though, volunteer crews had worked to gut and rebuild the house, and the man began to see a way forward. “It was such a blessing to meet him,” Davidovich said, “and to be able to help.”
Russ Olderman leads the Presbytery of Mississippi’s Disaster Recovery Office, which is currently involved in building 1,300-square-foot houses to replace homes damaged in the storm. With the help of volunteers from all over the country, “we’re getting people out of trailers into their homes,” Olderman said. “The greatest need is for people to continue to be aware that there is a need.”
David Legg, a retired civil engineer, is planning his seventh trip for Katrina relief work — taking a group from Cincinnati Presbytery in October. “I’ve never seen the faith of a bunch of people as I’ve seen down here,” Legg said.
Presbyterians who continue to work in Katrina relief say the trips have made an impact both in areas hard-hit by the hurricane and in their own communities. Larger congregations have teamed up with smaller ones and made trips together. People who weren’t involved in any church — co-workers and friends-of-friends — have come along too and joined in the prayers.
Young adults have worked with senior citizens; families and friends and strangers volunteer together. Many volunteers speak of reconciliation, of how their groups have encountered conflicts or bumps in the road, and have learned to work through their difficulties with a new sense of trust. “It’s bringing a stronger body back to the church because of the relationships they form down here,” Olderman said.
Kayla Gray, who works with college students at Vienna Church in northern Virginia and at George Mason University, has made nine trips to the Gulf Coast and organized 13. Why?
“I really saw God’s hand in the people down there,” she said. “Lives were just changing and being transformed.”
She made her first trip in January 2006, in the first frenzied months of the relief effort. “The need was just so great. Everywhere we looked … there was just so much to do.” So Gray organized more trips in March, May, July to Gulfport or Long Beach in Mississippi — returning time after time.
For one thing, the young adults Gray met, whether at the church, at George Mason, or out-and-about, wanted to get involved. “Many of these people were not Christians, they were not part of a church,” said Sheila Breuer, director of missions and outreach at Vienna Church. “But they became part of her team and they wanted to go there to serve.”
Gray has taken along “blue-collar, trade-school kids” from Pennsylvania and international students from Vietnam and Laos who barely spoke English.
The running joke became that Gray (who says “I love to welcome strangers”) picked up volunteers everywhere — at the convenience store, at the baggage claim carousel at the airport. Everywhere she went, she invited people to “get in the van and try it for a week.”
One day she met a young woman in a café and told her about a trip leaving the next day. The following morning, her new friend climbed into the van. These trips included times of prayer and devotion, but Gray would tell the volunteers they didn’t have to participate if they didn’t want to. Most of the time, they did.
One young man, named Josh, had been raised Catholic but drifted away, developing a rocky relationship with organized religion. Volunteering in Mississippi, he was exposed to daily times of devotions and prayer, “something he’d never done,” Gray said. “It was just incredible. One week, and this guy was back to his first love of God … He ended up falling in love with Scripture, falling in love with the church and with people.”
Josh later went back to Mississippi and worked there in the reconstruction effort for six months.
Gebetsberger, the pastor from Oregon, understands the pull to return time and again. She has led groups of volunteers, from her congregation and her presbytery, and “it’s just been an incredible experience.”
When they started, “we were doing just awful stuff — mucking out and watching someone who had four or five cockroaches on their back, or discovering a rat when you lift up a mattress,” she said. She has watched people carry everything they own, ruined, to the curb, then come back and cook lunch for the volunteers. She remembers when Rich Cozzone, a leader for Presbyterian Disaster Assistance who later was killed in a car accident, cocked his head and told her, “Listen!”
He could hear birds singing. Cozzone told Gebetsberger: “This is the first time since Katrina hit that I have heard birds.”
She has also seen new friendships and connections form among the volunteers, who come from congregations scattered across Cascades Presbytery. “People have kept in touch with one another,” she said. “They’ll call and say, ‘Are you going this time? I will too.’”
Last year, the volunteers included a group of about 10 homeless people from Portland, and “it was tremendously gratifying to witness what happened that week,” Gebetsberger said. At first, the Portland group kept to themselves, holding back. But gradually they began mixing with the others, sitting with new friends at meals. And after they returned to Oregon the advisor for that group wrote of their joy at realizing “they have something they can give.”
Presbyterian volunteers — who often wear bright blue t-shirts from Presbyterian Disaster Assistance — tell stories of people who stop them on the street to thank them, of a man who handed them $100 at a gas station to help with Katrina relief.
The Oregon volunteers have kept in touch with some people whose homes they’ve helped repair or rebuild. They’ve prayed together; when they’re back in town they stop to visit. One man told them: “I don’t know who you Presbyterians are, but I think I’m going to find out.”
Gray, who’s organized trips from Virginia, said her congregation has formed relationships with churches in Alabama and South Carolina, which provide hospitality and housing for the volunteers when they stop to spend the night driving to and from the Gulf Coast. In Birmingham, Ala., one church would provide shelter, another brought over the food, and “they would pray us out” for the next leg of the journey, Gray said.
She gets Christmas cards from families whose homes she helped rebuild. People who had lost everything brought the volunteers sodas and cooked them hot dogs.
“I learned a lot about hope” from the people in Mississippi, Gray said.
And “the hospitality of these people has just been incredible. I’ve got so many stories. Not only have they loved us and welcomed the volunteers, but they have received our service. Sometimes to receive someone’s service is hard; it’s like receiving grace. Sometimes we don’t want to believe that we are loved just because we are.”
Blumenfeld tells of situations where he’s sure God’s hand was at work in the relief efforts — of how, on the first trip, his crew of four ended up just a block from their destination in a devastated area even without road signs, exit markers or cell phone coverage. On another trip, trying to help an elderly veteran, the crew was somehow able to finish in just one day a job of cleaning out a house that would take an experienced group at least two days.
“I really can’t explain how we were able to do that,” Blumenfeld said. But the homeowner, a man in his 80s who’d built the house himself decades earlier, “was totally unable to cope” when they arrived. By the time they finished, he was preparing to call contractors and take the next steps in rebuilding. “Over the course of the day, we could see him coming back to life again.”
Kayla Gray puts it this way. “I just know I’m going to meet God in Mississippi.”
