As Americans brace themselves for yet another hurricane season, they might look at one congregation and its response to the Gulf Coast disaster. Perhaps it will become a blueprint for the future.
Suspended between Orlando and Daytona Beach is a small town, DeLand, Fla., home to Stetson University. Across from the campus, along a major tree-lined boulevard, is First Presbyterian Church, a congregation of 550 (Web site: www.firstpresdeland.com .)
In 2004, when hurricanes Charley, Frances, and Jeanne hit Central Florida, residents were sensitized to the pain caused by evacuations, flooding, damaged homes, and lack of electricity. The face of suffering was personal. Then Katrina slammed into coastal Mississippi, Louisiana and Alabama, touching the hearts of DeLand’s people like Jim and Rachael Winter, Mississippi natives.
The wheels in Jim Winter’s mind began to spin. Turning to his church to answer the question, “How can we help?” he, Pastor Bruce Hedgepeth, and other leaders identified stages of assistance as search and rescue, relief and recovery, and rebuilding. Next they needed to select from those stages the ones they were best prepared to manage. “We were not able to deal with search and rescue,” noted Hedgepeth. “We left that to the government.” But, because of their ongoing experience of recovery in post-hurricane Esteli, Nicaragua, which has continued every year since Mitch in 1998, the congregation was equipped with experienced people who had tools and skills to deal with relief and recovery as well as rebuilding.
“When we determined our disaster response to Katrina, we tailored it to our capabilities with respect to resources of personnel, skills, numbers and funds,” said Winter. During their five trips, teams of volunteers cleared debris, secured some homes against additional damage, and rebuilt others enabling people on the lower end of the economy to stretch their meager resources.
The organizational skills of people like Winter proved priceless in getting the program off the ground, said Hedgepeth. A retired Air Force officer, Winter ran airlift operations in Vietnam and the Persian Gulf, learning the logistics of disaster work. He was a natural.
Winter pinpointed places with electricity by using the national directory of Presbyterian churches and dialing ones in Mississippi within a day’s driving distance of De Land. “I kept calling until someone answered the phone.” Nine days after Katrina struck New Orleans, a caravan of vehicles carrying teams of volunteers, armed with contributions of money and supplies, headed for Laurel, Miss.
After the third trip to Mississippi, Winter evaluated the situation by identifying three key ingredients that brought together a well-organized relief program: FEMA, local municipalities, and faith-based organizations. Where this good infrastructure was in place, volunteers were all set to go. Winter concluded there were other people who needed them more urgently, so he pushed farther into rural, isolated areas.
Through a contact with South Alabama Presbytery, he found what he was looking for. It was Bayou LeBatre, a fishing community with a large number of Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laotian families, functioning below the level of recovery found in Mississippi. Residents had begun to receive FEMA money but, because of language problems and unfamiliarity with protocol, they were overwhelmed by the task at hand. Most importantly, the community lacked both a major FEMA presence and churches networked to help. Bayou LeBatre fit the profile of a community that could benefit from the special skills of the De Land group. The first three trips were to Mississippi. Since then teams have concentrated on Bayou Le Batre and a sixth trip was planned for June. By this time, Winter realized the goal of his teams needed to be getting families out of FEMA trailers back into their own homes. He described the process as tying together loose ends beyond what the government could do. His recruits were willing to do whatever it took to get the job done, including dipping into their own pockets for materials FEMA did not cover. Equally important was developing a rapport between volunteers and the community to create a high level of honesty, integrity, and trust. “One man simply handed me a fistful of money to pay for supplies he needed. When I returned with his change, he never counted it. That’s trust,” said Winter.
Thus far, the DeLand church has committed itself to a specified task, enlisted capable leadership, built a team to help with relief, recovery and rebuilding, identified a place that needed its kind of expertise, outlined its mission, and set out to accomplish it. One final very important dimension of the project was to network with other agencies already at work performing different tasks.
Among that number, Winter applauded the accomplishments of the Lutheran Disaster Response project, the Alabama Relief Task Force of the Church of the Nazarene and the Presbyterian Disaster Association (PDA). “The Lutherans assessed individual needs, aided in filing applications for FEMA assistance and worked with ordering and delivering building supplies. They opened charge accounts for individual families with local building supply stores and kept records of their balances,” he said. They coordinated the work of government agencies and volunteers.
The Nazarenes opened their facilities as an aid station that stocked staples and clothing donated by their member churches.
According to Elizabeth Lyman, up until Katrina, the PDA provided consultants and pastoral care and funded the work of Presbyterians in the disaster area. Realizing the proportions of the Gulf Coast catastrophe, it opened Volunteer Villages with dormitory accommodations and established a national reservations center for volunteers coming into the area. As an ordained minister experienced in pastoral care and counseling, Lyman is currently serving a three-month assignment out of the Presbyterian Church in Gautier, Miss. “Presbyterian presence in the area gives hope to the people, strengthens us as the body of Christ, and validates what is happening in the lives of people here,” she said.
Remember the words of the prophet Jeremiah, “‘I know the plans I have for you,’ says the Lord, ‘plans for good and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope.'” That applies to both volunteers and people they serve.
Mimi Pacifico is a retired teacher and retired CE director currently living in Orange City, Fla. She is a member of First Church, DeLand. Her “Senior Lifestyles” column has appeared in the Daytona Beach News-Journal.
