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Real Answers™
sh48
Copyright: © 2007 Shaunna Howat
625 words

REBUILDING VOLUNTEERS STILL OFFERING HOPE TO KATRINA VICTIMS

By: Shaunna Howat

Television specials and documentaries try to put it all in perspective: photos of clouds in circular formation, computerized reenactments of water flooding the land, interviews of survivors. But the very real heartbreak, the anguish, could never be adequately depicted. The enormous magnitude of Katrina’s devastation is still being measured a year later.

Three months after Katrina, traveling to New Orleans to help out, we drove for miles and miles through utter darkness. Imagine driving along a highway after dark through what you know is a major city, and for 30 minutes all you see are shadows of buildings by moonlight. No street lights, no porch lights, no parking lots lit up. The city was just an eerie shadow of its former self.

By daylight the city was worse than our most horrible expectations. Blue tarps covered thousands of roofs, store fronts were peeled away, windows gone from virtually every building. A scummy film covered everything, the remnant of polluted floodwater, turning the world a dirty gray-brown, almost as if looking at a monotone photo. The smell of rot and mold violated our senses.

Miles of raw, unbelievable destruction left us speechless. What do people do when they’ve lost everything, lived through such devastation? We met a young boy who lived for three days in the Superdome. He couldn’t talk about the experience; it was too horrible to recount.

We took more trips to New Orleans during the next six months. Each time we opened houses full of jumbled, rotting masses of furniture, clothes, belongings. We visited with homeowners, looked in their eyes and saw the pain, their utter hopelessness. And then we cleaned: we gutted houses whose insides were ruined, tore out drywall and paneling, carpeting and cupboards, until all that was left was the studs and floors. Professionals would come in and spray to kill the mold, then the homeowner could begin the rebuilding process.

It was dirty, grim, depressing, smelly work. One woman sat by her car the whole day, tears flowing, as she watched us carry her entire life out to the street for disposal. We wore protective masks to keep from getting sick from the black mold covering everything. Sometimes we fled outside to breathe, to escape the smells of rotting food that sat for months in mold-infested houses. But in every hour of work we knew we were handing out hope to the hopeless. By the end of the day, that woman had plans for rebuilding.

While federal, state and local officials argued about who was to blame, the Church swung into action and did what a bloated bureaucracy could not: we restored hope. The numbers are unclear, but we know that churches across the country sent millions of dollars and thousands of relief workers to the Gulf Coast. They cleared fallen trees, trucked in water and food, housed the homeless, nailed tarps to roofs. They gutted homes, wiped down belongings that could be salvaged, carted mountains of rotten belongings to trash heaps.

In our exhaustion we remained humbled by the huge needs all around us, in this American city reduced to a third world country. To them we became the desperately-needed “rebuilders of the ancient ruins, repairers of the breech.” (Isaiah 58)

Most of all, while homeowners began the day with lifeless eyes, we offered them hope. We smiled and told them that they hadn’t been forgotten. We offered the love that they desperately needed to begin healing and restoration. From the overflow of love and gratitude we have in our hearts, we are able to give to them. And by the end of the day, they saw the possibility of rebuilding again, now that hope had been restored.

Katrina’s victims still need help. To support the rebuilding effort, contact Samaritan’s Purse or your local church.

"Real Answers™" furnished courtesy of The Amy Foundation Internet Syndicate. To contact the author or The Amy Foundation, write or E-mail to: P. O. Box 16091, Lansing, MI 48901-6091; amyfoundtn@aol.com

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