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March 19, 2007
Katrina Disaster Relief, Part I
I'm back from my week of volunteering for clean-up from Hurricane Katrina through Evangelical Free Church of America Crisis Response. It was a really valuable trip and a huge learning experience, despite being exhausting. There was a lot that happened on the trip, and I didn't want to forget any of it if I could help it, so what I've written below I've written so that others can read about and see what we did. But I've written it perhaps more for me so that I can go back and read it down the road to be reminded of what it was like. Hence, I know not everyone will read everything I've written because it's so long, but I hope you all will, because there were so many cool things that happened, and I'd like to try to inspire others to volunteer their time to do clean-up on the Gulf Coast or elsewhere closer to home.
Saturday, 10 March:
I stayed up late the night before to get all my stuff packed for the trip, so I didn't have much left to do when I got up at 5, other than just finish throwing some stuff together. I got to State College Evangelical Free Church just after 6am, where everyone (Jack, Glenn, Mike, Matt, Chris, Sue, her daughter Katie, Kim & her 12-year old son Max) was meeting to pack the vehicles and the u-haul trailer. By the time we got everything stowed away and prayed together in the parking lot, we were ready to hit the road at about 6:45. We stopped fairly frequently and often changed up who was in what vehicle and who was driving, so that there'd be a bit of variety of company. And so that everyone would have to put up with everyone else for at least a few shifts. :-) Though as it turned out I stayed in the jeep, and didn't ride in the van the entire way down to New Orleans, hehe. We really did all start to get to know each other pretty well, which was good for me since I really didn't know anyone before the trip, even though they're all from SCEFC.
At any rate, the drive down was pretty uneventful overall, except for almost getting lost in some random town (Winchester) in the Deep South otherwise known as northern Virginia while we were trying to find I-81, and then for the time I tried to navigate us on some side roads around an accident on Interstate 81 down in southern Virginia. Yeah, that didn't turn out so well. The map showed a road going from one exit to the next, but it wasn't numbered, and then after a few miles of winding through the pretty Virginia countryside, the road abruptly narrowed and turned to gravel. Umm, yeah, that was the sign we needed to turn around from my misguided adventure. But hey, at least it broke up the monotony of the interstate for a little while. :-)
When we were pulling over for supper at a Cracker Barrel just past Knoxville, Tennessee, we saw there was a rainbow over the restaurant. We figured that was a good sign. :-) I thought about getting Katie (huge Alabama fan) a nice UT mug, but then thought better of it when she replied to a text message with "ha ha ha, do it and you die." Oh well, it's the thought that counts. ;-) But it was my first time at Cracker Barrel, and I took full advantage of the southern experience, with some grilled spicy catfish, deep fried okra and (of course) sweet tea. When in Rome...
We finally rolled into Fort Payne, Alabama at around 10pm to stay at our motel. We were all very glad to flop into bed for the night, and enjoy our nicest night of accommodation until Friday night, when we were planning to stop at the same motel on the way back to Pennsylvania.
Sunday, 11 March:
Before we rolled out from Fort Payne, we noticed there were five other vans from Penn State sitting in our motel's parking lot. They had all sorts of paint on the windows, with sayings such as "Fight on State," "New Orleans or Bust," "1200 Miles to Slidell," "Spring Break Habitat for Humanity" and others. Some of them did come out before we left, so we got to shout "WE ARE..." across the parking lot and say hi to some fellow Penn Staters. We also ran into several other people at our various stops on the rest of the way down, including in Birmingham, Alabama, when we met a group from a church in Ohio that was on their way to do cleanup work in New Orleans. It was so encouraging to see so many other people heading down to do the same thing we were.
We pulled into Trinity Church in Covington, Louisiana, at about 4:30 in the afternoon. A few people went down to Wal-Mart to get some lunch supplies for the week, and after that we all went out to eat dinner at the nearby Acme Oyster House for some good cajun cookin'. And yes, I did have some oysters -- three of them, they were good! -- and a BBQ shrimp po-boy. I love cajun cuisine, it's delicious! 
Most everyone was adventurous enough to try at least one oyster, but some still weren't brave enough. I think Glenn & I were the only ones to have more than one, actually. The restaurant was really full, and I overheard two of the servers talking to each other about how they always get slammed every Sunday night with tons of customers. Hmm, I wonder if that could possibly have anything to do with tons of new people arriving at Trinity Church every Sunday for the Katrina ministry. :-)
Then after we came back it was time for an orientation session, where they told the 225 people (a record for a week, usually they have more like a hundred or so) where they were staying, in Trinity, the neighboring old YMCA that they'd rented out for the month, or the nearby North Shore Church, which is where the guys from our group were sent. We did manage to claim a prime piece of real estate for our air mattresses near the wall and the windows, but that didn't save us from the sonorous sonatas of snoring that might be expected to come from a group of 50 men sleeping on the floor. It took me over two hours to fall asleep at all, and after a night full of fits and starts (mostly waking up to some rather interesting snoring sequences from somewhere in the room), lights-on at 6am came way too soon...
Monday, 12 March:
After breakfast we checked out the tools we needed for the roofing job in Slidell that we'd been assigned the night before. It took awhile to get everything together and whatnot, and our group also grew by two -- Liz from La Crosse, Wisconsin, who had come down for the week and is the daughter of one of the staff workers at Trinity, and Matt from Nebraska, an 18-year old firefighter who was in the midst of a 6-week stretch of volunteering at Trinity Church. Matt was also the foreman for our job, and taught us all how to do just about everything, since none of us really had much of any experience doing work on a roof.
It was a half hour drive from Covington over to Slidell, where we were to fix the roof on the L-shaped ranch house of a lady named Leonita Liu. We all called her Mrs. Lee, and she was the absolute sweetest lady. But more on her later. We took a look around the house and gave the whole roof a once-over, and there was a fair bit of wind and water damage from Hurricane Katrina, so the whole roof needed to be reshingled. Several of us were eager to hop up on the roof, 
so Matt showed Mike & I how to strip the old shingles and tarpaper with cat's claws, and we just went to town on that, as did several others on one of the other sides. It was hard work, but we had lots of energy and managed to clear off three entire sides of the roof eventually. The downside? By the time we did that it was mid-afternoon, and we had to get new dripedge and tarpaper laid down over all the parts of the roof that we stripped, so that water wouldn't leak through the plywood into the house if it rained overnight. So even though we got half the sides of the roof stripped, that was only about 40% of the roof or so, because among the three remaining sides was the biggest one.
Part of what delayed us was that we discovered some roof-rot, and so we had to wait for someone from Trinity to come with a skil-saw and some OSB (plywood) to replace those sections. So there was awhile where we were kind of just sitting around and waiting until we could resume doing stuff. And we had to wait, because the rot was at the edge and we couldn't put on the dripedge until new OSB was put in, 
and we couldn't put down the tarpaper until the dripedge was installed. Also, we had to wait for the construction company to deliver the tarpaper and shingles. They were supposed to come at 1pm, but didn't show up till about 3:30, which actually wasn't so bad, because we weren't ready for them until about 3. And then when they got to Mrs. Lee's house, they weren't able to use their boom to unload the shingles on the roof due to all the trees and power lines around, so they just set them on a palette on the driveway and left. 
That left us all wondering how in the world we were gonna get so many heavy packages of shingles up to the roof by ourselves, but then just after 5, one of the guys from the construction company showed up with his skid loader on his own time to help us get a bunch of the shingles up to the roof. He said he felt bad about leaving us with all that on the ground, and so came straight to our worksite as soon as he clocked out at his job. That was really nice of him, and we were grateful to God that He made that happen.
Early on in the day there wasn't stuff for everyone to be doing up on the roof, so whoever wasn't up there was doing other jobs for Mrs. Lee, like moving a big pile of dirt from her driveway (which had been dug out from under her house after Katrina, I believe) to her backyard, and also got to meet some of Mrs. Lee's neighbors. That's an important part of our work down there, since it's not about the physical work but about the people, and helping and ministering to them.
The weather was also pretty nice, with temps in the 70s. It was sunny in the morning, but then stayed mostly cloudy throughout the afternoon, which mercifully kept the temps manageable up on the roof.
At any rate, we were working on Mrs. Lee's roof until 8pm or so, which meant that we missed 6:30 dinner back at Trinity. When we got back we found out that our group was assigned to clean the showers that day by 10pm, which we weren't too thrilled about since it was already almost 9pm and we hadn't showered or eaten supper. (Every group was assigned to clean the showers, pick up trash, or do some other task at Trinity at least once during the week.) We took showers before going out to eat at Outback, but for whatever reason the showers were ice cold. Not so fun. And then once we got done with dinner, it was well past the 10pm lights-out time, so we had to find our way to our beds in the dark amidst the already-raging snore-fest. What an exhausting day. At least Trinity was understanding about why we didn't clean the showers, when Glenn & Jack explained that we didn't know about our assignment, and that we'd stayed at the worksite really late to get stuff done.
Tuesday, 13 March:
I was a bit more rested when the lights came back on at 6am, because I had been so exhausted by Monday's work that I only woke up a few times during the night. Anyway, we had breakfast and got out to Mrs. Lee's house earlier than the day before, because there wasn't the extra orientation stuff at devotion time in the morning. Matt and Jared, another foreman for EFCA who was kind of supervising several roofing jobs and other projects Trinity was doing in Slidell, showed us how to start shingling and how to do a couple other things, before they went off to another job where the volunteers needed a bit more help. 
At this point there was enough for just about everyone to be on the roof, with one or two teams of people using the nail gun to put on shingles on one of the sides, while another team (myself included) started stripping all the old stuff off of the front side of the house. That was the largest section of the roof, and took quite awhile to strip, clear the nails, and then tarpaper. But we made a point of not biting off more than we could handle, so that we could be done by 6pm or so, instead of 8pm.
Fortunately the weather again stayed nice, cloudy and in the 70s. There were a lot of scattered showers around, and it even started sprinkling a couple of times, prompting us to get out our *enormous* tarp to cover up the exposed side of the roof that we hadn't papered yet. But God is good and He kept the rain away so that we could keep working. It took about ten of us to fold up the tarp before the day was done, though.
Mrs. Lee really started to show us some of her generosity and appreciation for what we were doing, as she made us all some strong coffee and bought us tasty doughnuts for a mid-morning snack. And that was just the start. :-)
There were also a couple of major God things that happened during the day. Jack & Mike left before lunch for Home Depot to pick up a couple pieces of OSB, because we found some more roof rot on the front face of the roof that we'd just stripped. First of all, that store didn't have any left, they'd just sold out, but they said there was another store across town that still had some. When Jack & Mike got back out to the jeep they discovered that the keys were locked inside, so they prayed they'd be able to find a way to get into the vehicle soon. They called Kim to let us know that they were gonna be at least a couple hours longer, because AAA was on their way in an hour to let them in, and they still had to go find some OSB. Anyway, they were trying unsuccessfully to reach their hands in through the rear window that Jack had forgotten to close completely, and had left open a little bit. Then Jack all of a sudden got an idea, ran back into the store, and came back with a 1x2, which he used to snake through the open window, and hit the power lock button on the driver's door to unlock the vehicle! That enabled them to save almost an hour and get back to Mrs. Lee's sooner. And then on the drive back to Mrs. Lee's, the sheets of OSB got wedged in the u-haul trailer so that the door couldn't be opened. I went over to help Mike & Jack try to lift the door, but it wasn't coming up more than about a foot. We said a little prayer, and then suddenly the wood shifted somehow, and we had to let the door down. Once we did that the wood became unwedged, and we were able to lift the door open no problem! God was definitely at work!
By the end of the day we managed to get part of one of the sides shingled, and the big side tarpapered, which took a lot of work. We got back to Trinity by about 7 or so, a little bit late but still in time for dinner. Everyone else went in to get food, but I ran back over to North Shore Church (our sleeping quarters) to plug in and charge up my computer and phone, which was almost dead. By the time I made it back over to Trinity, Jack was on his way back carrying a plate of food for me, since the cooks were putting everything away. There was a presentation at 7:30 by the Trinity pastor, but I decided instead just to go back over to North Shore and relax and take some quiet time, as did Mike and Jack. I had been wanting to write something about each day as we went throughout the week, but I was always so tired and we were always getting back so late that I didn't have the wherewithal to do that. At least I managed to get stuff written about the first couple days of the trip that evening. Also, we were excited that the no-hot-water problem with the showers had been fixed! Now the temperature dials actually worked, and you could get any temp from freezing to scalding, yay! A real shower for the first time in almost three days felt really good, and I slept soundly, only waking up once during the night.
Wednesday, 14 March:
This day was the hardest, in terms of maintaining a good energy level and focus. We'd already put in two hard days, and we were halfway through the week, but there was still another day of roofing work yet to come on Mrs. Lee's house. I know I was dragging, at least.
The rain didn't stay away completely, as we had a pretty good shower for about 20-30 minutes in mid-morning, just in time for coffee and muffins from Mrs. Lee. It didn't rain the rest of the day, though, which was another blessing from God, so that we didn't have to lose any more time.
After the morning rain stopped we all got back up on the roof to resume work, and Jared stopped by to see how we were progressing. He wound up pulling me off to another roofing job he was supervising in Slidell, because the roof was leaking, the Trinity team wasn't there for some reason, and he needed help to get a tarp laid over it. There were a couple places where we could tell water was getting in, from the baseplate around a pipe that wasn't secured well enough, and from a couple holes in the tarpaper. First we tried Jared's tarp, but it only covered about a quarter of the roof face that was leaking. So then the homeowner ran over to his church nearby and got a larger tarp, but that was only able to cover about half the roof. So Jared called Trinity to have them deliver an even bigger tarp, but during the half hour we were waiting for them the roofing team showed up (which had another person named Jered, so there were three Jared/Jered's at the site at that time, a majority of the Trinity volunteers there, haha), so Jared was helping them get everything patched up. By that point there wasn't anything for me to do, so I kind of felt frustrated, because I knew that I'd be able to be working and helping back at Mrs. Lee's (I hadn't brought work gloves or tools over, since I thought all I was gonna be doing was laying out a tarp over the roof, and that I'd be coming right back). Anyway, during the couple hours I was over there with Jared, I found out that he's a contractor from Grand Marais, Minnesota. I mentioned that I had some relatives up there, and we found out that my cousin Michael does 90% of the sheetrock work for Jared's contracting company in Lutsen. Small world!
After I got back to Mrs. Lee's I was able to help the team get about three-quarters of the big roof face shingled, and the other smaller side that had been started the day before also was nearly finished. We had originally been planning on wrapping up work early, because supper back at Trinity started an hour earlier, at 5:30, because it was one that all the homeowners (and others that the teams met in the neighborhoods) were invited to, followed by a church service. 
But Mrs. Lee had other plans, and bought some lasagna, salad and french bread for us for supper, and invited some of her neighbors over too! One of her neighbors, Ursula, has a house in Mississippi that's being rebuilt from the ground up by another Christian group, Walls of Hope, and so she's just staying in Slidell until that gets finished. During the meal I was able to talk to Mrs. Lee and get to know her a bit. That was something I'd been getting anxious/frustrated about, because I'd spent virtually all my time up on the roof doing work, and virtually no time getting to know the lady whose roof we were fixing. So I was really glad about that, and really started to feel a bit more connected to her. 
The others in the team mentioned to her that I play piano, so after we ate she asked me to play something on her piano. It was really out of tune as a result of Katrina's floodwaters, and I tried to play "Magnetic Rag," but couldn't keep focus because the notes I was playing were putting me on edge so much. I asked if she had a hymnal, and she did, although it was in Chinese. Music is a universal language though, and notes are notes, so I shifted the right hand up an octave where it was more in tune, and played through a few familiar hymns for everyone.
It was late again when we got back to Trinity, and the lights had been shut off before I could get back from my shower. That kind of irked me, since the North Shore worship team was having practice in the sanctuary from 7 until almost 10pm, so we couldn't really be in there. I left for the shower at 9:40 and the band was still going, and by the time I was strolling back right at 10:00, the lights were already off. Apparently there was one guy named Roger (who was on his 5th Katrina mission and kinda acted like he owned the place) who was insistent that the lights still go off right at 10pm, even though the band was in there right up till a few minutes before that. So there was awhile after the lights were out when people were coming back, making noise trying to find their stuff with flashlights and blowing up their air mattresses, and everyone was giving Roger a hard time about shutting the lights out at 10 o'clock sharp. I can't say I felt sorry for him though, because given the circumstances lights-out time should've been pushed back at least 15 or 30 minutes, to give people a chance to get situated after the band left. Oh well.
Thursday, 15 March:
Our final day of working on Mrs. Lee's roof didn't start out so well. First of all, the awning on her trailer in her front yard had broken. Also, it had rained a bunch overnight (I was awakened around 2am by some pretty vigorous thunderstorms rolling through), and her roof had leaked in the area of the valley of her roof (in the bend of the "L"). That disappointed all of us, because we thought we'd done a good job, or at least a good enough job with tarpapering that section of the roof, but Mrs. Lee's reaction to it was amazing. Her attitude was so positive, and one of thankfulness to God that it rained when it did, so that we could find the leak and do something about it promptly. Hearing that from her really changed our attitudes.
So while Mike & Chris were working on figuring out how to redo the tarpaper in the valley so that it wouldn't leak, and while a couple other groups were working on finishing shingling a couple faces of the roof and starting on another, and a few other people were fixing the awning, doing cleaning around the yard, or painting her bathroom or doing other little projects Mrs. Lee had for us, I started stripping another face of the roof. 
We could've been satisfied with just finishing up the projects we'd already started, but we had grown to have such a heart for Lee that we wanted to do as much as we possibly could before we had to leave. Stripping that other side was tough because we couldn't just shove the debris off the edge, due to some tall bushes and the neighbor's yard starting about three feet away from Mrs. Lee's house. 
Since that whole area would've been a bear to clean up, we shoveled and swept all the debris off either the front side or back side of the house, which took a lot more time and effort. But in the end we were able to finish shingling three sides of the house completely, and have two sides tarpapered. There was only one side of the house, the one on the back with the chimney and all sorts of pipes, 
that we didn't get to. All in all we thought that was a pretty good four-day accomplishment for 10-12 people that had very little previous roofing experience. And next week there's a team of professional roofers coming down to Trinity, so Mrs. Lee (and some others around Slidell) will have their roofs finished off by pros. Hopefully they don't cringe at some of the surely amateurish ways we did some things.
Mid-afternoon also brought some excitement when the Slidell Fire Department dropped by for a visit. Glenn, Jack & Sue had started a leaf fire in the backyard since FEMA won't pick up leaves or anything in a trash bag (they'll pick up anything else left curbside though), but apparently there's a nosy neighbor nearby who has a reputation for tattling on people for things like having too many cars in their driveway. 
We didn't get a citation or anything, but the firemen did have to put the fire out. In the evening when we got back Glenn found out that we were the first ever Trinity team to have the fire department show up to a worksite, hehe. Even though it's apparently against Slidell city ordinances to have a leaf fire or anything, nobody's gotten in trouble for it before, so now Trinity will no longer tell people to burn leaves there.
After we were done with the roof and were just doing some clean-up on the ground, a bunch of us got together and duct-taped Max to the side of the u-haul trailer. It was something we'd been threatening for days, pretty much ever since we got down to Louisiana, haha. But he was a good sport about it, he let us do it, hehe.
Mrs. Lee came through with even more food for us. For mid-morning she made coffee yet again, only this time with some Godiva chocolate in it. She also bought two freshly-made King cakes for us, which were fantastic. I got one of the baby Jesus figurines too, hehe. And then for lunch she went out and bought us all "Lee-burgers," which she says are the best burgers in New Orleans. 
After tasting them I wouldn't doubt it, either! And then on top of all of that she got supper for us too (and the same neighbors from the night before), a bunch of chicken, salad, and spaghetti noodles (not with sauce, but with garlic salt and cajun seasoning -- excellent!), it was delicious! Mrs. Lee really spoiled us with so much excellent food all week long, it was absolutely wonderful.
She had also borrowed four hymnals from her Methodist church so that I could play again and people could sing along. She picked out three hymns she wanted me to play, including "Trust and Obey." I was really glad that I was able to do that for her and for everyone else, it was a really nice time even with the out of tune piano. We also all got together and signed a Bible that we gave to her before we left, she was so appreciative of that. She'd taken a lot of pictures on her digital camera during the week too, so she burned us a disc with all of her pictures. Our plan is for me to compile the pictures from everyone in the group into one or two discs and then send them out to everyone, including Mrs. Lee. Anyway, eventually it got to be after 9 o'clock and was time to go, however, and it was really hard for all of us to leave. We'd all grown quite attached to Mrs. Lee, and were so appreciative of the love and generosity she'd shown to us, and the encouragement and blessing she'd been to us, just as she was so appreciative of everything we did for her.
Mrs. Lee is a 65-year old retired biochemist, who is originally from the Philippines. She has three kids, all of whom are doctors I believe, and the one who lives in New Orleans was able to stop by briefly Thursday afternoon to say hi and thank us before he had to go to work. She's a strong Christian, and managed to stay positive even through the hurricane. Because of the damage to her house that required a lot of renovation, she's been living in an RV in her front yard since May, and she set herself a deadline of a year for living in the trailer. A Reformed Church group had recently been in there to do a lot of work on the inside of the house, and it was starting to look really nice. So with her roof being finished next week, and the sink, counter and cabinets being put in by the Reformed Church in a month or so, she should be able to meet her deadline of being out of her trailer by May! We're all praying that that happens.
(The blog entry was originally too long to be contained in a single post, so please scroll down to continue reading below. If Part II is not located immediately below, then click here to get to the post.)
Posted by Jared at March 19, 2007 10:57 PM
Comments
That be one long blog post. Whats up with that man. Whats up with all that jazzzzzz.
I'm glad to see you're alive.
Posted by: joshua at March 21, 2007 11:16 AM
I'm glad to be alive! There was at least once down there where I kinda lost my balance and almost went careening off the roof, hehe. But yeah, this totally smashes my PR for longest blog post ever. Who knew that there was a maximum length limit?
Posted by: Jared at March 21, 2007 11:25 PM