ScoopJohnD
03-10-2007, 01:30 PM
These were a good way to start the morning. I want to post them not just the links and also say that even if you can't make comittments like these people, any help makes a difference and has value.......
A WELCOME TIDE
Thousands of volunteers, including college students on spring break, are arriving to help with gutting and, increasingly, with rebuilding
Saturday, March 10, 2007
By Bruce Nolan
Staff writer
On a clear, bright morning this week, Kara Huselton, a Boston College freshman from Rochester, N.Y., muscled a dead washing machine out the second-floor door of a vacant duplex on Franklin Avenue and, with the help of two friends, tipped it over a railing to fall two stories with a satisfying crash.
Vile water spilled out of the bent machine. "Cockroach water," declared a disgusted Kristen Dacey, a 19-year-old who hails from New Hampshire.
Visitors to New Orleans for a week, they had been at the house the day before as well, masked and gloved, tearing out its interior in the familiar, sweaty and nasty ritual that prepares a Katrina-damaged house for repair and reoccupancy.
But elsewhere in town, others of the 52 Boston College volunteers were installing wall insulation and hanging drywall under the supervision of Southern Baptists from Arkansas. Those, too, were relatively simple jobs -- but a sign of measurable progress as well, because they lie across the demarcation that separates mere cleanup from the first stages of rebuilding.
In the second spring after Hurricane Katrina, more than 10,000 college students and other volunteers once again have skipped spring break's traditional beachfront bacchanal and instead poured into metropolitan New Orleans to work hard. It's a volunteer wave that will reach its high point in the next week or so and continue into April before tailing off.
But this year is markedly different in the sophistication of the agencies managing the influx of volunteers, and in the work they are being sent out to do.
Once again, the volunteers represent the full roster of American higher education, from the University of Texas to Lenoir-Rhyne College in Hickory, N.C., to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.
Travis Scruggs, a relief coordinator at First Baptist Church of New Orleans, said he had bookings for 1,000 volunteers in March. Catholic Charities is full, with 1,200 incoming volunteers, said Joan Diaz, director of Operation Helping Hands.
"This is not falling off," said Courtney Cowart, who directs storm relief for the Episcopal Diocese of Louisiana. "If we had more capacity for housing people, we'd have even more volunteers than we do."
Systems fine-tuned
Spring break is the high point on the year-round calendar of volunteerism in New Orleans. Even as the memory of Katrina becomes more distant, thousands of volunteers ebb and flow through the city every month, relief directors say. They follow the predictable rhythms of the school and work year: Numbers spike at spring break, during the summer and, to a lesser extent, during the winter holidays. In between are troughs in which directors say volunteerism slows, but never stops entirely.
Since spring break of 2006, secular nonprofits such as the Common Ground Collective and nearly a dozen major Christian relief agencies have benefited from another year's experience, fine-tuned their goals, beefed up their programs and become increasingly adept at marshaling and directing volunteers.
Now volunteers are housed in networks of long-term bunkhouses established in gymnasiums, fellowship halls or ruined sanctuaries of vacant Catholic, Lutheran, Methodist and Presbyterian churches, among others. Often they cooperate; a coalition called the Greater New Orleans Disaster Recovery Partnership acts as a booking agency that finds available bunks for many incoming volunteers.
Southern Baptists long ago leased three floors of the World Trade Center at the foot of Canal Street to house up to 500 volunteers. The Salvation Army's center on South Claiborne Avenue houses up to 200 volunteers. A Common Ground encampment at the closed St. Mary of the Angels elementary school in the 9th Ward holds 300 or more.
Precise count elusive
For most of the 18 months since Katrina, those agencies have trained their volunteers in the simple skills of house-gutting, then deployed them in the wastelands of New Orleans, St. Bernard and parts of Slidell.
No one knows how many homes private volunteers have gutted across the metropolitan area.
Among just a few of the major groups, Catholic Charities reports having gutted more than 1,600 homes and apartments; Southern Baptists, more than 1,000; Samaritan's Purse, Franklin Graham's Christian relief agency, more than 500.
This spring, FEMA and a number of secular nonprofits and faith-based disaster ministries have joined forces to launch a Gutting Task Force.
Private relief agencies for the first time have pooled their separate databases to estimate how many owners still want their houses gutted, presumably in anticipation of rebuilding.
The task force also is taking new requests from owners who contact the task force by dialing "311."
But even with an expected growth in new addresses solicited by the program, the numbers in the database are plunging, said Mary Sutton, a FEMA official who coordinates that agency's work with private relief groups.
Months ago, homeowners seeking help typically signed up with many agencies to have their homes gutted, happy to have it done by the first organization to get to it. The new, combined database is full of such duplications, she said. In addition, over time some of houses have been demolished or by now clearly need to be demolished.
A few weeks ago, the task force's list of houses thought to be in need of gutting stood at about 4,800. Scrubbing out obvious duplications quickly cut the number to 4,100. More inspections and phone calls to owners will whittle it down still further, Sutton said.
"I suspect the bottom is near 2,000 homes in New Orleans," she said.
After 18 months, she said, "You can see the end of the last chapter coming, although we're not yet on the last page of the chapter."
The economic value of all that work is imprecise.
Sutton said the agency nominally values volunteer labor at a little more than $18 per hour. Early in the recovery process, there was interest in keeping track of the donated hours, perhaps for local parishes to count toward their match of federal funds, she said.
But in the months since then, it has become unclear whether volunteer hours are as valuable to parishes as once thought, she said. And while "there's millions and millions brought in by the faith-based and other volunteer organizations, trying to get these statistics is like herding cats."
Tasks changing
Still, with an end to house-gutting at least on the horizon, major denominations for months have begun a shift toward rebuilding houses.
While Kim and his Boston College friends were gutting their assigned house on Franklin Avenue, another team of volunteers patched the roof on the house across the street.
A few agencies -- exceptions to the general rule -- have been helping homeowners with repairs since the earliest days after the storm.
Arkansas Baptist Builders, headquartered at Gentilly Baptist Church, have specialized for months in hanging drywall, installing insulation and rewiring houses. Operation Noah Rebuild, another Southern Baptist agency, based in Algiers, similarly has been importing teams of skilled and semi-skilled workers to help underinsured homeowners with major repairs. And two weeks ago, a gathering of Mennonite volunteer builders from Canada, Ohio and Mississippi happily dedicated their new operations base on Hayne Boulevard, a former church they converted last winter and will occupy for the next four to five years.
But most volunteer rebuilding efforts are only just beginning. And most will focus first on the neediest cases, helping the elderly, the infirm, or underinsured families close the gap between their depleted resources and a finished home.
They will take different approaches.
The Catholic Church's Operation Helping Hands, for instance, helps applicants negotiate the tangle of the state's Road Home program, Diaz said. As money becomes available, the agency will introduce clients to preferred contractors who have pledged not to soak them at top-of-market rates. Helping Hands will help the clients work with contractors, and pair them with volunteer builders such as the Mennonites, should their Road Home money fall short, said Diaz.
So far, about 100 people have signed up for that kind of help, she said.
Other groups, such as the Episcopal Church's Jericho Road project and the Presbyterian Church's "Build Blitz" seek to rehabilitate badly damaged homes. United Methodists intend to build or rebuild about 200 homes, said the Rev. Darryl Tate of that church's storm relief ministry in Baton Rouge.
The Rev. David Crosby of First Baptist Church of New Orleans said Baptists hope to focus on the Upper 9th Ward over the next few years. The goal is to build 300 homes and help an additional 1,200 families return to their neighborhoods.
Relief managers say fulfilling that mission will require a shift toward volunteers able to quickly pick up simple construction skills under supervision.
Some said that shift is already occurring.
"Our volunteers are getting more sophisticated," said Crosby. "We're getting repeat visitors who really know what they're doing."
Relief managers say it is not uncommon to see volunteers touched by one trip to New Orleans returning months later, with fresh faces.
"People are going back home and saying, 'This will change your life,' " said Cowart, the Episcopal relief director. "They're right. It absolutely will change your life."
. . . . . . .
"Every day I just see the Holy Spirit picking people up,. I'm just here to help that along. I get to be a part of that. . . . I wouldn't want to be anywhere else right now."
SHIRLEY LONG, Gentilly Baptist Church
Saturday, March 10, 2007
By Bruce Nolan
Staff writer
Shirley Long stood at the stove one evening this week and shared a small secret, keeping a cook's eye on pots of simmering corn and spinach while two huge pans of ravioli heated in the oven.
*
Usually, she confided, when she's cooking at Gentilly Baptist Church for the teams of retirees and vacationing middle-agers who come to New Orleans to volunteer their rebuilding skills, she serves up a little more of the labor-intensive home cooking they're used to. But this week, charged with feeding more than 50 taut, high-energy spring-breakers from Boston College who were bunking at the church, she cut herself a small break.
She tilted more toward pasta and simpler-to-fix, carb-heavy meals for the metabolic dynamos who wolfed her cooking after a day of gutting and rebuilding houses.
Long, who the day before Hurricane Katrina was a settled citizen of Searcy, Ark., has been cooking in the storm zone on and off since September 2005.
Shirley, 50, and her husband, Danny, 44, get back to their mobile home in Arkansas one or two weeks a month so Shirley can cuddle her 10-month-old grandchild.
Otherwise, the pair are in Gentilly, living in a small furnished room in what was once the church's education building.
"Our ministry is to minister to the people who are ministering to New Orleans," Danny Long said.
As a committed evangelical, Shirley Long did volunteer work in Searcy before Hurricane Katrina. Then came Aug. 29, 2005, and the suffering loosed by the disaster nearly tore her apart, she said.
At first, like other Arkansas volunteers, she would cook at a mobile kitchen for a week, go home a while to her husband, then return to the New Orleans area for another cooking tour. She and other volunteers did that for four months.
In July, Long agreed to become one of the cooks at Gentilly Baptist, the base of operations for Arkansas Baptist Builders, a Katrina relief ministry based in Little Rock. This time Danny Long came to work as a kind of facilities manager, having left his job as a forklift operator.
Although their needs are few, they have depleted their savings. But they say they are untroubled.
Hearing New Orleanians' tales of loss, "sometimes I'd just go in my room and cry, and say who are you to miss your things?" Shirley Long said. "God really dealt with me about that."
Now, they live as de facto New Orleanians, and their future is unclear. Arkansas Baptist Builders soon will decide whether to continue its operation past August.
Yet they say their past in Searcy seems distant. New Orleans has changed them.
"Every day I just see the Holy Spirit picking people up," Shirley Long said. "I'm just here to help that along. I get to be a part of that. . . . I wouldn't want to be anywhere else right now."
. . . . . . .
Folks here are determined to come back. It's my responsibility to do what I can to support them."
GREG GRIFFITH, Common Ground Collective
Saturday, March 10, 2007
By Bruce Nolan
In August 2005, Greg Griffith was just about to start another year as an international relations major at Kent State University when the horrific images streaming out of New Orleans transfixed him. Then came transformation.
"I decided I wouldn't be the guy on a couch yelling at officials on television," he said.
With a few friends, Griffith rented a truck, stuffed it with relief supplies and set out from Ohio to New Orleans. He intended to stay one semester. A year and a half later, he is still here.
Today, Griffith helps run a free neighborhood health clinic in Algiers organized by the Common Ground Collective, a secular nonprofit group that provides a range of services around the area, from house gutting to legal aid to health care.
With other volunteers, such as Bay Love, who used to work with migrant workers in Maine, and Nadja Jones, a recent Xavier University graduate heading for medical school in the fall, Griffith helps a staff of eight to 10 volunteer physicians manage the illnesses of residents unable to secure health care elsewhere in New Orleans.
In the first chaotic weeks after the storm, Griffith, 31, and Love, 25, slept outdoors in tents in the back yard of Common Ground founder Malik Rahim's home. Later, Griffith lived in the attic above the tiny Masjid Bilal, the Islamic worship center that first housed the clinic before it moved across the street to the corner of Teche and Socrates streets.
Both have since moved to less rude quarters. In Griffith's case, romance bloomed: He now lives with Anne Mullé, a nurse practitioner from California he met at the clinic.
For months, they lived entirely off their savings. Later came a small stipend courtesy of AmeriCorps, the national service organization. Their take: about $190 a week.
If there is to be an end to Griffith's volunteer service to New Orleans, he does not yet see it.
Like Love and Jones, he believes he has received as much as he has given. And what he says he has received is a pragmatic, street-level lesson in the power of grassroots organizing to mitigate -- perhaps even limit -- what he says is the official blundering of New Orleans' recovery.
"I've learned more about how politics works (here). . . . than in three years in the university," Griffith said. "The grassroots level, that's where change is."
Another life lesson: seeing poor New Orleanians, even in the midst of their own struggles, come together for common support and to play an increasing role in their fate.
"Folks here are determined to come back. It's my responsibility to do what I can to support them," he said.
. . . . . . .
"So many folks we'd come in contact with would retire at 62, then it seems like they'd die without getting a chance to do much. We didn't want that."
MARILYN AND GARY MORROW, First Baptist Church of Chalmette
Saturday, March 10, 2007
By Bruce Nolan
Staff writer
Back home in Marshall, Mo., population 12,000, Gary Morrow ran the family plumbing and electrical business while his wife, Marilyn, made and sold crafts.
Morrow's business paid the bills and gave him the freedom to indulge in what he really loved: closing the shop a few times a year so he could use his heavy equipment for volunteer projects. Typically, he helped build a new church or expand an older one.
As volunteer director of the Missouri Southern Baptists' storm relief ministry, Morrow also visited disaster sites to direct other volunteers.
In retrospect, he said, that work seems like deliberate preparation for the couple's new life in New Orleans. After Katrina, the Morrows effectively moved here to help rebuild.
"This is what God wants us to do," he said. "We've been training a lot of years getting ready for this."
In Katrina's aftermath, the volunteer agency Morrow ran dispatched two mobile kitchens to the fringe of the disaster area, as well as teams of men equipped with chain saws and rigging to clear streets and remove fallen trees.
Morrow came in December 2005, saw the landscape and has rarely returned to Missouri since.
He lived for a time behind Calvary Baptist Church in Algiers, where a big Missouri feeding kitchen dispensed hot meals. When the kitchen left, in February 2006, he stayed to help the church with its storm damage.
Later he met the Rev. John Dee Jeffries, who lost both his church, First Baptist Church of Chalmette, and his home to the storm. Out of that relationship grew a job: Morrow would move to Chalmette and supervise volunteers rebuilding Jeffries' house, as well as additional teams that will soon turn to rebuilding the church.
Today the Morrows live in a converted 18-wheeler in the parking lot of First Baptist Church of Chalmette. The Louisiana Baptist Convention pays their expenses, plus a small stipend "that I think would be insignificant compared to what they had," Jeffries said.
"We don't have a lot of fancy things, but we don't want any either," Morrow said.
Morrow says they haven't been back to Missouri since Christmas. They expect to return briefly in early May, then come back to Louisiana for the busy summer construction season.
The Morrows began shutting down their business the spring before Katrina struck; Gary Morrow closed it completely two months after the storm to free himself for the upcoming work.
"We're both 52," he said. "So many folks we'd come in contact with would retire at 62, then it seems like they'd die without getting a chance to do much. We didn't want that."
He said they retired early to devote themselves to disaster volunteering.
They expect to be in Chalmette a year from now, but have no plans after that.
"Wherever God wants us to go, that's where we'll be," he said.
. . . . . . .
"When someone's in need, we have to help them."
John Graziano, Catholic Charities
Saturday, March 10, 2007
By Bruce Nolan
This time last year, as John Graziano approached graduation at the University of Dayton, his path began to diverge from those of many of his classmates.
"Instead of going to job fairs I went to volunteer fairs," he said. "Instead of sending applications and resumés to companies, I sent them to different volunteer service organizations."
The search landed him in New Orleans last August as a lay affiliate of the Marianists, a Catholic religious order working with Catholic Charities in the storm zone.
At 23, Graziano and a roommate live in a rough apartment he built on nights and weekends in the corner of a Westwego warehouse that houses teams of Catholic Charities volunteers.
He clears about $70 a week.
In his first months in New Orleans, Graziano said, he found himself part of small teams gutting houses, sometimes pulling down moldy walls and shoveling debris nearly alone for long stretches. It was a challenge for a young man in a strange city -- for the first time completely on his own.
Graziano and a group of 15 or so like-minded university friends had vowed their senior year to try to live together in a spiritual community dedicated to social justice work. But the idea had to wait a year as members pursued individual service projects. So in those first months in New Orleans, Graziano found himself uncomfortably disconnected from human contact with his spiritual comrades. He also felt the absence of the homeowners he had come to serve.
Graziano got through the arid times with journaling and prayer and by telephoning and e-mailing his friends, including his girlfriend, Emily, who is working with addicted youths in Anchorage, Alaska.
Now he no longer guts houses. In his new job, he looks over damaged properties for Catholic Charities, purchases building materials and delivers them to work sites.
Now, he has more contact with the homeowners he came to help.
"There's less physical work, but more opportunity to sit and talk with homeowners and just hear their stories. Get to know them," he said.
Graziano's scheduled stay in New Orleans ends in July. He said he may stay through August to help his successor with the transition. Then he thinks he'll return to his family home on Long Island, reconnect with his girlfriend on her return from Anchorage, and explore whether their college group can again pursue the goal of living near each other as they work for social justice.
He thinks he might be a teacher.
"The dignity of each human person is there, and it's given to us by God," Graziano said. "It's something that shouldn't be -- and isn't -- negotiable.
"When someone's in need, we have to help them."
. . . . . . .
Bruce Nolan can be reached at bnolan@timespicayune.com or (504) 826
A WELCOME TIDE
Thousands of volunteers, including college students on spring break, are arriving to help with gutting and, increasingly, with rebuilding
Saturday, March 10, 2007
By Bruce Nolan
Staff writer
On a clear, bright morning this week, Kara Huselton, a Boston College freshman from Rochester, N.Y., muscled a dead washing machine out the second-floor door of a vacant duplex on Franklin Avenue and, with the help of two friends, tipped it over a railing to fall two stories with a satisfying crash.
Vile water spilled out of the bent machine. "Cockroach water," declared a disgusted Kristen Dacey, a 19-year-old who hails from New Hampshire.
Visitors to New Orleans for a week, they had been at the house the day before as well, masked and gloved, tearing out its interior in the familiar, sweaty and nasty ritual that prepares a Katrina-damaged house for repair and reoccupancy.
But elsewhere in town, others of the 52 Boston College volunteers were installing wall insulation and hanging drywall under the supervision of Southern Baptists from Arkansas. Those, too, were relatively simple jobs -- but a sign of measurable progress as well, because they lie across the demarcation that separates mere cleanup from the first stages of rebuilding.
In the second spring after Hurricane Katrina, more than 10,000 college students and other volunteers once again have skipped spring break's traditional beachfront bacchanal and instead poured into metropolitan New Orleans to work hard. It's a volunteer wave that will reach its high point in the next week or so and continue into April before tailing off.
But this year is markedly different in the sophistication of the agencies managing the influx of volunteers, and in the work they are being sent out to do.
Once again, the volunteers represent the full roster of American higher education, from the University of Texas to Lenoir-Rhyne College in Hickory, N.C., to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.
Travis Scruggs, a relief coordinator at First Baptist Church of New Orleans, said he had bookings for 1,000 volunteers in March. Catholic Charities is full, with 1,200 incoming volunteers, said Joan Diaz, director of Operation Helping Hands.
"This is not falling off," said Courtney Cowart, who directs storm relief for the Episcopal Diocese of Louisiana. "If we had more capacity for housing people, we'd have even more volunteers than we do."
Systems fine-tuned
Spring break is the high point on the year-round calendar of volunteerism in New Orleans. Even as the memory of Katrina becomes more distant, thousands of volunteers ebb and flow through the city every month, relief directors say. They follow the predictable rhythms of the school and work year: Numbers spike at spring break, during the summer and, to a lesser extent, during the winter holidays. In between are troughs in which directors say volunteerism slows, but never stops entirely.
Since spring break of 2006, secular nonprofits such as the Common Ground Collective and nearly a dozen major Christian relief agencies have benefited from another year's experience, fine-tuned their goals, beefed up their programs and become increasingly adept at marshaling and directing volunteers.
Now volunteers are housed in networks of long-term bunkhouses established in gymnasiums, fellowship halls or ruined sanctuaries of vacant Catholic, Lutheran, Methodist and Presbyterian churches, among others. Often they cooperate; a coalition called the Greater New Orleans Disaster Recovery Partnership acts as a booking agency that finds available bunks for many incoming volunteers.
Southern Baptists long ago leased three floors of the World Trade Center at the foot of Canal Street to house up to 500 volunteers. The Salvation Army's center on South Claiborne Avenue houses up to 200 volunteers. A Common Ground encampment at the closed St. Mary of the Angels elementary school in the 9th Ward holds 300 or more.
Precise count elusive
For most of the 18 months since Katrina, those agencies have trained their volunteers in the simple skills of house-gutting, then deployed them in the wastelands of New Orleans, St. Bernard and parts of Slidell.
No one knows how many homes private volunteers have gutted across the metropolitan area.
Among just a few of the major groups, Catholic Charities reports having gutted more than 1,600 homes and apartments; Southern Baptists, more than 1,000; Samaritan's Purse, Franklin Graham's Christian relief agency, more than 500.
This spring, FEMA and a number of secular nonprofits and faith-based disaster ministries have joined forces to launch a Gutting Task Force.
Private relief agencies for the first time have pooled their separate databases to estimate how many owners still want their houses gutted, presumably in anticipation of rebuilding.
The task force also is taking new requests from owners who contact the task force by dialing "311."
But even with an expected growth in new addresses solicited by the program, the numbers in the database are plunging, said Mary Sutton, a FEMA official who coordinates that agency's work with private relief groups.
Months ago, homeowners seeking help typically signed up with many agencies to have their homes gutted, happy to have it done by the first organization to get to it. The new, combined database is full of such duplications, she said. In addition, over time some of houses have been demolished or by now clearly need to be demolished.
A few weeks ago, the task force's list of houses thought to be in need of gutting stood at about 4,800. Scrubbing out obvious duplications quickly cut the number to 4,100. More inspections and phone calls to owners will whittle it down still further, Sutton said.
"I suspect the bottom is near 2,000 homes in New Orleans," she said.
After 18 months, she said, "You can see the end of the last chapter coming, although we're not yet on the last page of the chapter."
The economic value of all that work is imprecise.
Sutton said the agency nominally values volunteer labor at a little more than $18 per hour. Early in the recovery process, there was interest in keeping track of the donated hours, perhaps for local parishes to count toward their match of federal funds, she said.
But in the months since then, it has become unclear whether volunteer hours are as valuable to parishes as once thought, she said. And while "there's millions and millions brought in by the faith-based and other volunteer organizations, trying to get these statistics is like herding cats."
Tasks changing
Still, with an end to house-gutting at least on the horizon, major denominations for months have begun a shift toward rebuilding houses.
While Kim and his Boston College friends were gutting their assigned house on Franklin Avenue, another team of volunteers patched the roof on the house across the street.
A few agencies -- exceptions to the general rule -- have been helping homeowners with repairs since the earliest days after the storm.
Arkansas Baptist Builders, headquartered at Gentilly Baptist Church, have specialized for months in hanging drywall, installing insulation and rewiring houses. Operation Noah Rebuild, another Southern Baptist agency, based in Algiers, similarly has been importing teams of skilled and semi-skilled workers to help underinsured homeowners with major repairs. And two weeks ago, a gathering of Mennonite volunteer builders from Canada, Ohio and Mississippi happily dedicated their new operations base on Hayne Boulevard, a former church they converted last winter and will occupy for the next four to five years.
But most volunteer rebuilding efforts are only just beginning. And most will focus first on the neediest cases, helping the elderly, the infirm, or underinsured families close the gap between their depleted resources and a finished home.
They will take different approaches.
The Catholic Church's Operation Helping Hands, for instance, helps applicants negotiate the tangle of the state's Road Home program, Diaz said. As money becomes available, the agency will introduce clients to preferred contractors who have pledged not to soak them at top-of-market rates. Helping Hands will help the clients work with contractors, and pair them with volunteer builders such as the Mennonites, should their Road Home money fall short, said Diaz.
So far, about 100 people have signed up for that kind of help, she said.
Other groups, such as the Episcopal Church's Jericho Road project and the Presbyterian Church's "Build Blitz" seek to rehabilitate badly damaged homes. United Methodists intend to build or rebuild about 200 homes, said the Rev. Darryl Tate of that church's storm relief ministry in Baton Rouge.
The Rev. David Crosby of First Baptist Church of New Orleans said Baptists hope to focus on the Upper 9th Ward over the next few years. The goal is to build 300 homes and help an additional 1,200 families return to their neighborhoods.
Relief managers say fulfilling that mission will require a shift toward volunteers able to quickly pick up simple construction skills under supervision.
Some said that shift is already occurring.
"Our volunteers are getting more sophisticated," said Crosby. "We're getting repeat visitors who really know what they're doing."
Relief managers say it is not uncommon to see volunteers touched by one trip to New Orleans returning months later, with fresh faces.
"People are going back home and saying, 'This will change your life,' " said Cowart, the Episcopal relief director. "They're right. It absolutely will change your life."
. . . . . . .
"Every day I just see the Holy Spirit picking people up,. I'm just here to help that along. I get to be a part of that. . . . I wouldn't want to be anywhere else right now."
SHIRLEY LONG, Gentilly Baptist Church
Saturday, March 10, 2007
By Bruce Nolan
Staff writer
Shirley Long stood at the stove one evening this week and shared a small secret, keeping a cook's eye on pots of simmering corn and spinach while two huge pans of ravioli heated in the oven.
*
Usually, she confided, when she's cooking at Gentilly Baptist Church for the teams of retirees and vacationing middle-agers who come to New Orleans to volunteer their rebuilding skills, she serves up a little more of the labor-intensive home cooking they're used to. But this week, charged with feeding more than 50 taut, high-energy spring-breakers from Boston College who were bunking at the church, she cut herself a small break.
She tilted more toward pasta and simpler-to-fix, carb-heavy meals for the metabolic dynamos who wolfed her cooking after a day of gutting and rebuilding houses.
Long, who the day before Hurricane Katrina was a settled citizen of Searcy, Ark., has been cooking in the storm zone on and off since September 2005.
Shirley, 50, and her husband, Danny, 44, get back to their mobile home in Arkansas one or two weeks a month so Shirley can cuddle her 10-month-old grandchild.
Otherwise, the pair are in Gentilly, living in a small furnished room in what was once the church's education building.
"Our ministry is to minister to the people who are ministering to New Orleans," Danny Long said.
As a committed evangelical, Shirley Long did volunteer work in Searcy before Hurricane Katrina. Then came Aug. 29, 2005, and the suffering loosed by the disaster nearly tore her apart, she said.
At first, like other Arkansas volunteers, she would cook at a mobile kitchen for a week, go home a while to her husband, then return to the New Orleans area for another cooking tour. She and other volunteers did that for four months.
In July, Long agreed to become one of the cooks at Gentilly Baptist, the base of operations for Arkansas Baptist Builders, a Katrina relief ministry based in Little Rock. This time Danny Long came to work as a kind of facilities manager, having left his job as a forklift operator.
Although their needs are few, they have depleted their savings. But they say they are untroubled.
Hearing New Orleanians' tales of loss, "sometimes I'd just go in my room and cry, and say who are you to miss your things?" Shirley Long said. "God really dealt with me about that."
Now, they live as de facto New Orleanians, and their future is unclear. Arkansas Baptist Builders soon will decide whether to continue its operation past August.
Yet they say their past in Searcy seems distant. New Orleans has changed them.
"Every day I just see the Holy Spirit picking people up," Shirley Long said. "I'm just here to help that along. I get to be a part of that. . . . I wouldn't want to be anywhere else right now."
. . . . . . .
Folks here are determined to come back. It's my responsibility to do what I can to support them."
GREG GRIFFITH, Common Ground Collective
Saturday, March 10, 2007
By Bruce Nolan
In August 2005, Greg Griffith was just about to start another year as an international relations major at Kent State University when the horrific images streaming out of New Orleans transfixed him. Then came transformation.
"I decided I wouldn't be the guy on a couch yelling at officials on television," he said.
With a few friends, Griffith rented a truck, stuffed it with relief supplies and set out from Ohio to New Orleans. He intended to stay one semester. A year and a half later, he is still here.
Today, Griffith helps run a free neighborhood health clinic in Algiers organized by the Common Ground Collective, a secular nonprofit group that provides a range of services around the area, from house gutting to legal aid to health care.
With other volunteers, such as Bay Love, who used to work with migrant workers in Maine, and Nadja Jones, a recent Xavier University graduate heading for medical school in the fall, Griffith helps a staff of eight to 10 volunteer physicians manage the illnesses of residents unable to secure health care elsewhere in New Orleans.
In the first chaotic weeks after the storm, Griffith, 31, and Love, 25, slept outdoors in tents in the back yard of Common Ground founder Malik Rahim's home. Later, Griffith lived in the attic above the tiny Masjid Bilal, the Islamic worship center that first housed the clinic before it moved across the street to the corner of Teche and Socrates streets.
Both have since moved to less rude quarters. In Griffith's case, romance bloomed: He now lives with Anne Mullé, a nurse practitioner from California he met at the clinic.
For months, they lived entirely off their savings. Later came a small stipend courtesy of AmeriCorps, the national service organization. Their take: about $190 a week.
If there is to be an end to Griffith's volunteer service to New Orleans, he does not yet see it.
Like Love and Jones, he believes he has received as much as he has given. And what he says he has received is a pragmatic, street-level lesson in the power of grassroots organizing to mitigate -- perhaps even limit -- what he says is the official blundering of New Orleans' recovery.
"I've learned more about how politics works (here). . . . than in three years in the university," Griffith said. "The grassroots level, that's where change is."
Another life lesson: seeing poor New Orleanians, even in the midst of their own struggles, come together for common support and to play an increasing role in their fate.
"Folks here are determined to come back. It's my responsibility to do what I can to support them," he said.
. . . . . . .
"So many folks we'd come in contact with would retire at 62, then it seems like they'd die without getting a chance to do much. We didn't want that."
MARILYN AND GARY MORROW, First Baptist Church of Chalmette
Saturday, March 10, 2007
By Bruce Nolan
Staff writer
Back home in Marshall, Mo., population 12,000, Gary Morrow ran the family plumbing and electrical business while his wife, Marilyn, made and sold crafts.
Morrow's business paid the bills and gave him the freedom to indulge in what he really loved: closing the shop a few times a year so he could use his heavy equipment for volunteer projects. Typically, he helped build a new church or expand an older one.
As volunteer director of the Missouri Southern Baptists' storm relief ministry, Morrow also visited disaster sites to direct other volunteers.
In retrospect, he said, that work seems like deliberate preparation for the couple's new life in New Orleans. After Katrina, the Morrows effectively moved here to help rebuild.
"This is what God wants us to do," he said. "We've been training a lot of years getting ready for this."
In Katrina's aftermath, the volunteer agency Morrow ran dispatched two mobile kitchens to the fringe of the disaster area, as well as teams of men equipped with chain saws and rigging to clear streets and remove fallen trees.
Morrow came in December 2005, saw the landscape and has rarely returned to Missouri since.
He lived for a time behind Calvary Baptist Church in Algiers, where a big Missouri feeding kitchen dispensed hot meals. When the kitchen left, in February 2006, he stayed to help the church with its storm damage.
Later he met the Rev. John Dee Jeffries, who lost both his church, First Baptist Church of Chalmette, and his home to the storm. Out of that relationship grew a job: Morrow would move to Chalmette and supervise volunteers rebuilding Jeffries' house, as well as additional teams that will soon turn to rebuilding the church.
Today the Morrows live in a converted 18-wheeler in the parking lot of First Baptist Church of Chalmette. The Louisiana Baptist Convention pays their expenses, plus a small stipend "that I think would be insignificant compared to what they had," Jeffries said.
"We don't have a lot of fancy things, but we don't want any either," Morrow said.
Morrow says they haven't been back to Missouri since Christmas. They expect to return briefly in early May, then come back to Louisiana for the busy summer construction season.
The Morrows began shutting down their business the spring before Katrina struck; Gary Morrow closed it completely two months after the storm to free himself for the upcoming work.
"We're both 52," he said. "So many folks we'd come in contact with would retire at 62, then it seems like they'd die without getting a chance to do much. We didn't want that."
He said they retired early to devote themselves to disaster volunteering.
They expect to be in Chalmette a year from now, but have no plans after that.
"Wherever God wants us to go, that's where we'll be," he said.
. . . . . . .
"When someone's in need, we have to help them."
John Graziano, Catholic Charities
Saturday, March 10, 2007
By Bruce Nolan
This time last year, as John Graziano approached graduation at the University of Dayton, his path began to diverge from those of many of his classmates.
"Instead of going to job fairs I went to volunteer fairs," he said. "Instead of sending applications and resumés to companies, I sent them to different volunteer service organizations."
The search landed him in New Orleans last August as a lay affiliate of the Marianists, a Catholic religious order working with Catholic Charities in the storm zone.
At 23, Graziano and a roommate live in a rough apartment he built on nights and weekends in the corner of a Westwego warehouse that houses teams of Catholic Charities volunteers.
He clears about $70 a week.
In his first months in New Orleans, Graziano said, he found himself part of small teams gutting houses, sometimes pulling down moldy walls and shoveling debris nearly alone for long stretches. It was a challenge for a young man in a strange city -- for the first time completely on his own.
Graziano and a group of 15 or so like-minded university friends had vowed their senior year to try to live together in a spiritual community dedicated to social justice work. But the idea had to wait a year as members pursued individual service projects. So in those first months in New Orleans, Graziano found himself uncomfortably disconnected from human contact with his spiritual comrades. He also felt the absence of the homeowners he had come to serve.
Graziano got through the arid times with journaling and prayer and by telephoning and e-mailing his friends, including his girlfriend, Emily, who is working with addicted youths in Anchorage, Alaska.
Now he no longer guts houses. In his new job, he looks over damaged properties for Catholic Charities, purchases building materials and delivers them to work sites.
Now, he has more contact with the homeowners he came to help.
"There's less physical work, but more opportunity to sit and talk with homeowners and just hear their stories. Get to know them," he said.
Graziano's scheduled stay in New Orleans ends in July. He said he may stay through August to help his successor with the transition. Then he thinks he'll return to his family home on Long Island, reconnect with his girlfriend on her return from Anchorage, and explore whether their college group can again pursue the goal of living near each other as they work for social justice.
He thinks he might be a teacher.
"The dignity of each human person is there, and it's given to us by God," Graziano said. "It's something that shouldn't be -- and isn't -- negotiable.
"When someone's in need, we have to help them."
. . . . . . .
Bruce Nolan can be reached at bnolan@timespicayune.com or (504) 826