WE'VE ARRIVED!

Hello friends! I am writing from the hot and humid state of Louisiana, where we arrived bright and early this morning. The past couple of days since the arrival of our group of five in the Deep South have been busy. Our plane from Minnesota touched down in Pensacola, Florida right on time, at 11:42 am on Saturday morning, after a short layover in Atlanta. A very friendly man from 1st Methodist Church in Pensacola met us at the airport with a large van that the church has generously lent to us for the week. He gave us a short tour of the church (where we will be staying on Friday night) and then we were off to the beach! Pensacola is famous for having the whitest beaches in North America and we were lucky enough to be able to spend a couple of hours on Pensacola Beach on Santa Rosa Island, which is a small island made up of four beaches just off the coast of Pensacola.

After spending the afternoon in Pensacola, our two-hour drive took us through Alabama (where we stopped for a bite to eat at IHOP) and on to our final destination of Ocean Springs, Mississippi. We stayed overnight there with a wonderful woman named Linda, who I met on my first trip to Ocean Springs in January. At that time, a group of CSF students worked on dry walling her daughter’s house, which was heavily damaged from winds and flooding during hurricane Katrina. When I returned with a second group of CSF students in March to Ocean Springs, we worked on putting up and painting all of the indoor trim, and so I got to see Linda and spend time with her once again. This time, the five of us also met her daughter Nesha for the first time. Nesha was just able to move back into her house for the first time 2 weeks ago (the house still isn’t finished and there isn’t much furniture on the inside, but at least it is livable finally). We also got to meet Linda’s sister Gilda and her two pre-teen sons, Jordan and Nigel, who are currently living in a FEMA trailer on Nesha’s property.

Sunday morning we joined Linda at her church and then we rolled up our sleeves and got in our first half-day of work painting the outside trim around Nesha’s house. It looked like a small enough job, but by the time we got it all painted and cleaned up it had taken us about 5 hours. It was fun to see the nice, cleanly painted results though! After we finished working Linda cooked us up a HUGE meal of BBQ chicken, ribs, coleslaw, potato salad, watermelon, and sweet corn soaked in butter. It was so amazing!! (And I haven’t even mentioned the biscuits, eggs, bacon, and cheesy grits that she cooked us for breakfast yesterday and today!). Then we spend the rest of the evening playing PlayStation with Jordan and Nigel and visiting with Linda and Nesha. It really was a great day of both work and fun!

This morning we got up really early, had another big, tasty breakfast soaked in butter, and were on the road by 6:30 am. We arrived at Aldersgate Methodist Church just a little before 8 am, spent a couple of hours grocery shopping for our food for the week, and then headed out to our first assignment – putting a tar-like sealant on a leaky tin roof that covers the front porch of a little trailer home that belongs to a sweet old lady named Rose. Rose had water rise under her trailer to just below her flooring. This caused all of her flooring to buckle so that when you walk inside of her home you have to be careful not to trip on one of the dips in the uneven flooring. Unfortunately, the $2000 she recieved from the government was only enough to replace the water-damaged living room furniture and freezer and since she recieved no money from her insurance company, she has no plans to replace the flooring. Furthermore, the layer of sealant we put on her porch roof is actually only necessary because an earlier volunteer team put on the roof incorrectly (they didn’t layer the tin enough, causing the water to leak through the cracks whenever it rains). This illustrates another common problem faced by people trying to rebuild – even when area churches are able to offer help, it is often help provided by well-meaning but inexperienced volunteers who do a job incorrectly that needs to be fixed later on. After an afternoon of hard, hot, and extremely dirty work, our tar-covered crew headed home with the promise of slightly cleaner work tomorrow - mudding and sanding drywall.

Overall, things are going great. The heat and humidity is pretty oppressive, so please pray that our team (Brian, Eric, Lisa, Rebecca & Zeb) can stay hydrated and not get heat stroke or any other heat-related illnesses. We are also pretty tired, so we would also appreciate your prayers for energy and strength. Finally, please pray for Linda, who suffers from various health problems due to blood clots, and her daughter Nesha, who is going through a very tough time of uncertainty and depression related to a difficult job situation (on top of the fact that she has been staying with friends and trying to get her house rebuilt the past year).

Thanks so much for prayers and your support and please keep checking back for more updates and some pictures (coming soon)!

(posted by Rebecca at 7:13 pm on 8/7/06)