Volunteers bring hope to a "culture of despair"

BILOXI, Miss. -12:03am

“At the outset, I knew how much the trip cost, where we’d be going, but I had no idea how engaged I’d become,” said Max Beck ’10, referencing his experience last year on Ole Spring Relief II in New Orleans. “I had a great time. It was definitely worth more than what 250 dollars could pay for. So this year, I became a member at large [on the OSR3 planning committee].”

I’m talking to a table of sophomore and junior young men after dinner on this Easter Sunday. Earlier in the day, they, along with the other OSR3 participants, took a bus tour of Biloxi to survey the damage—and progress—the city has undergone in the past two and half years since Hurricane Katrina first hit the area. Beck said he’s excited to go out to the work sites for the first time in Mississippi tomorrow morning, especially because Biloxi is a place that so few Midwesterners heard about in the immediate aftermath of the storm.

“New Orleans was what we really saw on the TV,” he said. “But the recovery efforts in Mississippi are not something you see on the news everyday. It’ll be a different experience for us on the trip this year, especially because it’s been another year and because here government has set the rebuilding wheels in motion.”

Beck is referring to one of the major differences between progress in this Mississippi community and that of New Orleans. According to 24-year-old Mark Armstrong of West Biloxi, the local government removed most of the large debris, which allowed volunteers to respond more easily to individual families and small business owners who needed help clearing out their properties. That’s how Armstrong, who first encountered St. Olaf students back in January 2006, said he drove an hour and half from Hattiesberg, Miss., where he attends the University of Southern Mississippi, to join us in Biloxi today.

“The volunteers bring a lot of hope with them. They restore hope for the people of the Gulf,” Armstrong shared with the group after lunch today. “Things were incredibly devastated. The whole thing has been frustrating with insurance not paying anything, lawsuits, endless paperwork, and waiting and waiting and waiting to see if you’ll get any assistance. The uncertainty is the hardest for people.”

Armstrong referred to the mentality that he says has affected everyone he knows across Mississippi and the Gulf Coast as a “culture of despair.” Beck said he remembers experiencing community members apologize last year for getting choked up when they told their stories.

“There was a lot of emotion, even two years after the fact,” Beck said. “Coming down here and listening to people is a great way to double-check how the media portrays things. There’s a lot of post-traumatic stress going on down here.”

Armstrong said that the immediate stress and frustration after the Hurricane was not just in relation to property, but that those feelings seeped into every aspect of life—including people’s jobs. When the storm hit Biloxi in 2005, Armstrong, then just 22-years-old, worked as an apprentice in the shipyard, building Destroyers. He also happened to be the Vice President of the Lutheran congregation at Church of the Good Shepard. In the first weeks after the hurricane, Armstrong knew that he had to get out of the shipyard and the hopelessness that festered there. So Armstrong took on another unusual role for a twentysomething; he became the Chairman of the Relief Committee at his church.

“Participating in the relief efforts is what got me through this,” he explained. “I was stressed out and breaking down. When you’re that beat down, all you can do is move forward or stand still and die.”

Armstrong helped organize what is now known as Camp Biloxi. But he didn’t stop there. After seeing how many people came down South to help recover his city, Armstrong said he felt guilty, but that it was a “healthy guilt, not at toxic guilt” that spurred him to action. When an opportunity to return the aid to other victims of a natural disaster presented itself in Greensburg, Kan, in the spring of 2007, Armstrong hopped in his car and drove northbound. An F-5 tornado had devastated the city, and Armstrong knew exactly how that felt.

“I didn’t lose as much as other people. I lost my house, but I still have my car. I lost a friend, but that’s not family,” he said. “A tragedy is still a tragedy—you can’t quantify that.”