Volunteers listen to victims' stories, find meaning in work

BILOXI, Miss., -8:19pm

Bob Rands commanded the eyes of every volunteer when he stood up in the dining tent last evening to give the Camp Biloxi orientation. Rands, the camp manager, is a Vietnam veteran. He was sporting a crew cut; his hair--grayish white. He donned an intimidating camouflage jacket paired with blue jeans. And when he began to talk about Camp Biloxi, everyone was at attention.

Then I noticed his Reebok sneakers—the same kind my dad would wear, and I think I saw him a flash a grin. His eyes pierced through his wire-rimmed glasses, making sure I heard what he said about the black widow spiders we might run across (Unlikely, but possible. "And don't flip 'em over to see if they're a black widow. Sheesh. I've got stories").

Rands didn’t stick around long after the orientation to chat, but he voiced what was probably the most valuable piece of advice for relief and recovery work, and it had nothing to do with getting up at “oh-600 hours” for breakfast, which everyone at Camp Biloxi is asked to do. He didn’t even talk about the various rebuilding and cleaning projects that we began this morning. Bob Rands advised Ole Spring Relief III volunteers to simply listen.

“Treat the clients with respect and dignity,” Rands began. “Listen to their stories. That’s even more important than doing the work.”

Perhaps an odd thing to tell a large group of volunteers who traveled some 1100 miles to work, Rands meant every word. And he was right.

Today on the work sites, students got their first listen to the stories of Lutheran Disaster Relief clients and other community members in three different areas across the region: Moss Point, Gulfport, and the Hayward neighborhood in Biloxi. And if we didn’t listen to the story of one family in the Forest Heights community of Gulfport, we may not have understood the importance of the work we were helping them do.

Forty-one-year-old Patrick (last name unknown) was helping his younger brothers load furniture, pictures, and appliances from their mother’s one-story, three-bedroom home into a “pod” when our work group arrived at about 9:30am this morning. A pod is a PODS (Personal On Demand Storage) unit, and they decorate the front lawn of nearly every other house we saw in the Forest Heights neighborhood.

Hasty rebuilding efforts on Patrick’s mother’s house failed to recognize that the electrical wiring encased behind new sheetrock had also been damaged in the storm. Today, the house had to be completely cleared out so that later this week the walls can be torn down and wiring problems fixed—the right way this time. According to Patrick, the sheetrock needs to be replaced anyway, as there are traces of mold growing behind the walls, of which only the bottom four feet were replaced after sustaining water damage resulting from Hurricane Katrina's violent rains.

Students carried everything out of the house, from mirrors and bed frames, to dining chairs and curio cabinets, all the way down to the mini blinds. Everything looked new and in mint condition, as Patrick’s mother and his brothers had moved back to Forest Heights, where they’ve lived for over 30 years.

With only a handful of screwdrivers, and no dolly until after 12noon, the workday for this group went in waves. This is when students had the chance to rest their muscles and use their ears.


“There was definitely a point in the day when the work died down and we were just standing in the kitchen, listening to Pat,” said Ryan Anderson ’10. “He told us how Mississippi really got the brunt of the actually storm. He said New Orleans was really damaged by the flooding, but that here there were 130 mile per hour winds for 12 hours straight.”

The wind blew the roof off Patrick’s mother’s home, allowing rain and elements to get inside and damage her belongings. He told the group of Oles that he is currently doing detail work on homes in the region so that he can have more time to help take care of his mother’s house. Patrick said he has been employed for 20 years as a stagehand at a local casino before the storm hit.

“[Pat] talked a lot about the importance of people getting back to work and not just taking handouts from volunteers,” Anderson said. “He got back to work.”

* * *

At another site today, students spent their time cleaning streets. Yes, really. In Moss Point, Miss., the city decided that if they were going to rebuild their town, they’d have to cut back on other services generally provided—like street sweeping.

“People would drive by and honk and say, ‘Thank you for being here,’” according to Tony Paterno ’09. “One lady rolled down her window and drove down the street telling each person, ‘Thank you. God bless you. Thank you…'.”

Although a lot of today’s service done by OSR3 participants differed greatly from the house gutting and demolition work completed by groups the past two years, meeting and speaking with hurricane victims and residents is what made the often tedious work meaningful for students.

“It’s not the fact that we’re doing work,” Paterno told me after dinner tonight. “It’s that we're acknowledging that work still needs to be done down here, and we are here to support the community and realize that not everything is back to normal.”

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.”