BILOXI IN JULY

Reprinted from September 2008 Messenger.

New York Annual Conference team #73 traveled to Biloxi, Mississippi for the week of July 12-19. We were a team of 17, mostly from NY with one member from CT and one member from NJ. Beth, Peter and Geoffrey Ackerman, Doug Egerton, Don Fuller, Leslie and Meg Grodesky and Ed Kirschner went from HPUMC.

We arrived on Saturday, borrowed two vans and then headed to Heritage United Methodist Church in D’Iberville, where we were going to sleep for the trip. We cooked and ate meals at St. Paul’s UMC in Biloxi.

On Sunday, we did our first set of work. We talked to Miss Jean, a member of St. Paul’s UMC, and she told us that she had a few things that we could do for her around her house.

About half of the team headed over to her house, where we replaced her door, fixed her lattice and outside faucet, plugged a leak in her roof, and closed up a hole that squirrels had been using to enter her house. Miss Jean was very grateful for our help. After a little work on Sunday we were ready for the full time work to start on Monday. After being briefed on our job at the Hope Organization, we headed over to our job site. We were assigned to work on a 2-story home on Copp Street in Biloxi, which was in pretty bad shape. At an earlier time, the house had been raised incorrectly, so the structure of the house was in bad condition and needed correcting. Throughout the week we added new studs, to reinforce the older studs that were in place, painted siding, put in insulation, put sheathing up, wrapped the house, put in windows, put siding around all the windows and started to put up the house siding. We did this to the two sides of the house. In the back of the house, the first floor jutted out so that there was a roof to stand on in order to get to the second floor. We had to tear all of the siding and boards of this second floor and attic section. We reframed the windows and added studs to reinforce the walls and attic section, and then put the insulation, sheathing and Permawrap up. This concluded our work for the week.

With five people returning to Biloxi for their 2nd, 3rd, 4th or 5th trip down and four experienced construction workers, we felt confident that we could do just about anything that was assigned to us. We were blessed to have such good and hard workers on our team along with the site leaders who were with the Hope organization.

The first day of work one of the volunteers with the Hope organization told us that thunderstorms would come about every afternoon. When we were there we had great weather with only that first day being a day where we had to cut off a significant amount of time of our work. This great weather gave us the opportunity to get a huge amount of work done on our house and we all felt an enormous sense of accomplishment. Even though there was still plenty more to be done on our house, we felt that our work had made a very big impact on the progress of the house’s rebuilding.

Also on the first day, just as we were arriving, a pit bull arrived as if he was coming with us. This year old dog was homeless and extremely thin. He seemed to be looking for someone to help him. The Hope workers had never seen him before. It was as if he was meant to come to our site. We all enjoyed him being there with us, and everyday we would come back to the house and he would be there. The site leader from the Hope organization, Jen, decided that she wanted to help him get fixed up and healed. She brought him to the vet and he was prescribed medicines to help him get better. The vet said that he would have died without the medicines. Our team helped pay for his vet bills. Jen adopted him and he is now staying with one of the people from the organization. We helped not only the lives of the homeowners, but also saved this dog’s life, now named Cisco.

Seeing the state that Biloxi was in, you can tell there has been a lot of progress made since Hurricane Katrina almost three years ago, but it can also be seen that there is still a lot more work that needs to be done.

While we worked and after the week was over there was a very happy and accomplished feeling in everyone from our team and everyone knew that they had helped with the multi-year process by doing their part on the house. We all felt like we helped with something good that we were meant to do for these people. Even though it was just one house that we worked on it was a very significant amount of work done to help that person who owned the house.

Overall we had a very successful week, and enjoyed ourselves at the same time. It is always a pleasure to head down to Mississippi to help out.

Standing left to right: The HPUMC team included Leslie Grodesky, Geoffrey Ackerman, Beth Ackerman, Meg Grodesky, Peter Ackerman, Don Fuller and Kneeling: Ed Kirschner, and Doug Egerton.