Katrina Relief-Mississippi
On Sunday October 9th a team of seven men left immediately after the 8:30 a.m. worship service to work in Biloxi, MS. We were based in a camp operated by Presbyterian Disaster Assistance in Gulfport, MS on the grounds of Orange Grove Presbyterian Church. This camp is one of five camps set up in Mississippi to help the people of the area recover from Hurricane Katrina. The camp consisted of about 30 tents with cots and several large tents used as meeting areas and for storage.
While our team was in Gulfport, there were about 50 people in the camp. There was a high school youth group from Carmel Presbyterian Church in Carmel, California; college students from UNC Charlotte and Davidson College; and two individuals from Connecticut. With all the young people in camp it was definitely a high energy place. All the young people worked really worked hard and showed great compassion for the people of Mississippi.
  
The area where we worked is in the lower income residential areas of East Biloxi. This area was very hard hit by the flood waters because it is surrounded by water on two sides. Most of the houses were flooded up to a level of about 5 - 6 feet. Although most of the houses were still standing, many will have to be demolished because of the degree of structural damage. Many houses were moved off their foundations by flood waters.
  
The primary work we performed can best be described as gutting houses. The houses were structurally sound, but due to the height of the flooding they had to have all the interior walls stripped off down to the studs. Damp, moldy sheet rock and insulation make for nasty, smelly work! Six weeks after the flooding there was mold and mildew everywhere. We wore dust masks and smeared Vicks VapoRub on the inside of the masks to help with the stench from the mold and mildew. It was not skilled labor, but it was necessary before reconstruction could begin. After houses were gutted, they will be sprayed with a bleach water solution three different times to kill the mold and mildew. All the wallboard and insulation that was removed was piled up along the street to await removal by the city.
  
The degree of destruction, the smells, and amount of debris are difficult to convey with words and even with pictures. Try to imagine if all your possessions were piled up in the street waiting to be loaded in a dump truck and taken to the landfill. Yet, the people we met were upbeat and anxious to get on with the rebuilding and with their lives. Our prayer is that our efforts served to encourage them and demonstrate God’s love for them. We were definitely blessed by this opportunity to serve and to represent First Presbyterian Church.
  
To read the day by day description of what we did and what we experienced, it can be found on the internet at our blog.
If you are new to blogs, please note that the articles are posted with the most recent first, so if you want to read them in chronological order, start with the bottom article and move up.
  
To learn more about Presbyterian Disaster Assistance and the reconstruction efforts, the director of the camp at Orange Grove has a very interesting blog here. One of the youth directors from the Carmel Presbyterian Church has returned to work for one month at the camps in Mississippi and she has an excellent blog about the continuing work in the Gulfport area here.
  
Our team consisted of David Mahan, Dave Corson, Leonel Perez, Kelly Lohman, Paul Cobb, Phil Brand, and Brian Wright.
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