Letter from a friend: Mississippi...before and after

"Hi Linda,

I just wanted to let you know that I'm back from Mississippi, alive and in one piece - although definitely a bit sleep deprived and feeling the backlog of being without an Internet connection for ten days.

I left on July 1st along with two busloads containing adult sponsors and 88 teenagers from our church to see what we could personally do to help the victims of Hurricanne Katrina rebuild their houses and their lives in the area of Mississippi where the eye of the hurricane crossed leaving a path of incredible destruction that is still very visible to this day.

Here is a link to some pictures before and after the Hurricane in the area that we were working in:

http://www.ad-alyzer.com/727/Damage

When you first pull into the area, you think, "There doesn't seem to be as much damage as I expected," but that feeling goes away quickly. 

The church were we camped out at was almost an hours drive from our work site because there were no facilities to handle our group that were closer.

Then as you move closer to the coast, the impact starts to hit.

Finally as you reach what looks like a one lane gravel and sand road -- which you later find out was a 4 lane highway before the hurricane - the first of a series of waves of impact begins to hit you.

We were working in an area the was relatively sparsely populated, but later in the week as we traveled to Biloxi and later New Orleans the massive spread of the damage was overwhelming.

As we approached New Orleans, we pass block after block of buildings that were empty, open sores on the face of the city. 

It literally looked like what you would imagine would be the result if an atomic bomb had gone off.

We were warned before we started that we would be overwhelmed with the great need and the fact that we wouldn't be able to even make a small dent in repairing the damage, but it was impossible not to be overwhelmed.

Over and over again residents told us the "starfish story" in various versions.

The starfish story first appeared in The Star Thrower, a collection of essays by the naturalist and writer Loren Eiseley that appeared in 1978, a year after Eiseley's death.

Variations abound, but here's the basic story:

An old man was picking up objects off the beach and tossing them out into the sea. A young man approached him and saw that the objects were starfish. "Why in the world are you throwing starfish into the water?"

"If the starfish are still on the beach when the tide goes out and the sun rises high in the sky, they will die," replied the old man.

"That is ridiculous. There are thousands of miles of beach and millions of starfish. You can't really believe that what you're doing could possibly make a difference!"

The wise old man picked up another starfish, paused thoughtfully, and remarked as he tossed it out into the waves,

"It makes a difference to this one."

So, over and over throughout the week we tried to "make a difference" to a few of the people that crossed our paths.

We divided our group up into teams.  Some groups did drywalling, some groups did trash removal and general cleanup.

As you can imagine, there are countless people with needs of all kinds, but most of the work fell into two categories.

First, there is a lack of people with select skills like drywallers, electricians, plumbers and roofers. 

If you had those skills you could be gainfully employed for the next 10 years in those areas.

The other need was for trash and debris removal.

Imagine mountains of trash, no tax base to cover removing it and mile after mile of rotting junk that has been sitting there for the last 11 months.

So we tried to do what we could.

The people were incredibly grateful - almost embarrassingly grateful.  You can see that they are worn out to core, but most were thankful that they were among the lucky who lived.  Everyone knew someone that had it worse than they did.

It's with a bit of guilt that I come back to my air conditioned house, swimming pool and 2 minute commute to work.

There is so much more to be done.

I know that there is a lot to be done here too.  I have people counting on me and promises to deliver on.  Forgive me if I've been a little slow getting back to you.

There is so much that I want to do.

The fact is that we are all going to die sometime, so if we are going to do something with our lives, now is the time to do it.

More soon!

All the best,

Ken