April 4, 2008 Letter from New Orleans

Dear E-pistle subscriber,

I write to you while sitting on the tail of a pickup truck parked on a street in the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans. I am here with “Team NOLA” – a group of 14 St. James’ parishioners who have taken a week off to come down here and help those who are still reeling from the devastating effects of Hurricane Katrina.

Almost three years after Hurricane Katrina, the extent of the damage remains great.

As I look up and down this street, I see forty, perhaps fifty houses. Only two appear to be occupied. The rest have plyboard where windows used to be and exposed frames where roofs used to be.

The bad news is more than 100,000 homes were flooded or otherwise damaged in the aftermath of Katrina. The bad news is much of the city is caught in a brutal downward spiral—businesses will not return, but people will not—cannot—move back until businesses reopen and there is work. The bad news is the “official” response to the devastation was and is inadequate at best and incompetent at worst.

But there is good news.

The good news is that—thanks to the government aid and programs that are working, and thanks largely to church groups and other volunteer efforts by hundreds of people each week, 95% (95%!) of those flood damaged houses are now gutted. (The first step toward either demolishing a “totaled” home or deciding if it can be rebuilt is to take the house down to its studs and concrete slab foundation.) The good news is that means there are signs of life again… as I look up right now a mailman is making his rounds… yesterday we heard the jangle of an ice cream truck trolling the streets for customers… a small convenience store was open where we walked in to buy Diet Coke and trail mix. The good news is the wonderful young people… college-aged and mid-twenties interns working for the Episcopal Diocese of Louisiana work in hard, sweaty and difficult circumstances every day for little or no pay simply because they CARE and want to make other people’s lives better. The good news is that today we unloaded boxes of “home legend bamboo flooring,” each box containing 24 planks and that means by the end of the week, 840 planks of flooring will be laid where—at the start of this week—there had only been subflooring… one more step toward getting the owner of this house back home.

As part of the orientation, the Diocesan volunteer work coordinators offer arriving volunteers a very solid piece of advice: don’t look at the big picture. When you face a disaster of this magnitude, looking at the big picture is not only unproductive, it is counterproductive. The big picture is out of our control.

What IS in our control is to dip that trowel into that urethane wood flooring adhesive and spread it on the subflooring and lay a piece of flooring on it and by day’s end, one room in one house in one neighborhood in one ward is one step closer to getting one family back into their home.

As people of faith, we take comfort in doing what we can do and trust that our efforts will somehow be knit together in the bigger picture which only God can see.

Thank you for your financial and material support (a special thanks to Kids with Purpose for supplying snacks, a gift certificate to Home Depot, and specially hand decorated reusable lunch bags.) and please keep the Team NOLA participants in your prayers. They are: Elizabeth Coppersmith, Max Coppersmith, Nevel DeHart, Mark Moroz, Teri Moy, Mike Nunnally, Bill Oldham, Jennifer Ramirez, Peggy Rust, Tom Smith, Henry Stribling, Kimberly Stribling, and Robert Twigg. While I return to Leesburg tomorrow night to be in church on Sunday, they will continue to work through Tuesday.

See you Sunday,

Fr. John