8 Days of Hope V

I spent New Year's week in Mississippi, working with a reconstruction organization called 8 Days of Hope. It's a bit of a blur, because of all the work we did there, but I'll try to sum things up.

We left the Friday morning before New Year's in the church van with a trailer full of tools, and drove to Bay St. Louis, MS, a town between New Orleans and Gulfport. 8 Days of Hope V was based out of a retreat center run by a Catholic church there, St. Rose de Lima. A couple of the ladies for our group left a few hours ahead of us, and got our lodging set up. We were assigned a couple cabins with bunk beds and foam mattresses at a Baptist church about 15 minutes away from St. Rose. This was a pleasant surprise, because we had expected to just be in some gym. Also nice was that a Baptist church from Alabama had brought a couple of full-length trailers that were outfitted with 3 full bathrooms each, and hooked them into the church's water and sewer. So we had nice facilities compared to what I was expecting.

Friday evening was a brief orientation, just enough so we knew what to do the next day to get work assignments. The guy leading our team from here was one of the project managers, so he chose a project that our entire team (our leader, his wife, and two of their grandchildren; a family of four; a family of six; two teenage girls who came without their parents; and myself and two other single guys) could work on.

The original "job" was at a house just a couple blocks from St. Rose, and the sheet said that we were supposed to move his personal items out, remove the kitchen counters, and tear out the ceiling in 2 bathrooms and 1 bedroom. However, it was planned that once a team did that part, other teams would come in to star fixing up the insides. They like to set the jobs so that specialists can just do their thing, or unskilled people can do simple stuff so the specialists don't have to. Instead, we just took the whole house on.

The home owner, Tal Raboteau, works at the Stennis Space Center, and is a reserve police officer as a second job. He's lived in Bay St. Louis most of his life. When the Storm came, he was at Stennis, where he's an emegency shelter manager. His house came off the foundation and floated around his lot for about an hour. A previous relief group had gotten his house back on the foundations a few months after the storm, another had raised the house 2 feet above ground level on concrete pylons, while a third had repaired several leaks in the roof that had damaged the ceilings. He's been living in a FEMA trailer next to the house with his son since the Storm.

The one thing that I had to get used to for the trip is the schedule. We were up at 5:30 every morning, working 7:30-5, and lights out at 9:30 PM. Sleeping with 7 other men in a bunkroom was rather interesting, especially when several of them snore.

We started work on Saturday, and it took about half the day to complete our "official" job of removing all his stuff and tearing down those ceilings. Then we started into the real work: restoring his home.

I spent the rest of Saturday working with the other single guys and one of the dads on hanging new sheetrock ceilings in one of the bedrooms. Given all the moves the house had been through, we quickly learned that the word "square" was not going to be in our project vocabulary. It slowed the work down a whole lot for us, and the fact that none of us had hung sheetrock before didn't help. However, we figured out what was up, and started making better progress around the end of the day. Other groups from our team started working on taking out old flooring and doors, as well as priming the walls and remaining ceilings.

On Sunday we had the morning off, so we went for a drive along the coastline to see what it looks like now. Some people have rebuilt their houses, but a lot are still living in trailers, and a lot more have either been abandoned or demolished and cleared. Insurance rates went through the roof, so it's not worth it for a lot of people, and they those who've left are trying to sell their property and failing miserably due to the prices.

Sunday afternoon we were able to almost finish the bedroom we'd been working on, and started looking at the second to plan strategy for it. Monday we finished the first bedroom ceiling, and got about halfway through the second. That night, they had a New Year's Eve worship service out on the beach, but we still ended way earlier than midnight. First time in about ten years that I haven't been awake for the new year.

Tuesday the last family arrived, so we split into two groups for sheetrocking, and did both the second bedroom and the bathroom in one day. Once we got the bedroom done, I started bouncing from here to there as needed. I did some caulking, some "mudding" (filling in the gaps between sheetrock panels and any cracks in the walls with goop to seal them), a little painting, and helping with the new flooring (we were putting hardwood paneling down everywhere except the kitchen and bathrooms).

On Wednesday, we had a major cold snap. It was 20 degrees when we got up that morning. Fortunately, we weren't going to be doing any major exterior work, and the house's heater worked well. I did some more odd job work, and helped hang a couple new prefab doors in the morning. The doors gave us major trouble for the entire week, as many of them didn't even fit the frames they came in. For the afternoon, I assisted with laying down the tiling in the kitchen. It took all afternoon, but we just barely made it before we had to quit for the day, and were able to let the cement harden overnight. By the end of the day, they'd also been able to start painting on the outside of the house.

Thursday was cold again, only a few degrees warmer than the previous night. It progressed pretty much like the previous day, doing odd jobs for part of the day, mostly hanging additional doors. It went slower, because there we had spread out a little more and I had less help with it. Then I was assisting with grouting the kitchen tiles in the afternoon, and cleaning off the excess grout took the rest of the day. However, we also lost about half our group, as they had to head back, so the next day was going to be the race to the finish.

On Friday, it was a little bit warmer, but still too cold for much outside work. It was just as well, because we had plenty for the rest of us to do indoors. We had almost finished the master bathroom, but had to get the fixtures back in before we could take down the main bathroom to tile it. So first I helped get the fixtures in, then I went charging into the main bath, got its fixtures out, and seated the cement board for the tile to attach to. Then we got the cement mixed and tiled the entire room before lunch. While the cement mixed, I helped get the kitchen cabinets back in and fastened down. It hardened enough that by early afternoon we were able to grout the tiles and hang the remaining doors. Meanwhile, the other groups had finished painting, and we'd gotten another small team in that finished painting the exterior of the house. After the grout was done in the bathroom and the doors hung, we were in cleanup mode. We managed to get the entire place swept and mopped, and moved a few key items back in (we'd put everything into the attached garage, so it was protected from the weather all week). Tal was extremely grateful for everything we'd done, even though there was still a lot of minor work yet to finish. We didn't get some of the lighting replaced, and some electrical work still needed completion. However, it was livable again, and he planned to move in that night, even if it meant just using a sleeping bag.

Friday night was our wrap-up meeting, where they told us that there had been over 1100 volunteers, and had finished about 330 jobs. This was almost double the job total from the previous trip a year before. Saturday, we left as soon as we'd packed and cleaned up our cabins. We drove through New Orleans on I-10 to come back. I'm told that it looks much better, but there are still large sections that have either been abandoned or not completely rebuilt. It's sobering to realize that even 2+ years after the Storms, there is still so much work that needs to be done throughout the region. At the rate things have gone, it may take a decade for things to return to normal.