Editor's Note: The Daily's Marc Raifman accompanied Tufts volunteers on this trip to Gulfport, Mississippi.
Tufts volunteers who set out to sow hope in a Katrina-ravaged Mississippi town found themselves in a community in the midst of a long and convoluted recovery, but also witnessed signs of hope and healing.
This relief effort was organized as a Volunteer Vacation sponsored by the Leonard Carmichael Society. Seniors Alex Kramer and Rachel Rosen planned the trip, which included 87 undergraduate students, seven alumni and 12 graduate students from the Tufts Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning (UEP) School.
While residents of Mississippi watched the fruits of government relief efforts slowly dribble in, Tufts volunteers worked through the Youth for Christ Outreach Program in the coastal town of Gulfport, slowly piecing lives together on the ground.
The volunteers spent their first day helping out with relief administration at a faith-based non-profit organization out of Jackson, Mississippi known as Helping Americans Needing Disaster Support (HANDS).
HANDS Volunteer Coordinator Ann Coggin spoke to the group that afternoon, telling them that one of the primary purposes of volunteers is to give people hope.
Leisha Pickering - wife of Congressman Chip Pickering, who helped found HANDS - said that Mississippi has often been overlooked in the media's Hurricane Katrina coverage.
"[New Orleans] needed a lot of help, but the eye of the storm hit the coast of Mississippi," she said.
HANDS paired the Tufts group with Youth for Christ, a Christian youth organization that is active on 18 public school campuses and sees 3,000 kids a week. The pairing was based on the time that the students were spending in the area, the size of the group and the skill level of the group.
HANDS provided the cots that the volunteers slept in for the rest of the week, but all work orders were provided by Brad Holt, Executive Director of Youth for Christ.
Holt estimated that the Tufts volunteers, who were originally split into 10 groups, assisted in about 20 jobs.
The jobs that this volunteer group undertook were limited because the group was relatively unskilled, but group assignments ranged from taking apart floor tiling and wiring on the inside of houses to cleaning debris in yards and public parks.
One group of four students assisted in the building of a house.
"All that was there was the foundation," Matt Woodward, one of the four students, said. "It was hard work."
Woordward said that when he and the three other students were chosen by the St. James Church, "they didn't ask who had skills at building a house, they asked for four guys."
"I think they really underestimated the work power we had," said sophomore Lauren Basile, one of the volunteers not chosen to build the house.
Holt and his wife Michelle acknowledged that southern American culture does not encourage women to work side by side with men on physically trying jobs.
"In the deep south, the mentality is that ladies are precious," Holt said, as Michelle quickly added, "Yes we are."
Each day, one group was required to stay behind to keep the center clean and make food - usually pasta - for the others, but nearby fast-food restaurants were still frequented by some members of the group.
According to Holt, Youth for Christ sends volunteers to people who contact the organization requesting help. The organization's phone number ran on a local television channel and radio station.
"[The phone] rings off the hook all the time," Holt said.
He also said that his 19-member staff directed relief to the people that they work with during their non-relief outreach.
"We've asked teachers if they have family and friends [who need help]," Holt said.
Maximum efficiency?
Some volunteers felt that Youth for Christ did not use their abilities as efficiently as they could have.
First-year Urban and Environmental Planning graduate student Craig Nicholson worked with his group at Holt's house for two and a half days. They worked on roof repair, fence repair, yard cleanup, and replacing electrical outlets. Another group that was there worked on mulching Holt's garden.
Nicholson said that his group was putting the finishing touches on the repairs to Holt's house.
"It obviously had a lot of work done on it already," he said.
By Sunday, Nicholson said, some members of his group split off to go help Holt's neighbor - who is currently living in a trailer - with her yard. The neighbor's house was still moldy.
Holt, who currently lives in his wife's residence and hopes to be able to move back into his house in three weeks, estimated that on third of the houses on the coast were unlivable. He added that the numbers of volunteers are constantly decreasing but the workload is not.
He said that his organization is "one of the few" that continues to house teams of volunteers.
"[Churches] are just overwhelmed," he said.
Holt hopes to continue hosting volunteers through August of 2006.
Hands-on help
Senior citizen Anna Cumbest got in touch with the Youth for Christ Outreach Program after its volunteer services were advertised on a local news channel. When Katrina hit, Anna and her sister Lorrene were taking refuge in Alabama. Both women essentially became nomads as they were forced to sleep on park benches in Alabama for two nights.
"[We] just moved from place to place to place," Lorene said.
Eventually, Lorene received a trailer from FEMA where both sisters now reside. The nearest bathroom available to them is at a McDonald's restaurant on Highway 90.
On Jan. 14, a small group of Tufts volunteers arrived at Anna's house to find a patchy lawn littered with heaps of debris from fallen trees, sodden insulation, broken glass and wooden boards with protruding nails. The mess had not been touched since August, and the inside of the house was not in livable condition.
While working, one Tufts student accidentally stepped on a nail, piercing his boot and foot. Anna offered to have her sister drive him to a hospital for a tetanus shot, and was reminded of the two nails she had pulled from her own foot since the hurricane.
Students salvaged many personal items out from the rubble, including old shoes, photographs (many of which had been blown from other houses), an old Snoopy doll, a still-green Christmas tree in a box, and a used coloring book. The covers were black and destroyed, but the inside pages remained in good condition.
In approximately four hours, the students had completely cleaned the front yard of all debris, and had made significant progress on the back.
'...not government helping people'
Anna said that in her observation, relief efforts had been spearheaded by volunteers rather than the government. It's "people helping people, not government helping people," she said.
"I've watched them go house to house," Lorrene said of volunteers from churches. "They put on their gloves and have done the job."
Both Cumbest sisters praised the Christian community in general, which has spearheaded volunteer relief efforts in Gulfport among other areas.
"Volunteers have done it all...given us food for three months...a shoulder to cry on," Anna said.
Lorrene did acknowledge that FEMA had provided trailers and $2,000 per person for those afflicted by the hurricane, but said that there were few places to spend the money until businesses returned to the area.
David D'Aquilla, Assistant Director of the Department of Leisure Sources of Gulfport, said that from within his position in the local government he was not aware of any city-directed relief efforts for private residents.
"That's more through the churches," he said, noting that government officials would refer people seeking help to appropriate church groups.
On Jan. 17, approximately 20 of the volunteers visited Verlon Herbert's home in Gulfport. Herbert had been in her house with her three-year-old grandson when Katrina hit. She said that she saw the wall move and the ceiling rise.
Her son had seen Youth for Christ advertised on TV and called on her behalf. Herbert lived with a nearby friend until her family was given trailers by FEMA. She estimated that she got the trailers in early October, though she conceded that she did not have a good sense of that time period.
Volunteers spent the morning gutting the house, moving furniture, spackling the walls, filling in cracks and removing tile from the floor. Others simply stood around: At times, there were not enough jobs for all of the unskilled volunteers to be doing something at once.
"Do any of you guys know how to close off a gas valve?" Herbert questioned before anyone was put to work at her house.
The group cleared debris from Herbert's porch and yard - debris that Herbert said had been there since October. They found a box of her photographs - amazingly, still in good condition.
"I feel so blessed and grateful," she said. Volunteers chatted and laughed with her, snapping pictures.
Soon after the volunteers arrived, Herbert called upon neighbors - demolition company workers Jeremy Potter and Jared Kuhn - to help with some of the heavier jobs.
After they helped the students remove the house's broken toilet, the men discussed their experience working for Koke Enteprises, a construction and demolition firm that is helping with rebuilding efforts in the area. Both live out of state, but have recently moved to the area with the company. According to Potter, they do not live in trailers, but were given houses by Koke Enterprises.
Herbert works as Marketing Representative for the Mississippi Coast Colliseum and Convention Center in Biloxi. According to Executive Director Bill Holmes, FEMA recently helped out this public agency by fixing the electrical systems in the building, and renting out its facilities as its headquarters.
"[It's a] wonderful thing for us," he said.
Though things were looking up for her employer, Herbert was particularly worried about an elderly woman down the street whose house still looked damaged.
"People need help," she said.
But some Mississippi residents were not grateful for the outsiders' presence. Student volunteers and seniors Zoe Bolesta and Ilsa Dohmen knocked on eight doors in Herbert's neighborhood, but did not find anyone who wanted help.
"None of them opened the door very wide," Bolesta said. She thought that the unannounced arrival of volunteers might have seemed threatening.
One elderly woman, dressed in a nightgown, said that a different church was going to come help her with her house, Bolesta said. "[It was] one of the few houses on the street that wasn't cleaned up," she
added.
Picking up the pieces at a park
On Jan. 16, approximately 20 students cleaned up a park in Bayou View, a neighborhood in Gulfport.
At the park, students spent most of the day picking up fallen branches, and piling and transporting leaves and pine needles.
The volunteers were not given directions on how to clean the park, but they were given rakes, shovels and wheelbarrows from the Youth for Christ Center. Most raked or carried debris to the side of the road, although a few students began an unsuccessful process of de-rooting the park, which had many tree stumps.
The houses around the park showed few signs of damage from the hurricane. One three-story house was being built next to the park by Ingram Inc. The workers employed through that project also piled debris in the park, by the road.
Another volunteer group, made up of a Presbyterian congregation from Pennsylvania, was working on a house near the park.
Holt, who gave the work order to clean the park, had spoken with D'Aquilla. When asked by Holt in what ways Youth for Christ volunteers could help, D'Aquilla requested that volunteers clean the park, and assured him that piles of debris would be cleared by the city.
Holt said that he usually has large volunteer teams clean at least one park.
D'Aquilla said that the Gulfport Parks Department lost five of its 12 members after the hurricane, and that the volunteer efforts allow the department to focus on other things.
D'Aquilla explained that the piles of debris made on Jan. 16 by students were condensed on Jan. 17 by Phillips and Jordan Disaster Recovery Group. He expects that the piles will be removed by the company soon. He added that the city of Gulfport has a contract with Phillips and Jordan as part of FEMA's broad recovery program, and he said that there is a lot of paperwork to go through before the piles can be removed.
"It's all got to be processed through FEMA and insurance," D'Aquilla said. "It's out of our control a little bit."
He added that when a different park was cleaned up in late December, Phillips and Jordan cleared the piles a week later.
Playground equipment and a fence around two tennis courts at the park were in poor condition, but D'Aquilla said that he hoped the park would be completely rebuilt in the next few months.
"This is a process," he said. He expects cleanup of public areas in Gulfport to continue at least through March, as the city is moving from area to area working on public facilities.
While the volunteers worked on the park, Ray Smith of Burford's Tree Surgeons drove around with his co-workers cutting down tree branches that were dangerous to power lines.
He said that they were being employed by the Mississippi Power Company. When he saw the Tufts volunteers in the park, he assumed that they were FEMA workers.
Local residents were grateful to the volunteers for cleaning the park. A man who walked his dogs through the park stopped to thank a group that was raking pine needles.
UEP graduate student Cyndi Veit witnessed a mother and her daughter drive onto the edge of the park.
"[She] just said she wanted to thank us all so much," Veit said.
