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This article is reprinted from the St. Paul Pioneer Press, January 2, 2006
A whirlwind of help
Volunteers found Woodbury church's mission irresistible
BY NANCY YANG
Pioneer Press
OCEAN SPRINGS, Miss. — Her home was in tatters, her clothes and shoes were found more than a block away and a neighbor's house was flipped on its side in her yard.
Four months later, Gaye Row's hurricane-ravaged home is still in tatters. Clothes and shoes still are strewn about the block. But the neighbor's house? That's gone from the yard — one sign of progress.
In the time since Hurricane Katrina swept away nearly everything from her home, Row has moved twice to temporary residences, watched her husband lose his business and performed her work as a U.S. Navy budget analyst out of a makeshift office while trying to clean and repair her home and that of her mother, who lives a few blocks away.
"I tried to do what I can, but it was just so overwhelming," she said.
Then help came from Woodbury Lutheran Church. The congregation has made the recovery of Ocean Springs its mission. Volunteers have cycled into the Gulf Coast community on five trips since September, bringing needed supplies and willing hands to help some of Ocean Springs' 19,000 residents rebuild.
And they plan to keep coming. Woodbury Lutheran has committed to one year of work, coordinated through the First Baptist Church in Ocean Springs. Four more teams are scheduled to head south this month alone, with three others slated through April.
The first crews were all cleanup — they hauled debris from homes and tore out storm-soaked walls that would have to be rebuilt. On Tuesday, a contingent of more than 40 volunteers started to arrive in Ocean Springs, ready to do whatever was needed as the work turns slowly from cleanup to reconstruction.
Row was among the nearly dozen residents the recent volunteers helped during their stay in Mississippi, along with Linda Carriere, who lives with her two daughters, Nisha and Rishawn, next door to her brother, Herb Hardy.
To date, First Baptist Church has coordinated the help given to about 300 people since the storm, with another 300 people now receiving or expecting help through the church.
NEW PROS
Linda Carriere took a spin around her daughter's house Wednesday, her eyes shifting from the half-naked walls where up to four feet of drywall had been stripped away, a victim of the hurricane's floodwaters, to the stacks of drywall waiting to be nailed up.
"How much experience do you guys have?" she asked the four-person Woodbury team assigned to repair the home.
Pause.
"Well, we all have some kind of experience," said Mark Bonney, who works as a product manager at 3M Co.
"Are you sure you want us working on your house?" Stephanie Botz-Nelson asked.
Carriere laughed. "We're just blessed to have y'all," she said.
It was a day of firsts for many construction novices on the Woodbury church team.
Jacob Nelson hadn't hung drywall before this trip. The closest he had come to construction before was doing woodwork while making musical instruments for a Stillwater company.
"It's kind of similar in that I use a tape measure," he told Carriere, who couldn't resist egging on the team the rest of the day.
"Do you do this type of work often?" Carriere asked Botz-Nelson.
Botz-Nelson — who is employed by two Twin Cities battered-women's shelters — answered with a laugh. "No."
"Oh, Lord," Carriere said melodramatically, her hands over her heart, a deep chuckle rising from her throat.
But by the end of that day, the volunteers joked that they had become bona fide professionals who could wield power tools, drywall cutters and measuring tape with ease.
Lisa Bonney and Botz-Nelson were newbies that morning when they picked up their drills. It was a different story by midafternoon, when both seemed as though they had been hefting them their entire lives.
THE WORKERS
Stephanie Botz-Nelson and Jacob Nelson ended up in Ocean Springs by word-of-mouth.
Botz-Nelson heard about the Woodbury church's mission to the Gulf Coast through a co-worker who belongs to the congregation.
Word-of-mouth turned into action.
"We came because we wanted to do something," Jacob Nelson said. So they packed up and shipped out, much like Pat Sullivan and his 14-year-old son, John; Tami Korwin and her two daughters, Kelsi, 11, and Kenzy, 13; and Ardell Nelson and her son, Sam.
None is a member of Woodbury Lutheran. All volunteered after reading or hearing about the church's commitment to Ocean Springs.
Botz-Nelson called immediately about joining the second team, which was sent in October. She spent two days cleaning out an older couple's home on that trip — tearing out drywall, pulling nails and sifting through yard debris — and did much the same last week.
The work was similar, but she saw a difference.
"There's been a lot of progress," she said, "but there's still a lot to be done."
Jacob Nelson surely knows the feeling. On Friday he mulled whether to stay an extra week.
The younger team members brought their own energy to the work: It was barely past 8 a.m. on Wednesday of his holiday break, and 12-year-old Sam Nelson — armed with a crowbar in one hand and a hammer in the other — was ready to get to work breaking things.
He was one of a handful of kids who ventured south with their parents for four days of tiring, 8-to-5 labor.
"He dragged me," Pat Sullivan said of John. "He said, 'Let's go down there!' "
Forget sleeping in. Forget watching television. This was work — but there were moments of fun, too.
During a break from clearing rubble from Row's home, Sam Nelson went fishing, using a pole he found in the house.
"I saw a fish jumping up and down the other day," he said. "I want to catch it."
A CROWDED HOUSE
It was nearing 2 p.m. on Thursday — day two for the Woodbury crew — when Herb Hardy found himself without a way to get inside one of his niece's bedrooms. He wasn't blocked by debris or work supplies — it was people.
"Excuse me," he said to the half-dozen volunteers crowded in the narrow hallway of the house, "can I bring some insulation in?"
There were 13 Minnesota volunteers digging into various tasks at the house — cleaning, nailing, putting Spackle on drywall.
With so many people, some found it hard to work while staying out of others' way. Ardell Nelson decided to work outside, picking up debris that still littered the yard.
Lois Setten observed Nelson's work. "Little by little, you start to see a difference," she said.
Inside the house, a difference also was becoming obvious to Carriere, as once-stripped walls were repaired.
"It looks like a real house," she said.
BACK HOME
The roofers didn't show when they were supposed to, and neither did the plumber. But Lillian and Burleigh Harwood are just happy they're back in their home of 35 years. They moved home Thanksgiving Day, about 10 weeks after they fled.
The couple, both in their mid-70s, were among the first hurricane victims to receive help from the first Woodbury church volunteers.
Those initial workers dragged out flood-soaked furniture and belongings, eventually piling 4 feet of scrapped innards in the yard.
Over the next several weeks, more teams from the church helped the Harwoods repair their house — help the Harwoods are thankful for.
Now, the Harwoods said, they think their time with the church is over. Earlier in the week, they had the last crew of volunteers over to finish cleaning the backyard. The two will work on their own now, with assistance from relatives and contractors as they put the finishing touches on their reconstruction. They expect to be finished by February.
It's evident they love being home. They eagerly welcome visitors and happily give tours, showing the work that has been done.
"It was wonderful to come back out of a one-bedroom motel room," Lillian Harwood said. "But it is kind of lonesome."
Of the 17 houses on their block, only two are inhabited.
'I HIT THE LOTTERY'
On Friday, the third day church volunteers were at her home, Carriere declared that she hadn't worked this hard in years. After her mother died six years ago, Carriere left work and moved in with her daughters.
She was busy raking leaves Friday with a batch of University of Minnesota students who had arrived the night before. She noted her yard had "never looked this good."
As her house transformed from a skeleton to something resembling what it was before the storm, Carriere's mind raced with the things that still needed to be done.
"I'm going to be sad when y'all leave," she told the crew. "It's like I hit the lottery when you came."
Nancy Yang can be reached at nyang@pioneerpress.com or 651-228-5480.