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(This article originally appeared in the Sept. 14 edition of the Woodbury Bulletin)
Answering a call to action
By Patricia Drey
Most Minnesotans witnessed Hurricane Katrina’s devastation through their television sets, but Woodbury Lutheran Church’s youth pastor, Derek Broten, viewed it through the windows of the New Orleans hotel where he was staying.
“Six hours of rumbling and shaking,” he said. “For a Midwestern boy, that was an experience I hope to never go through again.”
Now, Broten and others at Woodbury Lutheran Church are hoping the community of Woodbury will “adopt” a Mississippi town, providing relief until reconstruction is finished.
Broten was one of 60 youth leaders in New Orleans in late August to plan for a 2007 youth conference, which was supposed to bring 35,000 to 40,000 young people to the city. Word that a hurricane was coming made organizers stop the meetings at 1 p.m. Saturday Aug. 27, two days early, and tell everyone to get out of town.
Broten pushed his scheduled Sunday flight a few hours earlier, but he was receiving mixed messages on whether the airport would be open. His group made a few rental car reservations, but they were all contingent upon others returning the cars, an unlikely prospect given the situation.
“People ask, why didn’t people leave? The reality is they couldn’t,” Broten said. “If you didn’t have your own car, you couldn’t leave the city.”
On Sunday, Broten awoke to learn his flight had been canceled, and during another attempt to rent some cars, the group found the rental company deserted.
Broten was one of 13 attending the meeting unable to get out.
“We knew we were going to ride the storm out at that point,” Broten said.
The 13 wandered around town looking for supplies, but most stores were closed. Eventually they found an open liquor store where they bought the last flashlight and some bottled water, and then returned to the hotel.
On Sunday night at about 7:30 p.m., Broten took his comforter and pillow down to a hotel ballroom and claimed his spot for the night. About two hours later, he and his group returned to join about 1,000 other guests and hotel employees — and a few family pets — in two ballrooms to wait out the storm. They expected to be in that room for two to three days, he said.
Watching the rain hit the hotel’s windows was like being in a drive-through car was, he said.
“That wind is a sound that’s just hard to explain. It’s like a freight train going through your living room,” he said.
At one point during the storm a movable roof from another one of the hotel’s ballrooms blew off the building. The crash of the roof breaking nearby shook the hotel, he said.
By Monday afternoon, the hotel allowed guests to return to their rooms. Many walked around outside looking at the damage, he said.
While on Monday, he felt a general elation among those left in the city that they’d survived the storm, but that quickly changed to desperation Tuesday with news that a levy had broken.
“Tuesday morning, we knew we had to get out,” he said.
The group was fortunate that one of its members had relatives from the city that they’d discovered were riding out the storm in a nearby hotel. The New Orleans residents didn’t want to leave, but after much persuasion, they talked them into leaving, and taking the 13 with them.
Fitting the large group into three small cars was tough, and they left their suitcases and almost everything inside behind.
“What we found out is we got out in just the nick of time,” he said.
While seeing the hurricane’s devastation firsthand gave Broten a strong desire to do something to help its victims, for another Woodbury Lutheran Church member, seeing television images of the city she’d grown up in battered and flooded drove her to action.
On the first day of watching the images, Maria Engen said she and her husband were “bawling.” By the fourth day, she couldn’t watch anymore.
Engen, whose sister lives in New Orleans and brother lives in a small Mississippi town also hit by the storm, needed to do something. When her brother told her how another city had “adopted” his town of Petal, Miss., to help them rebuild, Engen was inspired to do the same thing for another town.
“We can find a town and make a difference in their lives,” Engen said. “That is what we’re doing.”
Engen’s brother recommended she call a pastor in a town of about 20,000 called Ocean Springs, Miss., he’d heard they needed help there. Engen called for 12 hours before she could get through, and for two more days before she could get through again. Through phone messages and e-mail, the church got a hold of a list of items needed in Ocean Springs, and made arrangements to send a group of volunteers down that planned to leave Sept. 13.
Engen said the pastor seemed thankful for the help, but not surprised.
“We’re Christians – that’s what the body does,” Engen said.
The church’s goal is to help with the city’s long-term needs, sending trucks full of supplies and various teams of both adults and students until the job is done.
“Our hope is the long haul,” Broten said. “They’re not piecing together their lives in two or three weeks.”
The group’s vision, Broten said, is that the community of Woodbury – including businesses, schools and other churches – would partner with them to send help to the Mississippi town.
For more information on helping send relief to Ocean Springs, contact Derek Broten at 651-739-5144 or e-mail.
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Permission to reprint this article was granted by the Woodbury Bulletin.