Response: Mission Institutions Offer Hospitality to Hurricane Survivors
by YVETTE MOORE*
Shirley Feet will soon be returning to her rural Louisiana home destroyed more than a year ago when Hurricane Rita whipped through the Gulf states just weeks after Hurricane Katrina and took all her personal belongings with it. Her house in Dulac, La. had to be gutted, leaving only bricks and two-by-fours. Unlike many of her neighbors, Ms. Feet's insurance company issued a check quickly for repairs, but her mortgage company took it.
"Because my house was mortgaged, the check was under my name and the mortgage company's," Ms. Feet said.
Unable to cash the insurance check, Ms. Feet signed it over to the mortgage company, which will reimburse her expenses for repair materials and work after she has paid for them and submitted the receipts. The problem is she doesn't have the money to pay for the repairs and supplies up front.
"That's why I'm still not in my house," Ms. Feet said. "If it wasn't for Dulac Community Center, I wouldn't have anything started because I wouldn't have had the money to get started. The center really came through for a lot of people."
Dulac Community Center, a national United Methodist mission institution in Dulac, receives support from United Methodist Women's Mission Giving. The center purchased much of Ms. Feet's repair materials and arranged for volunteer teams to gut the building and start the renovation work on her home.
Mission institutions respond
Ms. Feet's experience with the center is just one example of how Dulac and national United Methodist mission institutions around the country - all supported by Uni-ted Methodist Women's Mission Giving - came through for people after back-to-back storms ravaged areas along the Gulf of Mexico, dispersing evacuees far and wide. Some have decided to start life anew in cities and towns away from hurricane-prone areas, while others just needed a safe place to lay their heads till they could return home.
Whatever the need, United Methodist mission institutions were there with open doors and helping hands before, during and after the storms:
• Rust College in Holly Springs, Miss., provided housing to several families until they could return to New Orleans or relocate to other areas.
The college made its academic program available to students of schools in the disaster areas, particularly its sister school, Dillard University in New Orleans.
• Wesley House Community Center in Meridian, Miss., offered food, clothing, household items, toiletries and access to its free clinic staffed by medical volunteers.
The center worked closely with local pharmacies to get evacuees' prescribed medicines.
• Dumas Wesley Community Center in Mobile, Ala., offered emergency housing.
• Sager Brown Depot in Baldwin, La., provided relief supplies.
The depot is a joint project of United Methodist Women, which owns the property, and the United Methodist Committee on Relief, which coordinates distribution of relief supplies.
Many of the institutions offered assistance in the midst of their own storm recoveries, including Dulac Community Center, which is 80 miles southwest of New Orleans.
"We got high winds and rain with Katrina, but no rising water," said Alice Rothrock, executive director of the center. "Three weeks later, Rita came, and we got high winds and six feet of water in our gymnasium and some classrooms.
"Because we are so close to New Orleans, we lost a lot of services that usually come our way, including mail delivery and programs that bring us food to distribute. We called around and nobody could help us. They were too busy helping Katrina evacuees to help us with our people. I contacted former volunteers and asked for help. They said, `We're coming.'"
Within four days after Rita, a Volunteer-in-Mission team already scheduled to come to the center arrived early with food and supplies loaded onto a 23-foot trailer, Ms. Rothrock said. Former volunteers also responded by sending money and food. Some scheduled mission trips. The contributions helped the center continue to feed families and seniors who depend on its meal programs.
The generosity also allowed the center to help people like Ms. Feet who were waiting on money from insurance companies, mortgage companies and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). More than 1,700 volunteers worked more than 700 hours repairing the community center and homes damaged in the storms and otherwise serving people in the Dulac area.
"What's happening now is volunteer teams are coming in, and they are doing work so that the funds people receive from their insurance companies or FEMA will go further," Ms. Rothrock said.
Entertaining strangers
A week after Katrina devastated New Orleans, when federal, state and city government sent buses to evacuate stranded people, a new problem arose: where to take them. National United Methodist mission institutions were part of community efforts nationwide to welcome thousands of New Orleans evacuees traumatized not only by Katrina's destruction, but also by a week of government inaction that followed the Category 5 hurricane.
The Red Cross called on Open Door Community Center in Columbus, Ga., to serve as a distribution center for relief supplies. The center's gymnasium was packed full of clothing and household items for about three months, said the Rev. Kim E. Jenkins, executive director of the center.
"One thing that Columbus did very well was that it immediately developed a one-stop shop for relief services," Ms. Jenkins said. "We were off-site because we had all the clothing, but everything else was onsite and geared toward getting kids ready for school. We served about 1,200 people."
The center's ongoing programs include counseling; job training; a 12-bed facility for homeless women with children; and showers, meals and a laundry for transients. Ms. Jenkins said about 500 New Orleans evacuees stayed in the area and made use of the center's programs. The center tracked clients for six months.
Wesley Community Center in Robstown, Texas, accepted the first Katrina evacuees to the Corpus Christi area the Friday after the storm. A Lutheran social-service shelter, which had been destroyed, had a place for families it served but not for its staff.
"We took the staff," said Eddie Jackson-Mathis, executive director of the center in Robstown. "We served 44 people with their families."
In addition to food and shelter, the center transported the staff to work about eight miles away and to local medical facilities.
"The local people got us on TV so everyone heard me say we needed toothbrushes," Ms. Jackson-Mathis said. "When I was listing what we needed, they cut me off. Every dentist in town sent toothbrushes. We had toothbrushes coming out of the ear. But really, we were blessed by the whole experience."
Southside Community Center in San Marcos, Texas, served about 60 New Orleanians displaced by Katrina and about 150 Houstonians fleeing Rita three weeks later. Evacuees from Slidell, La., stayed in the center's shelter for about two months.
People from Houston joined them after an initial government decision to make San Antonio and Austin sites for Houston evacuees with San Marcos as a site to pass by. So many Houstonians took to the road to escape the coming storm, San Marcos had to open its doors.
"The city opened up a shelter at the end of the week," said Rueben Garza, executive director of Southside. "These people were elderly. They were African American, they were White, they were Hispanic. They came with animals: parrots, cats, dogs. It was like Noah's ark. I've never seen anything like it.
"We have a homeless shelter at the center, but we also opened up our gym. We had people in every single office upstairs. The only thing that wasn't filled was our main office. We set up X-Box videos and other games for the kids because they were pretty bored."
Mr. Garza said a local Baptist church provided food for Southside's storm guests while local United Methodist churches provided clothing and toiletries.
"There were so many people, local government was not prepared to handle them," he said. "I've been here 20 years, and I've seen evacuations about four or five times, but never at this magnitude. When you have people parked along the road because they don't know where to go, food begins to run out and gas becomes an issue."
A ministry of advocacy
Moore Community House in Biloxi, Miss., had one building remaining after Katrina. By August, the institution had raised $750,000 - enough to start phase one of its $1.75 million rebuilding project, and was entering into a contract to renovate the existing building. Renovation was to take 12-14 weeks. When done, the center planned to bring back some staff, recruit children and start providing child care again by Jan. 1, 2007.
In the midst of its own recovery, the community house has tried to be a voice for the people it's serves who are all but forgotten in the city's redevelopment plans. Executive Director Carol Burnett said 70-80 new casinos are planned for the area, but no child care or affordable housing.
"We had a beautiful sunrise service at Gulfside Assembly on the one-year anniversary of Katrina," Ms. Burnett said. Gulfside, the historic African-American United Methodist facility in Waveland, Miss., was destroyed by the hurricane. "But at the official commemoration with all the politicians, they were talking about how wonderful the recovery is, touting how far Biloxi has come, focusing on economic development with casinos and high-rise condominiums, some already being built. But affordable housing has not been paid attention to in these redevelopment plans. Child care has not been paid attention to. All this development is not going to happen if you don't have people available who will go to work to make these things happen.
"So much money has come into Mississippi, but it's been difficult to get these needs attended to. If low- and middle-income families are priced out of the market, where are they going to live?"
Ms. Burnett worked with a local organization, Coastal Women for Change, to survey women to give them voice in the recovery efforts. The survey showed 65 percent of women in Biloxi needed child care for children under five.
Ms. Burnett also cited an Oxfam report documenting that while recovery funds came to Mississippi for the rebuilding of homes, homes have not been rebuilt with that money. She cited a third survey by a nonprofit called East Biloxi Relief
Coordination Center documenting the same. Local people have been unable to get insurance companies to pay claims and unable to get grants to rebuild.
"We've had so many meetings and people are just tired of going because we go, state the needs, they get listed in a report, and the money comes and none of the money goes toward those things," Ms. Burnett said. "All of the work in this area that we've been doing, I feel we've been doing with weights tied around our feet. But one wonderful thing is the coalition of organizations that has emerged. Together, we try to have more voice to speak to the issues of the people we serve."
Ms. Burnett said another issue facing low- and moderate-income families in the area is increasing insurance costs. Insurance companies petitioned the state for permission to raise their rates 400 percent in anticipation of future hurri-cane-season claims. Moore Community House was covered by a hurricane insurance policy held by the United Methodist General Board of Global Ministries. The insurance company only paid for wind damage, which it deemed the only damage caused by the hurricane. The center, which was submerged in water from the storm, also had a small amount of flood insurance, she said. It got about $140,000 from various insurance policies.
Volunteer mission teams have provided a tremendous service to Moore Community House, Ms. Burnett said. They removed fallen trees from the property, demolished uninhabitable buildings and did all the work done thus far on the buildings.
"Everything that we've had done, they did," Ms. Burnett said. "They've really been an inspiration to us who are facing this everyday."