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San Carlos and San Mateo keep Volunteers flowing!
Article Last Updated: 8/31/2006 11:40 AM
Welcome to the 'plywood cathedral -- By Rebekah Gordon, STAFF WRITER
Inside Bay Area PASS CHRISTIAN, Miss. Instead of stained glass windows, Trinity Episcopal Church has DuPont Tyvek HomeWrap. The industrial plastic does the job well enough, filtering the light that falls on worshippers from three sides of the chapel's upper reaches on Sunday mornings. Incandescent work lights, folding chairs and a small electronic organ now complete the Sunday-morning ambiance.
"This is our plywood cathedral," said the Rev. Christopher Colby. The church, blown out by Hurricane Katrina a year ago, save for its ceiling and buttresses, still has a visible water line 22 feet high. No pews, hymnals or altarpieces were left behind after the storm. Even the floor was ripped away.
Established in 1849, the church once had 255 households in its congregation with about 165 people attending either a traditional service at 8 a.m. or a contemporary family service at 10 a.m. Now, one year after the storm, about 50 households belong to the church, which draws about 90 worshippers each Sunday for one 9 a.m. service.
Fewer than 3,000 of Pass Christian's nearly 7,000 residents have trickled back to the Gulf Coast town, which lost all of its businesses and 80 percent of its homes when Katrina came barreling through.
San Carlos residents adopted Pass Christian after the hurricane last year and local churches have chipped in to help the Mississippi community rebuild. A Mardi Gras fundraiser at St. Charles Catholic Church earlier this year netted $8,000 for Pass Christian's Catholics.
For the town's congregations, the shrinkage has sometimes been a difficult adjustment. For some, services are conducted out of ad hoc locales like a parish hall and the town's two Baptist churches share space with a third in nearby DeLisle. Even if their house of worship was spared, churches attendance is just a fraction of what it was before the storm. But the disaster has had its positive side, distilling attendance down to the hardiest churchgoers and knitting closer relationships between them.
"People, before, they wouldn't even give you the time of day. I mean, they weren't ever nasty to you, but they're really nice now," said Marie Fry, 58, who lost her home in the storm and has been a parishioner at Trinity for three years. "We've all kind of been reduced down to the same level and people that are left here need to help each other. And they do, they really do. It just feels more like family now."
Katherine Foster, 34, a mother of two and oceanographer at the nearby U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, said that people now linger longer at Trinity after the service. Though she has moved back into her storm-damaged home, she said the church is a good distraction for those living in more trying situations, such as government-issue trailers.
"You know that when you come here, you cannot think about it for a while," Foster said.
The church's leader for nine years, Colby, 53, recalled that there were 15 people at services the first Sunday after the storm. That number grew over the last year and he is confident it will continue to rise. He has committed to rebuilding and is planning for an even larger congregation than he had before.
But rebuilding is the hardest job he's ever undertaken.
"I've started two churches from scratch, but this is like we have to build the town from scratch, then build the church," Colby said. "I never thought I'd be in a place that was obliterated."
The town's Catholic churches have undergone more drastic changes, with two parishes combined into the new Holy Family Parish. The parish combines what is left of St. Paul's Catholic Church and Our Lady of Lourdes, with masses held every day at Lourdes. Just yards from the beach, St. Paul's was badly damaged by water, while Lourdes, further from the coast, remained in good shape.
Before the storm, the two parishes had somewhere between 1,100 and 1,200 families. Now there are 600 between the two; just 20 percent of St. Paul's congregation has returned, according to the Rev. Dennis Carver.
The smaller congregation, combined with the prospect of no replacement for Lourdes' 83-year-old priest, led to the consolidation. "We would do harm to ourselves if we were to continue to remain separate or individualistic or parochial," Carver said. "The coming together of these two parishes has been really, I think, a symbol to the people of what we need to do. We need to be together."
Not that it has been easy.
Lourdes members lament that their church no longer feels like a small neighborhood congregation, Carver said; Lourdes now conducts six Masses on Sunday instead of one. The move is partly to accommodate more people, but also to follow the schedule that St. Paul's once had, a deliberate choice on Carver's part to maintain some semblance of continuity for his worshippers.
Members of St. Paul's, established in 1847, mourn the dwindling of a major institution. Schematics for rebuilding have been drawn up, but the parish will have just three buildings a parish hall, administrative offices and the sanctuary to replace 10. The parish school, which served 170 children, will be rebuilt further inland.
"There is a still a feeling of trepidation, still a feeling of knowing that there is going to be more change coming," Carver said. But he remains optimistic. And he senses a strengthening faith and connection among parishioners as he has seen rich and poor alike have their possessions washed away.
"Especially in the Catholic tradition, there is redemption in suffering," Carver said. "That's going to make the faith of the people here much stronger."
Staff writer Rebekah Gordon can be reached at (650) 306-2428 or rgordon@angnewspapers.com.
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Article Last Updated: 8/28/2006 08:05 AM
Where did all the volunteers go?
A year later, hurricane help drying up San Carlos among few organizations still lending a hand to rebuilding small towns BY Rebekah Gordon - STAFF WRITER
Inside Bay Area PASS CHRISTIAN, Miss. - For San Carlos resident Christine Thom, it was the hollow look on the faces of Pass Christian's Katrina victims that got to her.
That, and the hordes of volunteers who showed up to help them.
"People gave up their lives, put their lives on hold to come down and help total strangers," said Thom, 55, who was part of a team of four people from San Carlos who went to Pass Christian for the first time in November. "I thought that was just awesome."
Inspired by the experience, she and her husband, Dave, returned in March and plan to go again in the coming months to help. They are active members of the San Carlos Pass Christian Relief Committee, which was formed last year by the San Carlos Chamber of Commerce to provide long-term relief and rebuilding assistance to the small Gulf Coast town.
The committee has gathered members from all corners of San Carlos — churches, schools, the Rotary Club, city government — and raised more than $35,000 in cash and another $4,500 in gift cards for Pass Christian. They've also sent countless boxes of donated supplies and handfuls of volunteers to help.
On Aug. 20, the San Carlos group raised more than $2,000 for Pass Christian through a 5.4-mile "Pedaling for Pass" bike ride.
"People here have forgotten, and that's one of our missions, to keep them aware," said Thom, who runs a hair salon out of her home. "This is a monumental disaster and we have to keep helping."
Flow of volunteers dwindles
One year after Hurricane Katrina devastated Pass Christian, residents say that help from cities like San Carlos is still sorely needed. Several people were quick to point out that the town, which lost 80 percent of its houses and all of its businesses in the Aug. 29 storm, would not have made much progress without the help of out-of-town volunteers. They are able bodies for work that otherwise wouldn't get done and a palpable sign of hope in an otherwise bleak landscape.
The volunteers that come are committed to the cause. The vast majority are from Christian church groups, although even others say they feel called by God to help. Some church groups arrived to help before federal officials set foot on the Gulf Coast.
But a year after the hurricane, the number of volunteers has dwindled from about 300 a week to 50.
"You cannot depend on volunteers because they go home," said Amy Hardee, a long-term volunteer who helps run The Grey Hut, Pass Christian's assistance center. "We can't do without them, but they have a life in another community."
Hardee, 51, came to Pass Christian from Hillsborough, N.C., last September with a truckload of 7,000 pounds of goods, and she hasn't returned home much since. She has stayed here to handle the monumental task of coordinating residents' work requests with the volunteers who show up.
For months after the storm, groups just dropped in and worked where they saw fit. Residents who didn't know where to go for help fell through the cracks.
Now, Hardee, a bubbly mother-figure who ran a day care center before the storm, said she has compiled 357 requests for help with rebuilding, and another 300 requests for help with rehabilitation on structures that survived.
But doling that work out to volunteers is easier said than done. There is a dearth of skilled volunteer labor — electricians, plumbers and contractors. Further, the various volunteer outfits that still maintain a presence on the coast, from Randy's Rangers to the Mennonite Disaster Service, have operated as independent entities over the past year.
"We've got to break down territorial expanses so we're working toward the same goal, which is putting people in homes," Hardee said.
She recently went to ask Gov. Haley Barbour's office for $15 million for rebuilding homes, at $50,000 a pop, to be completed by Camp Coast Care, a mission of the Lutheran and Episcopal Disaster Response.
Doing God's work
Most of the Christian relief workers in town find their way to God's Katrina Kitchen, an effort started by Greg Porter, who came from Kentucky to hand out food in the days after the storm.
At its height, the kitchen served more than 3,000 meals a day. Today, it's less than 300.
The kitchen serves three meals a day to anyone, no questions asked, and will do so until the funding and the food — 10 pallets of ice cream showed up a month ago — stops coming.
But it's far more than a mess hall. The operation, with a staff of about a dozen, also houses volunteers and coordinates work assignments. And there is no mistaking its dual mission — free Bibles are for the taking at a nightly tent evangelical service.
"I really see what's happening here as fertile ground for revival of our whole country," said the Rev. James Giles, a Pittsburgh-based Episcopalian minister with Church Army USA who now coordinates volunteer short-term mission teams for God's Katrina Kitchen and lives in a trailer on the site.
Staying at the kitchen in early August was Heritage Bible Church of Princeton, Mass., which spent a week helping residents clear debris and build storage and pump sheds.
Despite their efforts, Heritage member Jon Drohan, 18, said he was surprised by the lack of volunteers in town.
"It's sad because there's not as much relief effort going on as there should be, even though it's been a year," Drohan said.
Even the presence of AmeriCorps, a network of national service programs launched under President Bill Clinton in 1993, has waned.
In the weeks following the storm, the U.S. Naval Construction Force, or Seabees, built a tent village that sleeps 300 to 400 people to house relief workers and hurricane victims.
Stationed in the tent city, about 25 people from AmeriCorps' emergency response team recruited dozens of volunteers and coordinated their work. Today, just two AmeriCorps staffers manage fewer than 10 volunteers, and the organization plans to vacate entirely by March.
Still, San Carlos residents seem committed for the long haul, said Sheryl Pomerenk, the chief executive of the San Carlos Chamber of Commerce.
The difference, she said, may be in the relationship the city is attempting to forge with the Mississippi town beyond providing immediate hurricane relief. Friendships have grown between the communities.
Pomerenk predicted that San Carlos will help Pass Christian for at least three more years. "People will get involved on a personal level if it's personal on the other end," she said.
Staff writer Rebekah Gordon can be reached at (650) 306-2428 or rgordon@angnewspapers.com.
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Article Last Updated: 8/26/2006 11:07 PM
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'Kafe' serves hot comfort food and cold air
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Former day-care center is oasis in destroyed town
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By Rebekah Gordon , STAFF WRITER
Inside Bay Area
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PASS CHRISTIAN, Miss. — Kafe Katrina is without a doubt the coolest restaurant in town.
"They do a wonderful job with the food and service," said Scotty Crawford, 52, who spends his days overseeing asbestos removal from hurricane-ravaged buildings. "And it's about the only place in town where you sit down and eat in air conditioning."
The catchy name is nice, but a full-service restaurant is a downright necessity in this Gulf Coast town, which lost all of its businesses in the storm last August.
Once a day-care center, Kafe Katrina and the attached Aftermath Lounge have become Pass Christian's principal dining and drinking spot. The staff prides itself on "cooking up a storm" of Southern comfort food. Catfish, oyster platters, meatloaf specials, crawfish po'boy sandwiches and blackberry cobbler are staples for the 400 or so diners that come through daily.
"The area definitely needs the place," said 53-year-old Jack Seybold, who eats at Kafe Katrina a couple times a month and works as a contractor at DuPont's manufacturing site in nearby DeLisle.
The lack of restaurants here is a sign of the slow pace of recovery. Some eateries were simply obliterated in the storm, their return entirely uncertain. Others have reopened as a shell of their former selves, like the Pirate's Cove, which serves po'boys out of a trailer window.
Kafe Katrina owners Ginger and Mike Holmes never saw themselves as saviors. Ginger Holmes, 40, was in tears after the hurricane: her day care center, which opened just 13 months earlier to serve 126 children, had flooded with at least 11 feet of water.
But the 6,300-square-foot structure survived, and in October the idea of the restaurant was born out of conversations with hungry demolition workers and fears that day-care customers would not return.
The couple, married for 22 years with three children, had no experience actually running a restaurant. Nevertheless, they opened in March, serving 60 plates on their first day.
"Once the word got out, it was no time and we were doing 250 plates a day, almost every day," said Holmes. "And that's just between the hours of 10:30 and 2. So if you divide that out, that's almost a plate a minute or less."
A month later, they began serving dinner three nights a week and now employ a staff of 10 to 15 to keep the place running. A private room is quickly becoming a favorite for events like birthday parties, which can be tough to hold in a trailer. Hundreds packed the place for an election victory party for the town's new mayor, Leo "Chipper" McDermott.
The Aftermath Lounge is also proving a big draw, particularly for karaoke on Saturday nights, when patrons sometimes stay until 4 or 4:30 in the morning, Holmes said.
Waitress and Pass Christian resident Jaime Deschamp, 25, said that she loves working at Kafe Katrina, especially because of the sense of community from repeat customers.
"You know the people who come in, you know them by their names," she said.
Bobby Freeman, a contractor from Nashville who only makes it home about once every five or six weeks, is one of the regulars. Freeman, 56, has eaten at Kafe Katrina nearly every day since he discovered it in April and said that the food is as good as any he's had anywhere else he's traveled in the country.
"Here, you get home-cooked food, which is what I miss: mashed potatoes, beans and greens, and pork chop and meatloaf," Freeman said. "They do a mean steak on Friday night, too."
Staff writer Rebekah Gordon can be reached at (650) 306-2428 or rgordon@angnewspapers.com.
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