[StBernard] Rebuilding lives as a way of life

[Westley Annis]

Aug. 29, 2006, 12:59AM 
Small armies of volunteers are digging in along the Gulf Coast for the 
monumental task of reviving it 
Rebuilding lives as a way of life 

By JEANNIE KEVER 
Copyright 2006 Houston Chronicle 


BURAS, LA. - Maria Nuñez was hanging out on the porch, casually flipping 
slices of ham on a smoky grill between puffs on a hand-rolled cigarette. 


Her face, her chest and her arms still carried the scars from a few weeks 
earlier, when a ball of flame shot from the 10-burner propane stove just 
around the corner, but Nuñez dismissed them. 


"This is home," she said, waving a hand at the twisted shell of the former 
YMCA in remote Buras, 70 miles southeast of New Orleans. "When I got burned 
and I had to go away and stay in air conditioning, all I could think was, I 
want to come home." 


So she was back at what she and other volunteers call "the hippie kitchen," 
a world removed from her old life as pastry chef for a trendy Houston 
bakery. 


Nuñez is part of a growing group that has turned disaster relief into a way 
of life during the year since Hurricane Katrina. In a mix of altruism and 
adventure, they have spent months in tents, church gymnasiums and other 
temporary quarters, often without air conditioning; others, with church 
groups and on their own, come to help for a few days or a few weeks. 


Nuñez and other volunteers with a small relief organization called Emergency

Communities moved to Buras on June 1, bringing hot meals and the area's only

laundromat to a narrow spit of land decimated by Hurricane Katrina, followed

by Hurricane Rita a month later. 


The volunteers, most of them young, many sporting tattoos and multiple 
piercings, were an unlikely fit for a town where most people engaged in 
fishing, farming and other hardscrabble pursuits. But people moving back saw

only a helping hand. 


"Whenever you need anything done, they're there," said Kim LeBlanc, who 
returned to Buras earlier this summer with her husband, Robert, and their 
three children. "They've done a lot more for us than the government." 


Rebuilding, piece by piece 
In the months after Katrina, seemingly everyone who visited the region had a

vision for what the rebuilt Gulf Coast should look like. 


Multifamily, mixed-income housing, built with energy-efficient materials and

situated well above the level of potential threat. Green space and 
pedestrian-friendly walkways. Respectful of the region's traditions, but 
somehow better. 


President Bush weighed in, as have the National Council of Churches, Brad 
Pitt and Usher. 


But a year later, rebuilding remains a piecemeal project, with many 
decisions made on the front lines, often by volunteers from churches and 
community organizations including Catholic Charities, the Association of 
Community Organizations for Reform Now and Habitat for Humanity. 


"You get this immediate emergency relief, but once they classify it as (in) 
the recovery stage, the relief people move out, and you have this vacuum," 
said Alan Splawn, pastor of missions at Fellowship of The Woodlands, which 
has sent scores of people to help in the past year. "It's going to take 
years for this recovery to get fully online." 


Most efforts are small, reclaiming one house at a time. 


With that in mind, 14-year-old Natalie Dunn ducked into a mold-covered home 
in the Gentilly neighborhood of New Orleans earlier this summer, only to 
quickly emerge. 


"It's pretty bad in there." 


Just 30 minutes earlier, Dunn, a freshman at Alief Taylor High School, had 
been lounging in fuzzy pink slippers, poring over a book of devotions as she

and two dozen other members of Houston's First United Methodist Church 
thought about the coming day. 


Youth director Mandy Jones asked them to focus on more than the physical 
pleasures of wielding a sledgehammer and shovel. 


"I really want you to ask why God brought you here," Jones said as they 
gathered in a dining hall at a Methodist church in Metarie, where they 
stayed for the week. 


But as they stepped into Jamie Diggs' battered home - still marked by the 
spray-painted symbols left by the National Guard, indicating that two dogs, 
but no dead bodies, were found - their mission grew tangible. 


The Houston group was there with the United Methodist Committee on Relief, 
which has raised $64.5 million in private donations and is also managing a 
$66 million, two-year grant from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, 
spokeswoman Linda Beher said. 


Diggs' small brick house had belonged to her grandfather, and then her 
mother, before she moved in with her three children. Floodwaters reached the

ceiling, and Diggs had been able only to pull her ruined furniture to the 
curb. 


Help is hard to find - more than half of New Orleans' homes were flooded 
with at least 4 feet of water, creating a seemingly insatiable demand for 
people to remove rotting wood and moldering Sheetrock. With no flood 
insurance and no money forthcoming from her homeowners insurance, Diggs 
waited almost a year until her name rose to the top of the Committee On 
Relief's list. 


Inside, the walls and tile floors had buckled, while corroded canned goods 
crumbled in the kitchen cabinets. Ivy snaked through broken windows, and a 
calendar still turned to August 2005 hung on a bedroom wall. 


Wearing flip-flops and declining the offer of a protective mask, the 
24-year-old Diggs, a nurse living with an aunt while her children remain 
with relatives in Tennessee, grabbed a broom as Jones tackled the kitchen 
cabinets. 


"Oh man!" Jones yelped, recoiling. "There are, like, 8,000 roaches in 
there." 


Diggs didn't blink. Roaches are nothing compared to the other hardships 
facing those who want to come home. 


'I saw the communal spirit' 
The group from First Methodist was there for less than a week. For others, 
disaster relief has become a lifestyle. 


Nuñez, 28, grew up in Friendswood, weaned on community service through her 
mother's participation in Habitat for Humanity and Meals on Wheels. She 
volunteered at the Astrodome as Katrina evacuees streamed into Houston and 
then determined to do more. 


She started out gutting houses but soon heard about the Made with Love Cafe 
in St. Bernard Parish, run by Emergency Communities. 


"It just felt comfortable," she said. "I saw the communal spirit." 


She signed up. 


Emergency Communities was born shortly after the storm. Founder Mark Weiner 
volunteered for a time in a Waveland, Miss., kitchen run by an unlikely 
alliance of evangelical Christians and the Rainbow Family, the free-spirited

folks who gather in national forests to celebrate peace and alternative 
lifestyles. 


Weiner and other volunteers transferred the vibe to a new location last 
fall, seeking through Emergency Communities to fill a niche that other 
disaster relief groups had not. Rather than gutting houses or providing case

management services, Emergency Communities would serve food and try to build

a sense of community. 


The move to Plaquemines Parish was another reinvention. 


Thousands of volunteers and relief agencies have moved to New Orleans and 
the more populous areas of the Mississippi coast, but southern Plaquemines 
Parish still is struggling for survival. There is no grocery store, no 
laundromat, no place to escape the dreary reality of destruction and debris.



Emergency Communities was allowed to perch in the former YMCA, where a 
patched roof provides protection from the relentless sun and civilization 
appears in the form of several industrial fans, a row of washers and dryers,

and strings of lights hanging from the rafters. 


One tent houses a few computers, giving volunteers and residents access to 
e-mail and the Internet. An above-ground swimming pool provides neighborhood

children with a place to cool off, and a row of community showers sits just 
behind the line of portable toilets. 


The number of volunteers varies - longtimers like Nuñez, who oversees the 
kitchen, are supplemented by people in for a week or two, often students or 
teachers free for the summer - but hovers around 25. By late summer, the 
group was serving about 200 meals a day. 


Luke Ippoliti, a 25-year-old graduate of the New York University film 
program, runs the Buras location, drawn in when Weiner, a casual 
acquaintance, needed someone to help deliver donated tents to St. Bernard 
Parish. 


His goal is to create a respite in the midst of devastation. 


"Everything is so ugly," he said. "Everything they love has just been 
destroyed." 


LeBlanc walked into the center recently for a meal with her two youngest 
children, Christopher, 6, and Helen, 2. 


"This is nice," she said with no trace of irony as she looked over the piles

of second-hand bathroom sinks, PVC pipe and other items that might one day 
be useful. "We can come here to wash our clothes, and it's free. The meals 
are ready like clockwork." 


LeBlanc and her husband are rebuilding with the help of the volunteers. 


"Once you meet them, they're so friendly," she said. "The ones with the lip 
rings, and the ones that look like they're still in high school, it didn't 
matter. This (place) doesn't look like much, but they've offered it to us." 


Came to visit, and stayed 
Several hours east, on the outskirts of Biloxi, another, larger group of 
volunteers is at work. 


Or not, as the case may be. 


Hands On Gulf Coast, a chapter of the Hands On Network, offers volunteers 
opportunities ranging from gutting houses and stripping mold to walking dogs

for the local Humane Society. 


Occasionally, a few people just hang around the base at Beauvoir United 
Methodist Church, where volunteers sleep in a loft or in tents pitched in a 
muddy field out back. That's OK; organizers say peer pressure keeps people 
working most of the time. 


Kate Magro, 27, offers a typical story: She was a residential director at 
Huntington University in Indiana when she brought a group of students in 
January. 


She never looked back. 


Many volunteers - numbers range from 80 to 300 in Biloxi, while Hands On 
runs a smaller operation in New Orleans - quit their jobs or took a leave 
from school. A handful of others, including Magro, come through AmeriCorps, 
a national service program. 


As a long-term volunteer, Magro was allowed to carve a small private space 
by hanging sheets and bedspreads as makeshift walls. 


"This is the size of the closet in my old apartment, but it's the most 
wonderful place I've ever lived, because it's just me in there," she said. 


But for many, communal living is part of the appeal. 


Roni Kobrosly, 22, graduated from Rice University in December and plans to 
start graduate school this fall at the University of Michigan, where he will

study public health. Katrina's aftermath seemed a perfect laboratory for his

interest in public health and race. 


But the Hands On lifestyle suggested another sort of social laboratory. 


"Wow," he marveled soon after he arrived. "The base looks like a 
Woodstock-era hippie commune." 


No matter that Kobrosly and most of those he was addressing weren't alive 
for Woodstock. "Yeah," 18-year-old Kristen Kernan giggled. "It's a good 
time." 


Like most volunteer organizations on the Gulf, Hands On is primarily an 
enclave of the young. At 57, Bernadette Sherman was a good three decades 
older than most volunteers. 


A New Jersey schoolteacher, she came to see the place that had drawn her 
youngest son, Daniel Sherman, for the past four months. 


She knew Daniel, who is 24, was there partly to assuage his grief over the 
death of his brother in Iraq last year. 


But Sherman also found something else, and on her last night, she stood to 
offer a benediction to those who remained. 


"I'm a generation ahead of most of you," she said, "and I am so impressed by

you. 


"I think I'm with the greatest generation." 


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