Our fantastic Youth Group completed another successful Mission Trip this past February. 10 Youth Group members along with Jim Prescott, Lee Waterhouse, and the Rev. Lynn Campbell traveled to New Orleans to work with St. Bernard Project (SBP). We were astonished by the amount of devastation that still remains following Hurricane Katrina in 2005. SBP uses volunteers from throughout the country as well as AmeriCorps members to rebuild houses destroyed in the storm. SBP also realizes that New Orleans is grappling with additional crises resulting from the Hurricane including the lack of affordable housing and the widespread number of blighted properties and deserted lots. To address these issues they buy foreclosed homes from the bank, and with the help of donations of money and labor, gut and rebuild the homes to be sold to first-time low income homebuyers. This is the project our group worked on. We were tasked with gutting a house so that it could be rebuilt by future volunteers. We were the first ones to work on this home since the hurricane which gave us insights into the pain of quick departures. Here are reflections from 3 of our participants.
While we worked on demolishing a house, we had the opportunity to take a look inside a family’s life. We saw everything from wedding pictures to school supplies to baby albums. As I was clearing out their belongings, I felt invasive at first, I thought to myself “Do I have the right to look into this family’s most precious memories?” … But after a few minutes, the group generally agreed… if we didn’t look at and appreciate them, who will? -Emily Ounanian
On this trip to Louisiana I learned so many things. I learned how to de-tile a bathroom floor, take down a bathroom wall, and even how to begin the mold remediation process. The most important lesson I learned this week was not about demolition or building but about Faith. One woman we met this week, Vanessa Ross, talked to our group about her experience after Katrina. Her house was flooded with 6-8 feet of water, she was forced to move into a trailer with her daughter, grandchildren and husband. Due to some of the materials in the trailer and a lifelong illness her daughter passed away, leaving Vanessa with her two young grandchildren and still no home. Not to mention the fact Vanessa was left partially blind because of the material in the trailer. Vanessa talked to us about how through all the hardships, not knowing what direction her life would go in she had faith that she would be okay. She taught me how no matter what you’re going through if you believe in yourself, the good of people like the volunteers at St. Bernard project, and Go it’ll all be okay, and this an incredible message for me to take away from this trip. –Abi Walsh
Every morning before we left for the work site, we spent about fifteen minutes reflecting and preparing for the day. Somebody in the group would read a passage from the Bible that Lynn had selected and everybody would think about that passage throughout the work of that day. One of the passages particularly stood out to me. In one of Paul’s letters to the Corinthians, he writes “Just as a body, though one, has many parts, but all its many parts form one body, so it is with Christ.” He informs the Corinthians that though they are all separate people or parts, they work together to make up one body. No one part is more important than another and they all have a purpose. At times during the week, I began to feel as though our work was not making very much of an impact. At the work site, we were not rebuilding anything or making the house ready to sell, we were demolishing it. It seemed that our work was not really helping anybody. However, the group and I soon realized that even though we were not building anything, our work was still incredibly important to the whole rebuilding process. It was the first step of the project and was just as important as any other step because it just had to be done in order to begin reforming the house. That evening, we all reflected that just like Paul’s body metaphor, even though the work we were doing may seem unimportant at times, it was part of a bigger picture and was just as important as all of the other steps. –Elizabeth Ruddy
