Mission trip to New Orleans has begun

I've got the first of what I hope will be a series of updates from a group from our diocese that is now in New Orleans doing cleanup work. Keep them in your prayers, and please read all the updates. This one is from Meaghan Kelly.

Our group here in New Orleans is made up of adults and teens from Grace Church, St. Michael & Grace, and St. Martin’s. We arrived here in shifts on Saturday, with the group from St. Michael & Grace winning the prize for earliest arrival, and therefore the earliest departure from RI (4:30am, ouch!). By about 4 p.m. we had all arrived at Grace Church in New Orleans, where we would be both living and working for the week. Unaccustomed to the Louisiana heat, we piled into the air-conditioned chapel at the church to wait for our faithful leaders to get us organized and find our living arrangements. That effort worked...kind of. Half of us are living at the newly named ‘palace’ with great air-conditioning, nice comfortable living rooms, a large kitchen, and decent beds. The other half of us are at, um…the other place. At the ‘other’ place we have a little bit of air-conditioning, a couple of burlap cots, a microwave, and cockroaches (big ones). The Palace was in a neighborhood that was not severely impacted by ‘the storm’, as it is called by the locals. Cockroach Central, on the other hand, was flooded by several feet of water. The difference between these two buildings is stark, and was a small introduction to what life is now like here in New Orleans. The church where we are working was also hit hard by the storm. Before pictures of the church show wood floors and pews, but 9 months after Katrina hit there are metal chairs and a green painted cement floor. Water lines can be seen on the walls and along the lectern and the pulpit. The hallways where Sunday School rooms once were are now vacant and missing walls and floors. The empty space represents hours of work that has already been done. The gutting process is long and difficult, and must happen before the more hopeful renovations can occur. These kind of projects are happening all over the surrounding neighborhood, as evidenced by the heaping piles of trash along the side of every street.

After massive pizza consumption, our group spent a little time in the evening discussing what we had seen and what our work plans would be. After a brief evening prayer service we moved quickly to bedtime, some of us in the luxurious surroundings of the Palace, and the rest of us at Cockroach Central. Regardless of our sleeping locale, we all slept soundly after an exhausting (and hot!) first day in Louisiana.

We woke up well-rested (basically) Sunday morning and prepared to attend the 10am service at Grace. The congregation is small there, as many of their members have left the area, but those that remain are welcoming and kind. After a lovely service (complete with incense, bells, and the sung Sursum Corda) the congregation provided us with an awesome potluck lunch. These people can teach us Rhode Islanders quite a but about a potluck. After lunch we piled into our vans with the Rev'd Walter Baer, Jim, and Martha from the parish, for a tour of the city.

This is when we run out of words to tell this story. There is no adequate way to describe the miles and miles of devastation and destruction that we witnessed from the windows of our vans. Our drive began in middle class neighborhoods, where almost every house remains uninhabited. Spray-painted X’s mark the outside walls of every house, FEMA’s way of noting the date they were there, and the people or pets they did or did not find inside. Fallen trees, ruined cars, and broken windows litter the streets, yards, and driveways. From there we drove past several of the levees that had broken or collapsed under the rising waters, causing the flooding in all of these neighborhoods. The levees have been repaired, and these repairs are the only major reconstruction efforts that we saw during out drive. Our drive continued, past countless closed and abandoned business and houses, the marks from the water levels still showing on the sides of the buildings. Still, in the midst of vacancy and ruin, we were unprepared for the desolation we would experience over the bridge.

There, in the lower 9th ward, we discovered the greatest devastation caused by the flooding. In these neighborhoods there were no neighborhoods. The houses that had once lined the streets were almost all gone. Where houses remained, they had been torn from their foundations and were leaning dangerously or had completely buckled. Especially striking was one house that had somehow landed on top of an upside-down blue ford truck, the wheels of which protruded up from under the foundation. When we stepped out of the vans on these streets to get a closer look, we were speechless. We snapped pictures of the wreckage, not to be fleeting tourists, but to somehow capture something that seemed so unbelievable, so impossible.

The atmosphere of our group was heavy as we drove out of the 9th ward. As we drove we passed a large wooden sign outside of an Episcopal Church which read “The Chapel is Open, can we help you?” This sign seems to be indicative of the current state of affairs in this city right now. The churches play a pivotal role in providing help and support to the residents here. Likewise, the groups that come down on these mission trips are welcomed and appreciated. On our transport van to the car rental place, the driver spoke to us saying, “If it wasn’t for groups like you we’d be in real trouble here. We have over 300,000 wrecked homes, and you don’t see 300,000 construction crews.” He is not the only one to make comments like this one. Most of the locals that we have met have expressed not only their gratitude for our presence here, but also their sincere hope for the future of this city. The hope and the spirit of resurrection that saturates the city are as powerful as the destruction. One church sign that we passed read “He is Risen, and so will we.” This spirit is what inspires us to start our work here.