One Tough Mission Trip

Two years ago today we were finishing up the most gruelling short term mission trip I have ever served on. It was five weeks after Hurricane Katrina had devastated the Gulf Coast and we were looking for some way to help. My brother in law, Gene Bennett and a friend of his had two weeks earlier taken a pickup truck piled high with a load of cleaning supplies to the area. They made it to what remained of First Baptist Church of Weswego, where my son, Jay, is pastor. There was no flood water to deal with at the west bank church, but the high winds and heavy rains of Katrina had destroyed the roofs of both buildings and the interior of the sanctuary had to be gutted.

Gene returned after a few days of intensive clean up work at Westwego with stories about how much damage he had seen. Along with the cable news outlets and their coverage of the disaster, the vision of helping New Orleans recover spread quickly across the country. Doug Virgin is the Director of Missions for the Greater Huntington Baptist Association and he caught the vision as well. Knowing Jay, Doug wanted to do something to help his church so he got busy. Soon he had rented a 24 foot box truck and it was filled with plywood, sheet rock, drywall mud, roll roofing, roofing nails, and assorted other related materials. He put out the call in this area and three of us responded to make the week's relief trip to the Big Easy. Naturally, since Jay was my son I wanted to be part of the effort. We were joined by Pastor John Freeman of Calvary Baptist Church in Chapmanville, WV and Mike Dixon, a layperson from the Coal Fields Association who had a lot of experience in SBC Disaster Relief work. WV State Convention of Southern Baptist's Director of Missions, Dr. Greg Wrigley, loaned us his personal van. We loaded it up and our two vehicle caravan set off for New Orleans.

We drove straight through and upon arriving, threw out our sleeping bags in a Sunday school classroom in the church's educational building. There were also some Katrina refugees living in the other class rooms. More about that later.

While in the New Orleans area that week we were overcome by the devastation. Jay gave us the quick tour of the worst affected areas of the city. It was heartbreaking and awesome in the scope of the devastation. There were still pools of "toxic soup" in the lower lying areas. Thousands of ruined "flood cars" dotted the landscape. Damaged shrimp boats sat in the middle of four lane highways and tree lined boulevards. The central business district was a mess from the flooding and looting. All of the grass was dead and a grey dried mud was everywhere. Trees and power lines were down and the place was pitch black at night. Military patrols and search parties were active all over the city. In the now famous lower 9th ward the scope of the damage was more than I can express. Houses had been washed off their foundations by the results of the breech in the nearby levee. They were piled up against one another, crumpled like broken models, and sitting in the middle of streets. It was not unusual to see vehicles on top of the rubble of houses, but in the lower 9th we saw houses on top of vehicles!

We spent several days helping out on Jay's side of the river doing various tasks for the church and some of it's members. We helped complete the gutting out of the sanctuary and unloaded all of the building and cleaning supplies there. One side of the former sanctuary was filled with boxes of clothing that had come in from all over the country. The other side was a community food pantry where neighbors were allowed to come in and take whatever their families needed.
Jay was working as a coordinator for the huge kitchen unit that had been set up nearby by the Georgia Baptist Convention's Disaster Relief people. They cooked nearly a half million meals while deployed to Westwego and the Red Cross delivered the meals to various distribution sites on the West Bank. Another SBC kitchen unit was at Calvary Baptist and others were set up on the New Orleans side of the river. No stores were open yet and I don't know how thousands of people would have survived without the selfless service of those precious volunteers.

We helped move refrigerators and freezers from a couple of homes and took them to a makeshift appliance dump on a shopping center parking lot. There were a mountain of fridges and freezers, piled high there. Each one duct taped shut with its rotting contents inside. The pile of appliances was only one of hundreds just like it all over the area. We helped a seminary student move out of his off campus apartment as he was pulling up stakes and heading for Atlanta. We cut down and moved a damaged tree from "Miss Mae's" property and we spent an afternoon chain sawing and clearing a huge tree that had fallen and was resting on the roof of "Miss Margie's" house. Less than a year later Miss Margie went to heaven as the result of a stroke, and a few months after that her house was demolished by a tornado that touched down in Westwego.

The most gut wrenching day of the week we spent there was the day we spent on the campus of New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary. It was hot and humid and the smell of the place was overpowering. The faculty and students had been evacuated and the campus had been locked down for the five weeks since the storm. On this particular week Seminary President Chuck Kelley had announced that all residents could return to the campus to remove from their homes, rooms and apartments any thing that might be salvageable. After this clean out week, the seminary campus would be locked down and turned over to contractor Mike Moskau for the tremendous task of demolition, repair, renovation, tree removal, and rebuilding.

It was the saddest scene I have ever witnessed. We helped clean out the house of Gary and Cheryl Halquist and their family. Gary and Cheryl and their folks were the ones who were also staying in the educational building of FBC Westwego. They had come back from their temporary home in Birmingham for this particular week to claim what they could of their belongings. On that morning we joined hundreds of people wearing heavy protective clothing, rubber gloves and masks in an almost other worldly scene. Folks were dragging out damaged furniture and other belongings from houses, residence halls, and apartments all over the devastated seminary campus. The stuff was piled along the streets of the formerly beautiful campus. Many were crying. Most appeared to be numb.

The formerly beautiful home of the Halquist's on Seminary Place was full of still wet muck on the floor and littered with wet moldy papers, lamps, and all types of personal belongings. Ruined furniture was turned over and piled wherever the flood waters had taken them. The black mold on the walls had spread nearly six feet high. Items that could be salvaged were taken to the driveway, where Cheryl and other family members hosed them off, cleaned them carefully with a Clorox/water solution, and hosed them off again. Once dry, those items were placed in the Ryder truck that Gary had brought with him from Birmingham. This ritual was being played out all over the seminary campus.

We came home from that week in New Orleans physically and emotionally exhausted. The work we had done was barely a drop in the bucket, but it was a beginning. The true heroes are the ones who face the battle every day. After two years I am still praying for them. I hope you will too.

Little did I know, at that time, that within a year, I would be elected to serve on the Board of Trustees of that same Seminary. I'm leaving tomorrow for our fall trustee meeting at the totally renovated and beautiful campus. In my next post, I will share President Chuck Kelley's post Katrina wrap up report. It is an inspiring one.