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[Back to index of April articles] Setting to WERK By Lucy Chumbley As Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast last Aug. 29, many people in the Diocese of Washington wrung their hands and wondered what they could do to help. But not for long. Within a week, a group of around 75 people from about 20 parishes had assembled at St. Columba's in Northwest Washington, D.C., to figure out a way to help those hurt by the storm. By early October, the grassroots group, calling itself Washington Episcopalians Respond to Katrina, or WERK, was gathering momentum. And by December, its members were rolling up their sleeves to help muck out houses in the Crescent City."From those early meetings we kind of evolved into a mission to organize a long-term response," said St. Columba's parishioner Hugh Riddleberger. "We recognized it would be a long road to recovery. We felt if we worked together there would be a better chance we'd maintain direction and focus." While individual parishes are involved with a variety of initiatives, including sponsoring a medical clinic and partnerships with various schools and churches, WERK's main efforts have centered on a series of work trips, Riddleberger said. St. Alban's parishioner and New Orleans native Barbara Manard has organized several of these trips, which concentrate on helping residents muck out their flood-damaged homes. "That is exactly what is needed now," she said. "That is what the people are asking for. It's easy to sit up here and come up with things you think might help, but that's what's needed there." For most residents of the ravaged Gulf Coast, rebuilding is still a distant dream. "Right now, there's not massive rebuilding going on because everybody's sort of waiting to see where it can be done," Manard said. Residents are waiting for two key pieces of information before they can rebuild, she said: Federal Emergency Management Agency maps that show the flooding elevations that will qualify for federally subsidized flood insurance - these will determine which areas it will be economically feasible to rebuild - and a decision from the United States Congress about the funding available to those who have lost a home. Meanwhile, New Orleans is a mess. "People think it's OK. It's not OK," Manard said. "Three quarters of the city is still inoperable - it's unlivable," Riddleberger said. "There's such a sense of loss and not knowing what to do." While waiting to learn whether or not their homes will need to be bulldozed, Gulf Coast residents are faced with the daunting prospect of clearing out the muck. This is heavy, dirty and depressing work that involves "pulling everything out of the house and putting it by the curb," Riddleberger said. And that means everything. Working in crews of up to 20 people, volunteers remove the complete contents of the homes, from appliances like refrigerators and water heaters to pots and pans, books, electronics, china and clothes that are rotting in the closets. "Most of the stuff is unrecognizable now," Riddleberger said. "It's got six months of mould on it." There are 200,000 houses that need mucking out in New Orleans, Manard said, but so far, WERK volunteers have concentrated their efforts on helping those most in need of assistance - the elderly, the poor, the uninsured and the overwhelmed. Referrals come from individuals as well as the City Council and the neighborhood associations. "People with the money would pay a contractor $10,000 to clean a house out," Riddleberger said. "Most of these people didn't have insurance, and if they did have it, it doesn't begin to cover their loss." Enter Katie Mears, a young woman who drove 1,000 miles from her home in Iowa to take part in the first WERK trip in late December and decided to stay on and help coordinate the volunteer effort. A 2003 graduate who has worked on a number of political campaigns, Mears was paid a stipend by the WERK parishes until she was hired by Episcopal Relief and Development a few weeks ago. At 8:30 each morning, volunteers from all over the country gather at the Episcopal Chapel of the Holy Comforter on the North side of Gentilly, a neighborhood on the edge of Lake Pontchartraine, to discuss the day's work, then fan out across the city. "They come in - the standard is about a week - and we sort of tell them where they're going," Mears said. "We introduce them to the family and show them what to do." Throughout the rest of the day, Mears drives a circuit, visiting each house and dealing with problems and needs as they arise. The workers are a motley crew, of all ages and from all walks of life. University students from around the country wield sledge hammers, crow bars, wheelbarrows and shovels alongside family groups and volunteers who arrive alone or in pairs of two or three. "As long as you can get yourself here and can work, I can work with you," Mears said. "As long as you can wear boots and bring a lunch and show up on time, I can put you to work." The volunteers work until the job is done, returning the next day if necessary. The larger crews can finish a house in a day, she said. Although the work is physically demanding, it is all self-directed, she said, with people choosing the work they are best able to do. While burly college boys are eager to bust up showers, less robust volunteers might concentrate their efforts on emptying the closets. "We need a diversity of skill levels so that everything gets done," she said. It has been more than six months since Katrina struck land but many homeowners have not even started mucking out their houses."Homeowners come to the house and are too overwhelmed," she said. "It's like the contents of your house got shaken, fell on the floor and got covered with mould. They just open the door - if they can even open it - and then close it and go back to the car." Painful as it is, Mears said many homeowners are relieved to put the mucking out behind them, "to pull the Band Aid off as opposed to sort of picking at it over the course of a year, which is what a lot of the families are doing." Returning to their former residences, families find that most of their possessions, which have spent several weeks percolating in five to 10 feet of filthy water and then left to fester in the tropical sun, are beyond repair, Mears said. But some items are still intact. Some people want to salvage as much as they can, she said, while others want nothing. "Some people are saving mundane stuff like light fixtures," she said, but most of the time they are looking for either jewelry or "some kind of sentimental, not valuable thing that belonged to a family member that passed away." The houses the volunteers are working so hard to gut may not be salvageable themselves, but Riddleberger says that's not the point. "The point is, you're giving people a sense of hope," he said. While the WERK parishes are mucking out homes and raising money, the real help this diocese can provide is "partnering with them to keep their heads and spirits above the imagined water line," he said. This moral support can encourage people who hope to return to the city to hold on until insurance money comes or federal aid arrives, he said, so they can reestablish roots when the sun shines once more on New Orleans. "What can we really offer? By reaching out and offering a hand, that really epitomizes what we stand for as human beings and as Christians," he said. "The people who owned those houses were both overwhelmed by what had come and moved by the people who would wade through fetid water to help them." The city's recovery will take a long time, Manard said, estimating it will be 10 years at least until the major repairs and rebuilding is completed. But until that day arrives, there's plenty of work to do, and for those who roll up their sleeves, the work is wonderfully rewarding. "I've never felt so useful in my entire life," she said. "I like what I'm doing," Mears explained, "because you go to bed tired, but you know you did what you could." [Back to index of April articles]
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