Work photos

Scenes from Dulac

Safe home again

After one last work day in which many worked at a feverish pace to complete projects, the team packed up to head home. Some left Friday night after a community karaoke led by Steve and Leslie Hoskins was well attended by the community in general. Many of the homeowners that became new friends last week attended.

The team members arrived home safe and sound at various times on Saturday, tired but feeling very blessed. To come will be a complete accounting of what the group — including everyone who supplied the team with food, prayers, donations and many other types of support — was able to accomplish in just 5 short work days.

Praise God for good working conditions and safe travel.

All work and no play …

Top: A card game (and some magic tricks) breaks out in the dormitory common room. Bottom left: Lester LaBruyere shucks some oysters he found in the Community Center refrigerator. Bottom right: Pastor Kirby Verret had a holiday from school (he is a counselor for at-risk Houma Indian students) to get in a little fishing. It was a success.

Donna S. writes:

It’s not all work. Sure, there’s a lot of work, but there’s also a fair amount of fellowship.

Fellowship with homeowners and neighbors. Fellowship with people in local establishments. Fellowship with the people of Clanton Chapel and Dulac Community Center. With Pastor Kirby and his family.

And, above all, fellowship with each other. We’ve made new friends from different Henderson County churches. We’ve had devotional time. We’ve broken bread together, and we’ve snored together. We’ve cooked together and washed dishes. We’ve gone in search of alligators, and eaten at Schmoopy’s, a local seafood restaurant with a killer shrimp, crab and corn bisque. There’s even been a game or two of euchre now and then.

Dulac has been a special place to bond as fellow Christians and to spread God’s love.

More words from the team:

From Bud Hill: We have been able to help more families on this trip than all the other Henderson County Methodists trips combined. That’s one advantage of bringing such as big group.

From Gene Crowley: There are lots of people in this world that are worse off than we are. Through God’s grace, we can come down here and work and make someone’s life better. I enjoy coming down. I enjoy taking what time I have left to try to help people.

From Jan Siedelmann: It’s really been a good experience. It’s devastating to see the poverty. That part is as bad as the storm.

From Julie McDonald (a naturalist in her real life who would like to set the record that she is not the Pied Piper of mice in Dulac): I enjoyed trying to identify the wildlife that we did see down here (including a Roseate Spoonbill.) I guess I was the Spider Queen. People kept asking me: “Is this spider OK?” I think I was the sacrificial blood donor for the Louisiana state bird: the mosquito. I have a dozen bites even with all the bug spray. Yes, I attract mosquitoes. We also had adventures with fire ants. I have enjoyed having an opportunity to have the fellowship, which is as rewarding to me as helping people rebuild their lives.

From Maria Raleigh: Mark Herron and Maria went out after regular work hours to finish the grout at a home where the owners hadn’t been home earlier in the day. “It was neat tonight when we went to do the tile. The people were making crawfish and corn for dinner.” They invited Mark and Maria to eat with them. “Just to the see the different culture was an awesome experience.”

From Rodger Swatzell: We had been prompted as a group to make an effort to speak the native language (French) if possible, or at least to make an effort. Today at Rodger’s site, a relative showed up to visit. “Bon Matin,” Rodger said, using his newly learned phrase for “good morning.” “I don’t speak French,” the relative replied.
Stay tuned for more from the team members as we wind down the week …

More Wednesday photos

Top: Mark Herron "high-fives" a little boy during a pick-up basketball game at his job site. Middle: Tim Lutz and Chuck Harris work on installing windows. Bottom: The sight in the dormitory hallway at the end of a long work day.

Ash Wednesday

Top: Susan Harris and Kristie Kerr move supplies at their work site. Middle: One of our "cleaning angels," Lori Woodburn, mops the women's dormitory. Bottom: Maria Raleigh blesses the team with morning devotionals.

Donna S. writes:

Thunder and downpour in the night. A bright, beautiful day in the morning.

Lots more progress made at all the job sites. Back at the ranch, a wonderful thing happened. Some angelic volunteers cleaned our dormitory within an inch of its life.

In the evening, we attended Ash Wednesday service at Clanton Chapel, and we were almost the entire congregation. Pastor Kirby Verret, a native Houma, conducted the service, drafting Mark Herron and Kevin Stevenson to play music on their guitars (and asking us to pray God to deliver them a piano player for regular services.)

We sat in a sanctuary that had its roof peeled back by Hurricane Katrina and that had taken on a couple of feet of water during Hurricane Rita. The water stayed for three days before it subsided, and Pastor Kirby said the forecast for the storm to go farther west caught them off guard and left them little time to get to Houma, which was just barely higher ground. They didn’t even have time to lift the chairs in the sanctuary up out of the water.

After that, the recovery process was slow to start, he said. “It wasn’t the government who came in to help,” he said. “If it had not been for the church to come in, things would have been so much worse. Prayers went out and people responded. They set aside what they were doing and responded.”

Pastor Kirby had a prayer for Ash Wednesday.

“There’s so much to be done. The days don’t seem long enough,” he said. “You take distance, you shorten it and you bring people together.”

More personal experiences from the team about how they’re connecting with the community (which, incidentally, is an extremely friendly community):

From Lori Woodburn: On Mardi Gras afternoon, the couple they’re working with spent part of the time in their kitchen slow-dancing to Cajun music. “It was so sweet,” she said. Their work team stood in the living room and applauded.

From Tim and Vickie Wright: When the ice cream truck came through their neighborhood, they bought treats for the little boy at the home they were working at, which brought a smile to his face. They also discovered that the little girls down the street collected aluminum cans for recycling. The next trip back to the work site, they took a bag of cans to them.

From Mark Herron: On Day 1 when the site bosses went out scouting the work, Mark had an impromptu basketball game on a dirt court at the house his crew ended up working at. “I was just trying to relate to him, to break the ice.” Mark shot once and missed. He fed the ball to the little boy, who proceeded to make eight shots in a row.

From Mary Lee: The homeowner at her house is very concerned about how she’s going to find the money to get her home elevated, which is what has happened to many of the houses in this area as the wetlands shrink and the land vanishes. (Pastor Kirby said the original Clanton Chapel church building was located five miles farther south. That area is now water.) Other homes adjacent to the homeowner have not been raised, but this homeowner has been told that she just. “I’m not sure how that gets all sorted out,” Mary said.

From Daryl Siedelmann: The thing that amazes me is how people live in so much water. They’re wonderful people, trusting, even grateful. Not all people are grateful. At the same time, he said, there seems to be a lack of regard for the surroundings. “These folks are really sub-poverty,” he said, adding that there seems to be a lack of coordinated effort to help them, the local recovery center excluded. “The Center here is very coordinated,” he said. They support the volunteers.”

Stay tuned…

More Tuesday photos

Top: Tony Weisman and Rob Kerr work on one of several replacement windows they installed. Middle: A crew consisting of Mark Herron, Vickie Wright, Maria Raleigh and Tim Wright prepare materials for installing flooring. Later they will be setting cabinets. Bottom: A homeowner gives a baby a bath in the kitchen sink at one of the job sites. They were getting ready to go to a Mardi Gras parade in Houma.

Travail dur et bonnes périodes

Top: A crew consisting of Denny Howard, John Eblen and Charles Lander works on drywall. They'll be setting cabinets later in the week. Middle: On another site, Dick Ward, Greg Fisher and John Tom Utley work on one of the toughest assignments: Hand-mixing 30 bags of concrete in a wheelbarrow to use for installing a handicapped ramp. Bottom: One of the two King Cakes given to the Mission Team for Mardi Gras.

Donna S. writes:

Today's title says "hard work and good times" (we were told that we would be blessed if we try out the local lingo!)

Even though it was a holiday here in the bayou, work continued in a big way on our job sites. Foreman Bud Hill says we are currently working at about eight of the 15 sites on our list. The punch lists are getting close to being completed at some of the sites.

And now, enough from me and time to hear from some of the other 44 Mission Team members and their experiences of the past few days…. Here are some of their paraphrased remarks:

From John Eblen: “What’s better than Super Bowl parties and the day after Super Bowl? What’s better than Super Tuesday? What’s better than Fat Tuesday in New Orleans, Louisiana? It’s the sight of a homeowner and the smile on their face when someone comes to their front door to repair their home that’s been ruined by hurricanes Katrina and Rita.”

From Tony Weisman: A guy today who didn’t know who we were came across the yard where we were working (where they were doing replacement windows). He said he and his wife had boiled a bunch of crabs and wanted to offer them to the workers.
EDITOR’S NOTE: The work crew brought them back to the dormitory at lunch time and shared with the rest of the Mission Team. They were declared to be delicious by all who tried them.

From Chuck and Susan Harris (who are on Tony’s crew): That was very neighborly (bringing over the boiled crabs to share). They weren’t really doing any work for that couple, Susan said, but they still felt compelled to express their appreciation. Their gesture gave Susan an opportunity to go over after lunch and share her cross with them. “They just thanked us, thanked us, thanked us,” she said.

From Max Whelan (our team member from Ottawa, Ontario, Canada): There’s so much to be done. There are other people even worse off than the homeowners we are working for and nothing is being done at their homes. The people are friendly and appreciative of help, both on the team and in the town.

From Karen Hill: A man walked by the front of Clanton Chapel United Methodist Church with two big dogs. He stopped to chat to find out where the group was from and asked which house we were working on in Dulac. I told him we were working all over Dulac, that we had 45 workers. He got a big grin on his face and said “Good.” That was the first contact I had with local people.

From Rob Kerr: I don’t believe I’ll ever complain again about what I have (or don’t have).

From Dan Odom: On Monday evening he and a group were eating dinner out a restaurant in Houma (since we ran out of food at the center) and he struck up a conversation with a Baptist minister and his family from Houma. Dan and others in the group found an opportunity to give away their crosses. In the course of the conversation, they started talking about King Cake and its tradition during the pre-Mardi Gras season. In a bit, Dan noticed that the minister had disappeared from his table. In a while, he came back with a King cake to give his new Henderson friends.

EDITOR’S NOTE: An anonymous donor also left two King Cakes for the Mission Team at the Dulac Center for the team to have for dessert on Tuesday evening after our dinner at the Boudreau & Thibodeaux restaurant. Rob Kerr got the baby from the first cake that was cut, so he’s apparently hosting the Mission Team for a King Cake party next year on Epiphany!

From Steve Raleigh: I’m amazed by the logistics of working out the details of working with 45 people and not having short tempers.

From Rodger Swatzell: There’s a lot of poverty down here. These people are sadly used to it. A lot of the poor people here don’t have a means of making a living unless it’s the shrimping business.

Heard at the breakfast table: One of the good things about being down here … We haven’t had to hear about all that politics.

More from other Mission Team members as we go forward …

The work begins

At left: Steve Raleigh works on a project for his homeowner that involved finishing Tyvek on the under side of a home that had been jacked up about 4 feet from its original elevation. Above: A flurry of activity Monday morning takes place in front of the Dulac Community Center as the crews unload and reorganize tools and supplies. In the background you can see Clanton Chapel United Methodist Church.

Donna S. writes:

After a morning spent getting organized, scouting the houses and dividing up workers into smaller work crews in order to make the most efficient use of our time, the teams fanned out after lunchtime to tackle projects at 15 different homes.

That's 15 different homes with work to do and most of them with multiple things to do.

Most of them are not far at all from the Dulac Community Center. Work ranged from hanging drywall, installing cabinets and counters, laying laminate flooring, building a deck, framing, measuring for siding, removed bathroom flooring, hanging paneling, roofing, cleaning vinyl siding, and so on. There's a lot of work to do, but once we got going we got a great start at building relationships with the 15 homeowners, not to mention making some improvements in their lives (we hope).

All the talk today is about tomorrow. Tomorrow is a holiday here... Mardi Gras! The kids are out of school. There are parades all day in Houma. They're excited and the atmosphere is festive. The talk among them is about going up to Houma to spend the day .

We will be spending the day trying to cross off items on the long list of things to do!

Maybe somebody will bring us some beads from Houma.

A couple more Sunday photos

Top: Those hoagie sandwiches made for the Super Bowl by the Chapel Hill Youth Group came in very handy for our lunch stop on Sunday. Paul Herron passes them out to anyone who was hungry.

Bottom: John Paul McGuire gives an overview of what happened when the small town of Dulac was impacted by both Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Rita in 2005.

Down in the bayou

Above: A portion of the Dulac Team poses for a group photo before pulling out from Chapel Hill Church on Saturday around 2 p.m.

Donna S. writes:

First, the big news. We made it.

After two pretty challenging days of travel (have you ever tried to simultaneously move 13 vehicles — 3 with cargo trailers and 1 with a camper — and 40-plus people and keep them together?) we made it to Dulac, Louisiana, on the Bayou Grand Caillou at around 4:30 p.m. on Sunday

That was after being halted for several minutes in the small town of Des Allemands south of New Orleans by a Mardi Gras parade. Beads literally covered the stretch of U.S. 90 that was the parade route.

Our home away from home for the next few days looks pretty good. The area still very much looks storm-battered, notably with many shrimp boats that are partially sunk or in great disrepair visible along the bayou. Shrimping remains this town’s biggest source of commerce.

After a welcome and orientation by the Dulac Station Manager, John Paul McGuire, everyone settled in to get clean (high priority item), snack on something courtesy of the many people who sent food with us — bless you all! or watch a little bit of the Super Bowl.

John Paul capped off our orientation by teaching us a new beatitude: Blessed are those who are flexible, for they shall not be bent out of shape.

Some of us could have used that earlier in the day.

Speaking of earlier in the day (much earlier), somebody needs to be thinking about recruiting Denny Howard for the Chapel Hill Praise Team. There’s nothing like hearing him sing “Oh, What A Beautiful Morning” at the top of his lungs when you’re still snuggled up in your sleeping bag.

But back to John Paul.

In his very detailed orientation that included information about everything from alligators to black widow spiders to the history of our host community, he helped us fully realize that we are needed here.

We are here to be in conversation and be in connection with the people in this very small, very close-knit community.

We are here to rebuild confidence, rebuild hearts, rebuild love.

We are ready to go to work.

Time to pack

Donna S. writes:

The team met tonight for the final time before departure. Most of the vehicles are leaving Saturday around 2 p.m. from Chapel Hill headed for our stopover in Oxford, Miss.

Here are some things about Dulac, Louisiana, the town we're going to serve:

— It's in the bayou in the southern reaches of Terrebonne Parish. Water and swamp outnumber dry land in square miles.

— Around Dulac, the population is around 90 percent Houma Indian. The parish is 51 percent Houma and 49 percent Cajun.

— The word "Houma" means "red" in Choctaw. After several migrations in the Louisiana, the bulk of the Houma people settled in an area they called "Dulac" — "the land of the lake" — referring to nearby Lake Boudreaux.

— Life in the bayou is centered around fishing, trapping and farming.

— The Methodist Church came to the area in 1882. In the 1930s, Miss Ella and Miss Wilhelmina Hooper brought educational opportunity to the children of Houma. Public education was not open to Native Americans at that time. When that changed, the focus of the Methodist Church shifted to social outreach to the community.

With this visit, we are in for an educational experience ourselves.

Where credit is due

Donna S. writes:

A couple of more successful fundraisers took place over the weekend, and it's time for the Blog to express gratitude for all who have supported this Mission Trip project by buying pizzas, attending chili suppers, flipping (and purchasing!) pancakes, listening to coffeehouse songs, taking time after church for a bowl of soup, doing legwork, attending meetings, organizing, delivering things .... and the endless number of jobs it takes to pull off such a big project.

The team thanks all of the many supporters for your generous hearts. Those hearts are critical for the success of the mission. No doubt about it: We are all a team.

That earthly acknowledgement given, here is a word from Team Leader Paul 3:
GOD has blessed this Mission Team and Trip. HE has provided the talent to make a difference in Dulac. HE has provided the Fund$$$$$ for this trip. HE has provided the leadership for this team. HE has provided the transportation for this team.

To God goes the glory.

The countdown has begun ...

Donna S. writes:

In a week, Henderson County Methodists on Mission will start packing tools, personal belongings and all the things needed for a week of hurricane relief work, this time in the deep bayou of Louisiana. Departure is Saturday, Feb. 2, and the return is Saturday, Feb. 9.

A 46-member team representing Belleview UMC, Bennett Memorial UMC, Cairo UMC, Chapel Hill UMC, First UMC, Holy Name Catholic Church and Wesleyan Heights UMC (Owensboro) will be working out of the Dulac Station, which is part of the Abbeville Disaster Recovery Station operated by UMCOR's Louisiana United Methodist Disaster Recovery Ministry.

This remote area's population largely consists of Native Americans and Cajuns, and its residents were impacted by major hurricane and major flooding from both Katrina and Rita.

This will be the sixth mission trip for the combined Henderson County Methodists on Mission. The first was to New Orleans in October 2006; three teams traveled to Gulfport, Miss., on consecutive weeks last winter and "the cabinet crew" returned to New Orleans in May 2007 to install kitchen cabinets in the home of Silas Dillion.

Dillion (shown at upper right in his kitchen with the staff of Westbank Station) was able to return to his home later in 2007 and the Westbank Station in New Orleans reported the joyous news to those who had worked on Dillion's behalf. They sent a photo and wrote: "Without your skills, hard work and love, this wouldn't have been possible. To put it simply, you changed his life. From our center here in New Orleans, we want to say thank you for being the hands and feet of God....."