Treasure in the debris

Cowboy hats and carcinogenic construction materials build friendships. It's true. Just ask the nine Chapman students who recently traveled down to the Gulf Coast. In January of 2006, eight DOC students, and one student who leads Chapman's Service-Learning office, flew down to the Texas/Louisiana border with two brave leaders and rafts of respirator masks.

We worked for a week, splitting our time between Beaumont and Orange, Texas, and Lake Charles, Louisiana. In Orange, we hauled fallen trees, working with a group of mostly older Disciples from the Missouri Ozarks to cut the trees into manageable stumps and pieces, then rolling and dragging them into big burn piles.

We helped two women at their homes. Tweety is a Vietnamese immigrant who had been abused and marginalized in Vietnam because she was the progeny of a U.S. soldier and a Vietnamese bartender, and had been grudgingly adopted by a neighbor. She told us her story of physical, emotional, and mental abuse, and her struggle to immigrate to the U.S., where she learned English from talking to customers at a dead-end donut shop job. She now owns her own business, a beauty salon, and is studying massage therapy. The other woman we worked with in Orange was named Ramona, a retired school teacher whose husband had died a few months before the hurricane. She told us that the work we did for her would have cost her $6,000 if she had to hire someone to do it, something she obviously could not afford.

For the last couple of days, we drove over the state border to Louisiana every morning to help two women who co-own a trailer park, The Phoenix. Miss Lilly and Renée named their mobile home park the Phoenix because they feel that it grew out of the ashes. Lilly and Renée are an amazingly hospitable, devout, faithful, and powerful bi-racial partnership. It was inspiring for us to see two women, one black and one white, co-owning of their own business. Their strength and their love were so evident. At the trailer park, we sifted through debris, collecting bags of insulation and other trash. It was so surreal to stand in the middle of this vast stretch of property, full of flattened trailers, and to find little signs of the lives that had been so dramatically altered by the hurricane. In the piles of debris, we found action figures, tea cups, underwear, board games, and all other sorts of indications of the people who had lived there. Two of the most amazing things that we found were an American flag with 48 stars, and a little tin box of army and Boy Scout medals. In Louisiana, we were working with a group mostly older Disciples again, this time from Kentucky, and those two finds really brought our groups together.

It was amazing to have the opportunity that we did to help with the ongoing hurricane relief efforts, but it was even more amazing to see the friendships that were built and the hospitality that we experienced while we were there. Northwood Christian Church in Beaumont hosted us in their lovely youth room for the entire week. Their congregants made us a dinner of traditional Texas fare, and their pastor even directed us to a western store where we bought cowboy hats and other fun western accouterments. Miss Lilly and Renee cooked us delicious Cajun meals when we helped at their trailer park, and we were introduced to the wonder that is homemade crawfish pie.

Experiencing the Gulf Coast first-hand following the disaster was really important and eye-opening for our group. Even months later, though much progress has been made, blue-tarped homes were omnipresent, and so much work remains. We organized our trip with Carl Zerweck through Disciples Volunteering of Disciples Home Missions, and they are doing great work in the aftermath of the hurricanes. Week of Compassion was also a big supporter of our trip. We were one of the earliest groups to arrive, but it is so encouraging to know that so many Disciples are signed up subsequently to help. Hopefully they, too, will experience the wonders of crawfish pie and cowboy hats.