I'm Jordan, a new volunteer from Seattle down here with World Shelters.  I arrived off a red-eye into the Biloxi yesterday morning, and, despite having read the news and talked to several of my friends who were on the previous deployments with World Shelters, I was taken off guard by the degree of devastation. I'll tell you about it, you'll see the pictures, but it's difficult to comprehend. Now that I've begun to digest it, I'm forgetting that their lives weren't always shattered.  There, but for the grace etc...

I had somehow thought the destruction was relegated to the shoreline, but it goes far inland.  Half of the houses in Waveland are splintered, nothing left except piles of rubble on slabs of foundation, beds in trees, debris in an undifferentiated mass everywhere you look.  Most houses within 20 or 30 miles of the coast are damaged and barely livable.  The impact of this is difficult to imagine: the economy is gone, there are no stores, no restaurants, businesses are plywooded storefronts with muddied fax and copy machines piled in front.

   
 
But in the face of it all, the people on the Gulf coast are determined to get to their feet.  Everywhere we go, there are PODs (Points of Distribution), sets of giant tents filled with shelves and boxes of food, diapers, soap, and other necessities. PODs are run by both locals and outside helpers.  Families come from all over and take what they need for free.  The PODs are both bottoms-up and top-down creations. For example, a bunch of people from the Rainbow Gathering (what, until this week, I would have called the most flaky, hippy-dippy group in the world) set up shop in a parking lot of a destroyed food store. (In an amazing demonstration of prescience, they packed up their busses and started down when Katrina was still just looming and were the first food distribution site in Hancock County. FEMA followed some days later.) 

They popped up some tents, set up a kitchen, painted a "New Waveland Cafe" sign (after the town of Waveland where they set down) and started handing out food, three hots a day (all organic, at the beginning). Locals started coming, and the Seventh Day Adventists plopped down next to them and started heading out basic supplies like peanut butter, cheese, meat, vegetables, soap and clothes.  Other relief agencies and FEMA, seeing a functioning relief center already in operation, started dropping off additional supplies for the kitchen and POD.

We had lunch and dinner there last night (both delicious, full meals including salad, meat, a vegetarian option, bread, dessert, and drinks).  During lunch, the Rainbow Family played albums over their PA system, leading to a slightly ironic, surreal moment of bunch of black and white, bayou-bred Mississippians gratefully eating meals provided by hippies while Neil Young's Southern Man played over the din of generators and buzz of flies: "I saw cotton and I saw black, tall white mansions and little shacks, Southern Man when will you pay them back?...Southern change gonna come at last..."  At dinner, they had a full band playing Van Morrisson, Rolling Stones and CCR tunes while dreadlocked Rainbows danced enthusiastically next to Mississippi senior citizens, suddenly homeless and momentarily carefree.

All the time, new supplies are flowing in to these centers from donors big and small across the country.  How does it know where to go? Best I can tell, it's a mix of peer networks of people from different relief agencies talking to each other about what's available and a top down effort of the Emergency Operation Center (EOC) of Hancock County, who hold twice daily coordination meetings of all the relief agencies operating in the area.
 
My first day, I worked with two deployments from World Shelters. On the first, the whole crew of us set up a a 50' long shelter for the medical center, set up by the Rainbow Family and staffed by volunteer medical students, next to the New Waveland Cafe (incredibly difficult, as we had to drill through the pavement to sink the rebar stakes). 

On the second, Mac, Todd and I set up a 25' shelter at a POD in a town called Pass Christian.  The people there were wonderful and grateful.  Operating the pod were a mix of locals and Scientologists.  Their plan was to keep the POD operating for at least a year. Guys in their early twenties were working shoulder to shoulder with women in their 60's, everybody with the same smiling determination I've encountered everywhere I've gone. 

This attitude has been really remarkable. I talked to a woman today, for example, who giggled and chuckled through her account of weathering the hurricane in her house, shouldering her two cats and carrying her poodle on her head as the water rose. 

"Whoo," she chuckled, "I had white caps in my living room! I had swim over to keep my refrigerator from floating out the front door. Twice! I got it though. I tell you, when my walls starting to shake from the wind, though, that's when I got scared." 

Then, she reached out and gave me a big hug and told me you've got nothing to do but go on. And that's what I hear everywhere we go. You got no choice, you can't give up, so you just gotta go on. I know it sounds corny coming from me, off of some soft focus poster of a kitten hanging from a rope, but coming from that woman and the people running the Pass Christian POD, it's something different. You'll just have to take my word for it.

Same day, Thomas, Sam, Jake and Mac set up a third shelter at the remains of a woman's house by the bayou.  The ground on her land was dried, caked and cracked mud, so they built a floor for her out of materials donated by the New Waveland folks while they were there.

Today, it was up with dawn, breakfast at FEMA-sponsored commissary here on the NASA base where we're camped out, and then off with Sam, Dan, and Todd to build a shelter for woman in Bayside Park. There were eight people living in a tarp strung over their back porch (their house itself had been declared unsafe due to water damage and mold).  Two of the men there had tried to weather the storm in the house itself, but when the water rose "to their necks", they swam down to the store at the end of their street and made it to the roof.  The next day, they said, they returned, opened the bobbing refrigerator, cracked open a bottle of wine that was there and got drunk.  The day after that, when the water receded to the point where they could walk, they started cleaning up.

We set up a 25' shelter in their backyard, that's a picture of Lennie and the crew next to it.  One of the women living there has a high-risk pregnancy, so I feel better knowing she's got room to lie down close to her family.

After lunch at the New Waveland (where I peeked in to see our shelter now fully stocked with medical supplies and patient exam tables, we headed over to the (remains of) a house belonging to a woman named Tamika.  She was living at her boyfriend's house with her kids and had begun the process of gutting her house in preparation for rebuilding it.  Throughout her neighborhood, men and women slowly but methodically carried debris out of their shells of houses, clearing the way for a rebirth.

We stopped to help the other deployment set up a shelter at a house in Bay St. Louis, but we decided it wasn't appropriate.  An older man was living in the house with his dogs and hadn't let FEMA in to inspect.  We could see pools of water still on his floor, and he was refusing to leave.  He needed more than we could offer, and the relatives who were looking after him thanked us but encouraged us to take the shelter to someone who would use it more appropriately.  We made sure they knew how to reach the appropriate service agencies and headed back to base, where we worked until dark cutting and clipping parts for the shelters we'll raise tomorrow.  A number of the existing shelter tarps needed to be retrofitted with mesh vents to allow for better airflow, and then the whole crew hunkered down for "clipping circle, gathered around a pile of tarps attaching the plastic fittings we use to tie the tarp to the PVC exoskeleton.

Showers in a truck, then to bed.