I was grateful when the pastor announced there were a few folks organizing a trip to Alabama/Mississippi the following day and welcomed anyone interested in going. Immediately I jumped on the chance to actually DO something tangible to help, and Emily and I boarded a plane Monday morning.

Twelve of us went. The guys stayed at the church where our youth pastor, Brent, was formerly employed, and Emily and I, as the only females on the team, were able to stay with Brent's friends in their Satsuma home. We worked Monday and Wednesday in Bayou La Batre, AL, Tuesday in Pascagoula, MS, and Thursday in Gulfport, MS. With the exception of the church in Gulfport, we mostly helped elderly and infirmed couples living in small, single story modest homes by carrying out all their unsalvageable earthly possessions to the curb to be picked up by the garbage truck.

It was a very humbling, sad, yet rewarding experience. They were so needy and we helped the best we could, although we could have stayed for years. The first homeowner had lived in their house for 40 years, raising all their children there. The husband was incapacitated and the wife was doing her best to sort through things, but she was exhausted and overwhelmed. The second day we went to Pascagoula into a neighborhood that the Red Cross hadn't yet found. The resident, Miss Jackie, was diabetic but lost her glucose testing machine in the flood and hadn't tested her blood sugar for a week. We gave her one we had just bought for someone else who ended up not needing it. She was truly amazed. While going through her things, she found a hundred dollar bill in a book and tried to give it to us saying, "Go and help someone else like you helped me". She had lost everything, yet she wanted to help others. It was very emotional.

Another lady we tried to help was clearly in shock and couldn't make decisions. It was very sad to be unable to convince her to seek shelter elsewhere or allow us to take out her wet, moldy furniture and personal items. Although we were unable to do much for her, when we gathered to pray with her on her front lawn she said that before we arrived she felt "helpless and hopeless, but had hope now". It seemed to have allowed her to started the process of dealing with the tragedy. Pascagoula took a hard hit. The houses closest to shore were decimated - literally. Debris was thick - houses on top of cars, some only the shell remained. It looked like a bomb went off.

Wednesday we helped an older couple who had adopted a boy that was 8 years old. The wife had had a series of strokes within the last 6 months which affected her speech and physical abilities and the husband had just had surgery 3 days prior to the hurricane and was awaiting test results to find out if he had terminal cancer. It didn't appear that they had any family in the area as nothing in the house had been removed nine days after the storm. The work was difficult as the odor of rancid, rotten food and moldy, wet carpet made us nauseous. I've never appreciated Clorox so much in my life! Our local friend and guide for all this worked tirelessly to help others while her own (second) beach home on Dauphin Island suffered destruction too. So we went out there to help clean up the debris in her yard and from her new pier that was picked up from the water and placed in her backyard. She lost her laundry room and anything that was on the first floor.

We were able to help 6 families in all - a drop in the bucket, yet we know we made a difference in helping them do something that would have taken them a very long time or cost them a lot of money to have someone else do. They were all shocked that we were from Maryland and seemed encouraged to know that the rest of the country feels their pain, have not forgotten them, and is praying for them. I truly feel blessed to have been able to go and see how God is working through all of this. His work is evident in so many places, but unfortunately, you only hear the bad stuff on the news. There ARE good things going on and we must have faith and perserverance to get through this together.