Beyond the Storm

Day 4 – April 4th, 2006

After a day of mucking out yesterday, our team needed a bit of positive reconstruction. Today’s work was to help Ms. Dot Burton finish work on her house. Dot is a 60+ year young women who taught junior high school Special Ed for 30 years, recently served in the Peace Corp in Dominican Republic and just a few years ago moved from Georgia to the New Orleans area to be with her sister. Unfortunately, her sister died a 1-1/2 years ago and now she is alone dealing with reconstruction after the hurricane. To top that all off, she is un-going chemo therapy which has weakened her.

The surge from Lake Pontchartrain had deposited a foot of muck in her house. Dot had contracted someone to repair her house paying out $25,000 for the work. But unfortunately, before he had completed the work, he left. So there she was with no lower cabinets, no flooring, no toilets, etc and very little money left. She couldn’t stop thanking us for the work that we were doing.

We split into smaller work cells with some laying laminate flooring, others working on installation of the kitchen cabinets, others work on clean-up of bathroom & kitchen sinks getting them ready for others that would install them after the sink cabinets had been installed. But there was so much to do and we ran out of time. After assessing the progress, it was decided that a few of us would go back tomorrow with the entire team returning to finish the work on Thursday.


After dinner tonight, Kurtis told us his family’s story about their experience with the hurricane. Fortunately they were able to leave and actually evacuated with financial help from a friend and ended up in Fort Wayne. His in-laws live in Woodburn. Their story was actually reported by the News Sentinel a month or so after Katrina. While their house in Slidell was hit by the storm surge, by the grace of God, they experienced no wind damage, tree damage and little muck damage. As they recounted their experience with their 4 children, they truly felt that they had more positive effects from the storm than negative – most because of the wonderful people that they met, who helped them and who are now helping the victims of this catastrophe.