Survivors' hearts
Holston members bring home tales of relief work

By Annette Bender

It's "pretty bad" when Vicks Vaporub smells good, says Jane Currin. The Concord United Methodist Church youth director explained that she and her co-volunteers put Vicks ointment on their noses and masks to block out the awful smell of mold.

"I DON'T KNOW HOW TO DESCRIBE IT," said Currin. "The mold is bad and the smells are bad."

Worse was the smell emanating from a freezer containing 100 pounds of previously frozen shrimp. "The refrigerators and freezers have all been sitting there for a month, pickling in 90-degree heat," said Currin, whose Oak Ridge District team worked in D'Iberville, Miss., in late September. In addition to rubbing on Vicks, her team chewed lots of mint gum and frequently stepped away for gulps of fresh air.

The members from Concord are only a few of the more than 200 Holstonians who have traveled to hurricane-affected areas to clean out houses, deliver supplies, and work in relief centers. The teams, representing nearly all districts, were dispatched from Holston through Volunteers in Mission Coordinator Bonnie Howard.

Currin's team of eight adults was assigned to "muck out" flooded houses. The process involves removing all the items inside the house, taking off the trim around the doors and floors, and removing the drywall, carpeting, and flooring. The house is then bleached and left to dry out before a determination can be made about whether the house should be salvaged or demolished.

"We worked on 10 houses that were very diverse and cross-cultural," Currin said. "They were homes of people who were well off and homes of people who weren't."

Currin told of the African-American woman who explained how "the water went over the house" during Hurricane Katrina. "There was water in her light fixtures," she said.

The Concord group also met a paralyzed Vietmanese woman who, prior to the hurricane, had been shot and whose husband had been killed during the robbery of their store. The woman took the money from the court settlement and bought a home, which was subsequently lost in Hurricane Katrina.

"It was all heartbreaking, what these people have been through," said Currin. "But they have survivors' hearts. They were still strong and wanted to get their homes back."

The Rev. Stephen Burkhart participated on a six-person team comprised of members from Kingsport, Johnson City, Morristown, and Chattanooga Districts. Burkhart's team set up and staffed a disaster-relief warehouse in Wiggins, Miss.

Burkhart, pastor at Vermont UMC in Kingsport District, said that he was struck by how easy it is to unload an organized and properly packed truck of supplies, and how time-consuming it is to unload a truck that is not.

"It took us less than an hour for two workers with a pallet jack to unload one truck," he said. "It took us seven hours to unload another truck that was stacked to the ceiling, half of it with individual plastic bags of supplies and boxes that were coming apart."

Incomplete flood buckets are a "nightmare" to unload, he said. Half of one truck's contents had to be thrown away because diapers were not in their original sanitary packages and many items were not needed or requested."

"If we could get three points across to help people, maybe they would be, send only what's being requested. Send it complete [with all the requested contents]. And send it so it's stackable."

Burkhart also noticed the exhausted clergy members in the area where he worked. "The pastors down there are just weary. There was a pastor from Biloxi whose church is gone, but he's spending every waking hour trying to coordinate help for his people.

"We need to listen to what Mississippi wants, because they're in the middle of a war down there," Burkhard added. "The closer you get to the coast - there are whole towns that are no longer there. But there's a good spirit down there - a spirit that you take with you."

The Rev. Harry Howe, who drove the first donated supplies from Holston into southwest Louisiana in the early days after Katrina, was also struck by the devastation and the amount of help that hurricane victims will need.

"It's more widespread than anything I've experienced," said Howe, director of Project Crossroads in Abingdon District. "We as a conference need to be involved in rebuilding, because it's not going to be done overnight."

Howe told the story of a woman who brought a donation of two bottles of water to the relief center where he was helping to unload trucks. The woman said that was all she had to give.

Howe subsequently told her the story of how Jesus fed the multitudes with only five loaves and two fish. "You are like that lad who brought the loaves and fish," he said, "and I'm the lucky one who gets to be the disciple who delivers it."

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