‘Katrina was big, but God is bigger’:
Two years later, Indiana parishes still help Gulf Coast communities
Marianne Krueger, a high school senior and member of St. Paul Parish in Tell City, carries two young girls in a park in St. Bernard Parish, La., during a June 25-29 volunteer trip sponsored by her parish. The 22 teenagers and eight adult leaders were cleaning up the park when the children arrived from a nearby daycare center. (Submitted photo)
By Sean Gallagher
The weather was unbearably hot and sticky. The work that needed to be done seemed endless.
What could 22 teenagers and eight adult leaders from St. Paul Parish in Tell City do to help the community of St. Bernard Parish, La., recover from the devastation caused nearly two years ago by Hurricane Katrina while they were in Louisiana for a week in late June?
As their trip was coming to an end, the group was cleaning up a park. A van stopped, and children from a nearby daycare center piled out for play time.
The youths from Tell City saw in the happy faces of the boys and girls that progress can be measured by more than the number of houses rebuilt. It’s also measured in love given and received.
“We were having our lunch break, and they pulled up,” said Derrick Woodfield, a member of St. Paul Parish and a high school junior. “A bunch of us played kickball with the kids and had a great time. That park was really all they had.
“We usually only took about a
20-minute lunch break. But that day, we took almost the rest of the day off just to play with those kids. Just to see the smiles on those kids’ faces was awesome.”
Two years after Hurricane Katrina came ashore along the Mississippi-Louisiana coast and ravaged much of the area, the people who remain there still need massive amounts of help in both material and human terms.
But because of the large numbers of previous residents who have permanently moved elsewhere, finding jobs and enough skilled labor to rebuild businesses and homes is a challenge.
In Louisiana, a parish is the term used for the equivalent of the counties found in many other states. Before Hurricane Katrina, St. Bernard Parish, which is southeast of New Orleans, had a population of approximately 67,000, according to local government figures. As of now, the population has dropped to approximately 25,000.
Linda Krueger, a member of St. Paul Parish who helped organize the service trip, knew the challenges facing St. Bernard Parish because her daughter, Theresa, lives there.
“The businesses can’t come back without the people,” she said. “And the people can’t come back without [jobs that] businesses support.”
In addition to helping clean up the park in St. Bernard Parish, the group from Tell City helped prepare a former school building to be converted into government offices. They also cleared a nature trail on the grounds of a museum and readied a public baseball field for use.
But in the midst of all this good work, Linda Krueger’s daughter, Stefanie, wasn’t sure if she and the other volunteers from Indiana were making a difference.
“Every night, I prayed that we would actually feel like we were doing something good,” said Stefanie, a junior at Marian College in Indianapolis and a member of St. Paul Parish in Tell City.
“And then, the last two days, we saw those kids. I just broke down in tears when we saw those kids because that made everything worth it.”
The group from Tell City went south with the intent to help people who live along the Gulf Coast. They accomplished their goal, and gained a lot as well.
“I don’t take stuff for granted anymore, and I try to spend more time with my family,” Derrick said. “There were so many families that got split up. I used to go out to eat all the time. Now, I just lay back at the house and say, ‘We should just have dinner [here] tonight.’ ”
After the success of their first trip, St. Paul Parish is planning to take another group to Louisiana next June.
Small beginnings, big results
Putting a human touch on charitable work is an essential part of Catholic charity, and the volunteer group from St. Paul Parish did this.
Caring for the material needs of people is also important.
Members of St. Bartholomew Parish in Columbus have been hard at work on this aspect, while not ignoring the other, for more than a year in Waveland, Miss.
In May 2006, the parish teamed up with St. Clare Parish in the coastal town in the Biloxi Diocese to form St. Clare Recovery.
It is a ministry that is working to put families back into homes in Waveland. Many who have received aid are members of St. Clare Parish, but the ministry is dedicated to helping anyone in the town who is in need.
According to Noel Phillips, a member of St. Clare Parish who helps oversee the ministry, in the 15 months that St. Clare Recovery has been up and running, the volunteer work it has coordinated has allowed 122 families to move back into their homes.
This work was brought about through 121 groups of volunteers from 33 states. Overall, more than 1,000 volunteers have logged more than 31,000 service hours.
“I just don’t know how to explain it,” Phillips said. “We are just so grateful that these people have given their time and their talent to come down and help, and to not expect anything in return.”
This massive outpouring of aid from across the nation started with a simple spring break trip for two families from St. Bartholomew Parish.
John McCormack and John Cord took their families down to Waveland in March 2006 to show their teenage children the devastation along the coast, and to lend a hand in helping people there start to recover.
“They were in total chaos, and had no way to really organize volunteers,” Cord said. “There were hundreds of families from their parish that had no homes.”
On their way back to Indiana, Cord and the others on the trip talked about how their one week of work wasn’t enough.
“You just can’t leave and walk away from it,” Cord said.
So they started discussions at St. Bartholomew Parish about helping to house volunteers and coordinate volunteer work through St. Clare Parish. And in a few months, St. Clare Recovery was born.
Jane Crady, Cord’s sister and a member of St. Joseph Parish in Shelbyville, moved to Waveland and lived there for a year while overseeing the ministry.
The ministry expanded by leaps and bounds in a short time, largely through attention it received through its Web site.
“In nine or 10 months, it went from a non-existent ministry to the largest ministry, both dollar- and people-wise, in our parish,” Cord said.
In the 15 months that the ministry has been in operation, the kind of volunteer work that has been coordinated has changed.
“In the beginning, … you needed a lot of hands to do clean-up,” Cord said. “But as it went on, we discovered that we needed more and more skilled labor, people that actually could do finish work and carpentry and drywall and truly skilled things.”
The need for volunteer labor in Waveland is largely driven by two factors.
According to Phillips, Waveland’s pre-Katrina population was approximately 7,000. Now it’s about 4,000. Combine that with a general population drop in the larger region, and the building contractors left there are swamped.
“They are so overwhelmed that they can’t get to them all,” Cord said.
A second reason for the volunteer labor is that many area residents’ homeowner’s insurance is covering only a fraction of the rebuilding costs of their homes.
The members of St. Clare Parish have recovered enough over the past two years that they have now taken over leadership of St. Clare Recovery from St. Bartholomew Parish.
The Columbus faith community, however, is still committed to helping the ministry. Volunteers from St. Bartholomew are still going south, and the parish has committed to contribute $4,000 per month to the ministry until September 2008.
This is in addition to the financial aid given by St. Bartholomew over the past 15 months, and $15,000 contributed by Catholic Charities Indianapolis from the archdiocese’s Hurricane Katrina Relief Fund, which was created after second collections were taken up in parishes across central and southern Indiana in the weeks after Katrina.
The archdiocese’s Office of Youth and Young Adult Ministry has also led two trips where scores of archdiocesan youths volunteered through St. Clare Recovery.
And all this work that has changed the lives of many families in Waveland started with a small weeklong trip taken by two families from Columbus.
“It’s very simple. We talk about this all the time,” Cord said. “It’s obviously a ministry that God wanted there.”
(For more information about St. Clare Recovery, log on to www.stclarerecovery.com or call 317-642-7322.) †
