Thankful for Beignets and Cafe au lait

I've started this blog over 5 times. All I can say is that words come up short to describe what we have seen and heard. Not much resembles the memories I have of New Orleans and surrounding communities. After hours of touring devastating sights...destroyed houses, hollowed out houses, partially rebuilt houses and church buildings, miles of empty apartments, closed businesses, government offices meeting in trailers, FEMA trailer parks, dead trees and plants, piles of debris, cars crushed, boats still sitting on sidewalks, and pilings without houses on top, it was an overwhelming relief to find beignets and cafe au lait still for sale in the French quarter. Jazz is still played on street corners, the horse drawn buggies still move tourists around the narrow streets, and artists still hang their creations on the fence around St. Louis Cathedral.

The experience here reminds me of hospital chaplaincy. You never knew what was awaiting you in the next room. In one room there was sad news and in the next joyful celebration. We listen to people who all have stories to tell. With one you are sad for their loss of home, work, or loved one. With the next you are celebrating the miraculous deliverance from the storm's rage. You are stunned one minute by the destruction by a broken levee and shocked on the other side of the levee to find a normal neighborhood.

I keep thinking of the people so disrupted by the storm. One day they had a neighborhood where folks sat on front porches and watched children play. The next day everyone they knew and shared life with dispersed to another city, perhaps never to be heard from again.

The results of Katrina are still monumental. In the week ahead we will be "mucking a house." We have had the training now and will be ready to don our protective gear so that we can tear out walls and insultation and put what is left of someone's possessions on the curb. There are thousands of homes yet to be emptied. Consider coming to help for a week or two.

There is a spirit of resilience here. Those who remain go about the painstaking process of rebuilding. Sometimes there will be only one or two inhabited homes in a whole block. It takes a full measure of hope to rebuild and reclaim home when the neighbors are now all off in some other city or state and many will never be returning. It takes courage, and hope and faith to rebuild a neighborhood church when the vast majority of the neighborhood remains abandoned and looking like a bombed out war zone, but the building is happening. God is at work here...in the still small voice of volunteers and caring citizens.

Don't think this disaster is history. It is still unfolding in so many ways. Pray, donate time and money, and come listen and serve.

Pastor Ruth Fortis