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Reflections on New Orleans Mission Trip

January 28 – February 3, 2007

Head of Christiana and West Presbyterian Churches

 

Reflections:  Jane Ritterson

As I listen once again to this passage from Luke this morning and reflect on it in light of our recent trip to South Louisiana, I wonder if it might just as well say – “Blessed are you who are poor, for you shall bring the Kingdom of God to the world.”  “Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you shall witness to the power of the Holy Spirit.”  “Blessed are you the people of New Orleans for you shall teach us the meaning of the Golden Rule– do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

 

Although it has been nineteen months since Katrina ravaged New Orleans, in many

parts of the city it is as if the levees broke last week.  The population is down to less than half of its 440,000 before the storm count, and New Orleans is now the murder capital of the United States.  The murder rate has gone up 90 percent in the last six months.  The rebuilding is the easy part.  What is difficult, if not impossible, is to cut through the red tape of politics, race, and poverty to get to funds allocated for the rebirth of the city.  While over 105,000 have applied for government funds, only 500 families have received any.  Katrina is still front page news every day in the Times-Picayune.  Today in many neighborhoods, rich and poor alike, nineteen months after Katrina, it is still hell on earth – yet paradoxically a city filled with hope, hospitality, and the tangible presence of the Holy Spirit blowing in and through the people who call the Big Easy home.

 

I can’t begin to tell you how delighted I am that 13 of us from West and Head of Christiana Presbyterian Churches joined together as the Body of Christ to travel to New Orleans.  It was a privilege and a joy to spend this time together.  We spent the week in the Land Education Building of the St. Charles Avenue Presbyterian Church in the Garden District of New Orleans.  It is an area on higher ground, referred to as the sliver by the river – a section of New Orleans that was not affected by flood waters following the breach of the levees.  St. Charles is a large, affluent church numbering about 1100 members.  We learned from their pastor that three weeks after the storm, the staff gathered in temporary quarters in Houston to re-envision their life and ministry as a church.  It was clear life would not go on as usual.  The roof had blown off their sanctuary and while they were not filled with muck and sludge, the church suffered significant rain and wind damage.  Indeed, many of their own parishioners had lost homes.  The Spirit blew as it will and RHINO was born.  RHINO – Rebuilding Hope in New Orleans.  It began as small mission as church members helped other church members with home gutting, debris clean up, and the process of returning to New Orleans.  The church converted it’s education building, a large southern mansion, next to the sanctuary into dormitories for work groups and they have hosted about 30 people here each week since October of 2005.  The Session of St. Charles has committed to continue the RHINO mission through December of this year and is likely to do so into 2008 and beyond.  It has been a gift and a strain to the church.  Not only have they been worshipping in the fellowship hall all of this time, but they have graciously been hosting 30 weekly guests with untold generosity and grace. The thirteen of us from Head of Christiana and West joined with 20 from Atlanta and we experienced Christian community at its very best.  You’ll hear more from Debbie Harper and Jane Murray in a moment.

 

We all thank you for your prayers and support.  We worked hard.  We cried a bit; and we gathered each evening to pray and reflect on our days.  We learned a few new songs, and laughed until it hurt.  We ate po-boys, red beans and rice, jambalaya, and gumbo not to mention King Cake in celebration of Mardi Gras.  Our relationships deepened with one another and with God as we lived and cared for one another.  Indeed, it was a life-changing experience.

 

It will take time to process all that we experienced.  The situation is complex and there are no easy answers.  The one request we heard over and over again was to go home and tell our stories, their stories as best as we can.  This is but a start…        

 

 

Reflections:  Jane Cairns Murray

We left for New Orleans having talked about our reasons for going, our hopes, and our fears.  We talked about what we expected.  What we didn’t talk about was the community we would become.

 

As you know, we partnered with a group from West Presbyterian, and were further joined with a group from Atlanta: Trinity Presbyterian.  We all were part of the ministry set up by St. Charles Avenue Presbyterian Church, formerly a large, urban, affluent congregation, whose church was located in the Garden District, surrounded by large, well kept houses.  In the words of

their pastor, in turning to a mission church, they have become more of a church than they’ve ever been.  Truly they are a mission.  With the upstairs of their parish hall, formerly a Garden District mansion, turned into a dormitory for 20 women and 16 men, it is indeed a new experience for them.

 

I knew the group from HOC, and had met most of the folks from West.  By the end of the week I couldn’t always remember who came from West and who came from here, and I can’t imagine a time that we weren’t friends.  Although we didn’t get to know the Atlanta folks quite as well, I know that should I ever find myself in Atlanta, I will have a home church there.

 

Why, might you ask, is it important to travel such a distance for a mission trip?  Why not just spend time at a closer site?  The answer lies in the statement that John Ames made before we left: that this city, this area, is an indication of government failure on all levels.  It further lies in the words behind the rhinoceros logo: Rebuilding Hope in New Orleans. 

 

The government isn’t doing the job, and if you doubt us, look up the series broadcast by Brian Williams on the NBC website from this past week.  The residents have done and continue to do all that they can, but it isn’t enough.  They are oh, so tired.  I look in the eyes of the man whose house we gutted.  He had worked by himself, with only his young nephew for help, removing sodden furniture, household belongings, and tearing out the first course of plaster.  He hauled it out himself.  It took 20 of us a long, hard day to finish the job, and it most certainly would have taken him months.  This is a man who has always worked, who has insurance, and who hopes so badly to return to the home that he had worked so hard to acquire in the first place.  Without our help, he couldn’t move on to bid the job out to contractors.  The money is not available to hire someone to gut out the house.  What did we see in his eyes as we finished the job, after he invited all of us, and I do mean all of us, to return for next year’s Mardi Gras?  I saw hope.  I saw hope, gratitude, and love.  Could I get that reaction at a Friendship House luncheon?  Maybe.  But can I make the same impact?  By traveling so far, and making the commitment that we did, we showed that we are a community of Christ, joining with others to do His work.  People in need aren’t just in Newark, or Elkton, or Wilmington.  By traveling the distance we did, we show our church’s and this congregation’s commitment–we show that we will use our collective resources to go out into the world doing the Lord’s work.

 

And we are returning home to spread the word about what is needed.  Regardless of the debate over whether it should be rebuilt: clearly, the city cannot be abandoned the way it is now.  And it shouldn’t.  I daresay that other cities bear a risk from natural disasters: San Francisco, LA, even Buffalo in this week of cold weather.  But New Orleans and its people are special, have been there for so many generations, and still have so much to offer.  By being a community of God and traveling to give them hope, and returning here to tell all of you, and hoping that you will tell others of our–and I mean our collective experience.  In New Orleans it would be all y’all–by telling all y’all and hoping that you to will tell others, we’ll be a voice together that this area can’t be forgotten.   Sharing our lives and new-found talents, and inspiring hope in our extended community. 

 

Reflections:  Debbie Harper

Part of the experience for every group at RHINO is to take Wednesday morning off from work to tour the city.  It was the hardest part of the week for me.  Homes of people from all socio-economic levels were devastated by the storm. We saw million-dollar houses, and houses of the very poor, and yes, we saw plenty of houses of the sort that any of us would live in, all with their doors and windows blown out, knocked off their foundations, walls toppled over, roofs collapsed, many with escape holes knocked in the roofs, and all bearing the same distinctive spray-painted markings that indicated how many times the National Guard units had entered the house, and what they found there.

 

There has been devastating loss in New Orleans.  And there is a lot of silence.  People who do return find that they cannot just resume their lives.  Their old lives are over, the people are gone, the places are gone, the touchstones of their lives are gone, and they will not come back.  Many people give up.  But those aren’t the people we met.  Glenn, and Jeanette, and Will and Katherine, and the people at St. Charles Avenue Church are focused on building new lives for themselves and for others, and that is what we were a part of.  And it was joyous.

 

One wouldn’t expect gutting a house to be joyous, but it was. Glenn, the homeowner, was so grateful we were there.  He amazed all of us with his fortitude. Typically when a RHINO team goes in to gut a house they first have to empty it of all it contained at the time of the flood, and this is a Herculean, frightening, and even dangerous task. But we didn’t have to do that, because for the past 18 months Glenn has been returning from Texas on weekends to clean out the house himself. Imagine, doing by yourself the work that it typically takes 30 people an entire day to do. But Glenn is determined, and Will, RHINO’s field coordinator, said Glenn has about the best chance of anyone he has worked with to really make it.

 

Will is a remarkable young man. He graduated from college in May, took two days off, and came to this job. He was recruited by a friend who had previously held the job. So he has been there 8 months. Previously the person who held this job the longest was there 2-1/2 months. It is a hard job. Will said that often when he meets a person to look over their home, it is the first time they have seen their house since Katrina. He is the one who is there to take all of their anger, all of their grief, all of their despair, and try to move them forward. “I am not trained for this,” he said to me. And so he is trying to formalize the program, to move the church into having a plan for training the workers to provide that needed support for the homeowners. Jane Murray and I both felt the same thing – this is a young man who needs to spend some time with Carl Mazza. I hope we can find a way to facilitate that. It isn’t often I meet someone about whom I can say, “I want to know what happens in this person’s life, because I am seeing the beginning of something wonderful, and I want to know how it all comes out.”

 

Another remarkable young person is Katherine, who also graduated college last year, and who is the construction foreman on our Habitat site.  We learned quickly to listen when Katherine speaks and to jump to the task. She is not impressed by credentials. If you are a skilled worker that’s great, because that means she can get some more complicated task done, but it will be done under her direction, to her specification. And no one minded. We were fine taking orders from this 23-year-old. And yet she, and the other regulars on the site, were so kind to we novices, showing us exactly what to do, and how, and cheering us on.

 

And then there is Jeanette, for whom we were building this house. Jeanette’s home in the Lower 9^th Ward was destroyed, so with Habitat for Humanity we were building her a new house. Habitat requires that its homeowners have a reliable income, be able to afford the mortgage and have a good credit rating, and of course they have to put in over 300 hours of sweat equity on the house themselves. Jeanette was so delighted to have us there, and so appreciative, and proud. She swept the house daily. There was no roof, or even roof trusses, before we got there, and of course no siding or windows or doors. But Jeanette swept the house. And she has reason to be proud, because we cared and we built her a very secure structure. We didn’t take any chances. If a nail bent on the way in – and I personally bent ALOT of nails – then we yanked it out and did it over – sometimes multiple times – so that the nail was straight and the fastening absolutely secure. We couldn’t take a chance on anything in the home failing because of our workmanship.

 

I would go back to New Orleans in a heartbeat.  My one regret is that we couldn’t stay to worship at St. Charles Avenue Church, because I would have loved to give thanks to God for these people and their work in their own church.  Their pastor said that previously they were a typical congregationally-focused church, active in various mission projects, and thinking they were just fine.  But then Katrina hit, and RHINO was born, and they were galvanized, and they were transformed.  They are truly mission-focused and as a result, they are now more truly church than they ever realized they could be. They experience consistently what we experience every year with the Trail Race – the work, yes, the organizational headaches, the concern about sustainability, but when it is over, and the results are in – then the joy, the exultation, the realization that we have done something really significant to help God’s people.  They have that experience every day, and it is wonderful, and I am so grateful to have been a part of it. I thank all of you who helped to make it possible.

Head of Christiana Presbyterian Church