I was able to go down to Port Arthur to help with the clean up after Hurricane Harvey. I am glad that my wife was willing to make the sacrifice of spending a weekend alone with the kids so that I could go do it. It was really an experience unlike anything else I have had.
I left at 4:45 Saturday morning. We met at the church and then headed down to Port Arthur, which took about 5 hours to get to. Not long before we got to Beaumont we began to see the heaps of trash and furniture piled up in front of houses. When we got to the neighborhood where we were working in Port Arthur, almost every house had huge heaps of furniture and building materials piled up in front. The first house was so hot and stagnant inside that I thought I was going to have to take a break every 15 minutes all day. Fortunately we weren't there long and then it started raining. That created some inconvenience, but it cooled everything down which was really a blessing. The last house we went to on Saturday was so disgusting. The carpet was still soaking wet and there was a thick band of fuzzy mold on nearly every wall of the house. Only the tile walls in the bathroom and the wood paneling weren't moldy on the outside. We had to rip them out too, though. After working there for a few hours I was feeling so discouraged and disgusted and humbled. I also was feeling angry about bad government policies that encourage excessive building in flood plains, but that only increased my feelings of sympathy for the poor people who had their lives turned upside down by the hurricane.
We slept that night in a sports arena complex, and while getting a warm shower in a shower truck was nice, I didn't sleep very well. We met the next morning for sacrament meeting in the arena, with probably 40 people passing the sacrament to however many hundreds of volunteers had showed up. It was one of the most beautiful sacrament meetings that I can remember. I left feeling so good about what we were doing and about life in general. The house we worked in on Sunday also was a house that the owner had worked very hard already to fix. He was so optimistic and grateful that it also lifted my spirits considerably.
My main takeaways from the experience are that no one should live in Houston, people are amazingly resilient, service is a truly beautiful thing where we can be the answer to others' prayers, and that God is watching over us even at the worst of times.
1 comment:
Good for you all helping others. A great opportunity for service and good fellowship. Some years ago when the Ohio River flooded, it washed away a lot of Adams County. We reroofed houses, replaced doors, cut out flooring and the lower areas of walls. One elderly lady on Steam Furnace Rd lost her whole house. We salvaged three parts of other buildings/houses that had washed down the river and cobbled them together with steel strapping. Once we had this "house" squared up, we went back for several more weekends and resided our "structure" with T-111 plywood sheathing. Recut door and window openings and it was sort of OK. Some of the old timbers we were trying to get screws into were so hard that we had to predrill all the holes. I was standing up on a ladder drilling pilot holes and putting in screws. Two other brothers were bracing me on the ladder with a "t-bar" sort of dead man pressed into my shoulders to keep me from pushing myself away from the house and off the ladder. Some one else did the windows and doors during the week. Yes, there were those who were too busy/tired/lazy to come and work, but others worked hard again and again and had great fellowship and received the blessings of good service. Bless you all for the work you did. Opa
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