Faith Draws Many Volunteers to Devastated Gulf Region

After a long, sweltering day hanging sheetrock, installing flooring, and removing fallen

trees for residents whose homes were damaged by Hurricane Katrina, some 40 people — ranging in age from their teenage years to their 50s and 60s — gather in a high-school gymnasium here for an evening prayer service.

The hymn they sing speaks of answering a call from God:

The volunteers at the prayer service are not alone. The call of faith has brought thousands of people from a host of religious traditions to the hurricane-devastated Gulf Coast, at first to cook meals and provide medical care and later to remove debris and gut water-damaged houses and finally to begin the long rebuilding process.

In the aftermath of a disaster that called into question the response of the government and the American Red Cross, many nonprofit leaders say that religious organizations and the volunteers they marshal have been critical to the progress that has been made so far.

“Without the faith-based groups there would be no recovery,” says Bill Stallworth, founder of the East Biloxi Coordination, Relief and Redevelopment Agency. “Without their participation, without their volunteers, this area would simply fold up and die.”

Volunteer Camps

Camps to house volunteers have been set up — largely by religious relief groups, although secular groups and individuals have set up similar operations — and dot the towns and cities hit hardest by the storm last August.

Here in Harrison County, Miss., the Salvation Army built a volunteer camp at an old football stadium in East Biloxi, while the Hands On Network’s volunteer operation in the city is housed at Beauvoir Methodist Church. God’s Katrina Kitchen, started by a couple from Evansville, Ind., feeds and houses volunteer workers in Pass Christian. And many churches put up volunteers informally.

More than 7,400 volunteers have come through Camp Coast Care, the volunteer camp set up in the gymnasium of Coast Episcopal School, in Long Beach, by Lutheran and Episcopal Services in Mississippi. Volunteers of various faiths and denominations have come from as far away as Australia, Kenya, and South Africa to offer aid to victims of Hurricane Katrina.

Soon after volunteers started coming into the region, they started a custom of making signs out of storm debris when their time at the camp came to an end. Dozens of signs now hang on multiple posts under a tall, shady tree.

And some volunteers find themselves coming back over and over again.

Jimmy B. Butler, from Vicksburg, Miss., a full-time nursing student at age 57, is here for the fourth time. After the disaster, he drove down to deliver supplies, and he later spent a week working during the Christmas and Easter holidays.

Mr. Butler says he is pleased to be helping people rebuild. He recalls an earlier trip when the work consisted mostly of demolition.

“I remember going to the second floor of a man’s house and taking a sledgehammer to his walls, ceiling, the sheetrock,” says Mr. Butler. “We took shovels to the carpet on the floor and a sledgehammer to his furniture, and everything went out the window. He was left with studs. Now they’re rebuilding.”

Emotional Moments

Seeing the devastation caused by Katrina firsthand and the trying conditions many residents still face is an emotional experience for the volunteers. “I’m really bothered by it,” says Lisa Friel Norbut, a middle-school guidance counselor from Freehold, N.J., fighting back tears. “There are so many people who have just been abandoned. I want to tell people, ‘Something is wrong.’”

People in other parts of the country don’t realize how much still needs to done, says her husband, Joe Norbut, a high-school teacher.

“As far as the news at home is concerned, it’s over,” he says. “You know, OK, we’ve moved on to the next story. The disaster was last year. And you just don’t realize how many people are displaced.”

During his week at Camp Coast Care, Jim Lawrence, a retired farmer from Cedar Key, Fla., did finishing work on the home of a Laotian family who had purchased the house only five months before the storm. Mr. Lawrence says he feels guilty that it has been such a meaningful experience for him.

“I feel guilty that I am enjoying what I am doing for the people so much,” he says. “I’m getting pleasure out of it, and it’s because of their hurt, their need.”

Military-Style Operation

North Carolina Baptist Men, the disaster-relief arm of the state’s Baptist convention, has converted an old National Guard armory in Gulfport into a crack operation that can feed and house 320 volunteers. Dormitory trailers sleep more than 20 volunteers each in camp-style bunk beds. Two other trailers provide shower facilities. The organization installed a commercial-grade kitchen, and built a 40-by-60-foot structure to store building materials.

Most weeks, however, the organization has many more volunteers than the 320 it can house at the armory. (The overflow stays at churches and schools.) One week in July, for example, the group had 630 volunteers working on 82 different houses.

Eddie and Martha Williams, of Spruce Pine, N.C., are one of four couples who have made a two-year commitment to running the camp. Like two of the other couples, Mr. and Mrs. Williams left full-time jobs to come to Gulfport. They receive stipends to cover living expenses — which if the money were for a regular job would “make you run like a dog,” jokes Mr. Williams.

New volunteers arrive so eager to get to work that Mr. Williams doubts they can sleep the night before. But he encourages them to think more broadly about their work.

“It’s not about how many shingles you put on or how many pieces of sheetrock you put up in a week or in a day,” he says. “I’ve told them time and time again, if you go to a homeowner and you don’t even break a sweat that day, you sit on the porch all day long just listening to somebody pour their heart out to you, then that’s what you’re supposed to be doing.”

Mrs. Williams, however, gently interjects that just as some homeowners want to tell their Katrina stories and others don’t, some volunteers reach out effortlessly to the people they’re helping, while for others it’s more difficult. “They’re not gifted in compassion, in people skills,” she says. “And they come in and work and work and work, and show their love toward the homeowner that way.”

The Williamses are modest about the sacrifices they have made. “Two years of our life is just a little blink compared to what people on the Gulf Coast are experiencing,” says Mrs. Williams. And the couple speaks easily and un-self-consciously about how the experience has strengthened their faith, and forced them to put their trust in the Lord.

“I’ve had to rely on Him giving me that wisdom for the right decisions,” says Mr. Williams. “A lot of time you have to make decisions. You can’t say, ‘Let me run in here and pray, and I’ll be right back.’ You have to be prayed up before.”