Lending a Hand in New Orleans

After Karl Uhrig came home from New Orleans, friends wanted to know what he’d seen there. “People asked me, ‘Do you think you made a difference?’ And I’d tell them, ‘Yes, we did. Every house we worked on is that much closer to being a home again,’” he said. Karl is a parishioner at the Church of St. Leo the Great in Lincroft, New Jersey. Karl had decided to volunteer after hearing an announcement at a Sunday church service. “I just had a calling,” he said. “I didn’t know what I could do, but I knew I could do something.”

Sister Joan Dreisbach, a pastoral associate at St. Leo’s, had written the announcement that Karl heard that Sunday morning. She knew that her religious order, the Sisters of St. Francis of Philadelphia, was offering to provide funding for volunteers to travel to New Orleans, and she had found herself entertaining the idea of organizing a group of volunteers from her church. “I said to myself, ‘I could do that,’” she recalled. Soon Sister Joan, Karl Uhrig, and twelve other parishioners had put their busy lives on hold and made the commitment to go. They traveled to New Orleans in April 2006—eight months after the levees failed and flooded the city—to volunteer with Operation Helping Hands, a recovery effort sponsored by Catholic Charities.

Slow Progress

A year and a half after Katrina, the rebuilding of New Orleans has slowed to a crawl. Planning paralysis has created uncertainty for families who want to return and rebuild. Long-promised financial aid for homeowners hasn’t been forthcoming. Clean-up efforts in huge swaths of the city have not even begun. Drug sales in back-of-town neighborhoods are booming; homicide rates have climbed well above pre-storm levels. The Postal Service estimates that only 171,000 of New Orleans’s 460,000 residents have returned.

Yet despite the lingering aftermath, the people of New Orleans persist in efforts to put their lives and their city back together again. One source of practical and spiritual support has come from the legions of volunteers—like those from St. Leo’s—who have come to New Orleans to lend a hand, provide witness, and listen to the still raw stories of the survivors.

Sweat Equity

The St. Leo’s volunteers spent four days working to clean out and gut two houses in one of the city’s drowned neighborhoods. The work was dirty, dangerous, and grueling. Homeowners Benny and Lourdes Pampo came each day to watch the progress on their house. The Pampos had lived in their home for twenty-seven years after emigrating from the Philippines to the U.S. with their six children, now grown. The Pampos evacuated ahead of Katrina, staying first with a son in Baton Rouge and later renting an apartment there.

“We were so happy to meet those people from New Jersey,” said Lourdes Pampo. “We loved them. We had fun and were enjoying ourselves, though it smelled terrible.” No one had been in the house since the storm. The volunteers donned respirators, formed a bucket brigade, and began digging out. Lourdes said “the older Sister”—Sister Joan, 77—“kept going no matter what.”

The St. Leo volunteers hauled out everything that was still in the house, “neckties, books, pillows, everything they didn’t take with them,” Sister Joan said, and took it to the curb for garbage pickup. She recalled the Pampos coming into their beleaguered home, picking up their belongings and “just looking at them.” After the house was emptied out, the volunteers took “crowbars and hammers—we had no power tools,” Karl Uhrig said, “and tore out the old plaster and lathe right down to the studs.”

Members of St. Leo’s congregation have remained in touch with the Pampos, helping them negotiate with public bureaucracies and fill out complicated aid applications. “They want to adopt us!” said Lourdes about the parishioners of St. Leo’s. “We’re so lucky God sent them to us.” Lourdes said her husband Benny had long tended a garden in back of their modest home. “He grew beans, vegetables, herbs. We miss our backyard,” she said wistfully. “It’s hard, it’s hard, but we’re surviving.”

Listening to Stories

When a second group from St. Leo’s volunteered to go to New Orleans the following October, Karl Uhrig jumped at the chance to return. As they drove through the neighborhoods, Karl, a ship’s guide in New York harbor, was surprised to see that little had changed in the six months since he’d been there. There might be a FEMA trailer parked in a yard or someone peeking out from a front door, but no other sign of life for blocks. Weeds had grown up waist-high in the yards. Some houses had escaped unharmed while just around the corner, houses had been knocked off foundations, roofs were caved in, and porches were gone.

For four days, five men and nine women—the youngest 23, the oldest 69—worked together, ate together, shared a dormitory and bathrooms, laughed, cried, and prayed together. “We went down as strangers and we came back as family,” said William Wei, a police sergeant with the county prosecutor’s office and a member of the group.

After Katrina, William had heard people say that New Orleans’ neighborhoods should “just be bulldozed,” he recalled. But he came to feel otherwise, especially after meeting the people who live there.

“I want people to understand that New Orleans has not recovered yet—people are still living in a traumatic situation and not getting the help they need. We saw the poorest of the poor, people with no family to turn to. They have every right to be there,” he said. William spent an hour listening to a police officer in a café tell the story of what he’d gone through after the flood. “Everywhere you went, people still wanted to tell their stories,” he said.
Loaves and Fishes

Jennifer Nimon, a schoolteacher, tore out tile and plaster walls in the bathroom with two other women in the first house the volunteers worked on. “It was amazing how we all worked so perfectly together with no experience. We took turns and got the job done,” she said. People didn’t say much or even need to ask for help from one another. They just seemed to sense what was needed, and they did it.

At the second house, floodwaters had reached the five-foot mark and had stayed there for weeks. The house was boarded up and dark. No one had been inside in 14 months. When they began cleaning out the house, furniture simply disintegrated in their hands. A piano fell apart when they tried to lift it. Dust filled the air. William Wei remembers thinking that it would take all the time they had left in New Orleans just to clean out the debris.

“It was like loaves and fishes,” he said. “How do you even start meeting the need?” But they hunkered down—carrying out a refrigerator, a sodden mattress, buckets of ruined belongings. “I have never seen so many cockroaches in my life,” said Jennifer Nimon. The volunteers duct taped their pant legs and shirtsleeves to keep the bugs out, and kept going. Someone found a wedding dress and a few photos, and set them aside for the owners. A day and a half later, they had the house cleaned out and stripped down to bare studs.

Church Service

The volunteers attended Mass together in a church that shared the namesake of their church back home, St. Leo’s. They had driven right from the job site to the church and sat down in their grungy work clothes in the back pews to worship. When the pastor introduced the volunteers from New Jersey at the end of the service, the primarily African American congregation stood up and applauded.

Jennifer Nimon said she was very moved by the service and the response, and felt she had seen “God in every person I met who told me their story or who welcomed us to their home or their city, or who thanked us.” She also felt a sudden and unexpected closeness with the other members of her group.

“The act of sitting there with these great people from my group, who were now my new friends, that did it for me,” she said. “I prayed for them and our efforts. I thanked God for allowing me to be his servant in this experience. It was my favorite part of the trip—dirty, exhausted, and in perfect harmony with God at St. Leo’s in New Orleans.”