Katrina: Baywood House

So we saw a lot of damage down in Pass Christian. But one thing that was truly baffling was how much water this water front town had to deal with. The second to last day there my group joined Julie’s on what turned out to be a house that was in much higher water then we could really imagine.

Get this, the house was up on stilts, I would say the stilts were 8 feet tall. This house was on stilts because it was right next to the cannel. So it was on stilts so it wouldn’t flood, but it was not prepared for Katrina. There was 1 foot of flooding…on the second story above the stilts. There were giant holes in the roof. The house hadn’t been touched in the three months since the hurricane and when we got there. There was stuff everywhere. The bed rooms litterally had feet of toys, muck, clothes and drywall on the floor. When we got to the floor, we didn’t even know it was carpet or hardwood. The floor looked like the bottom of a pond. And in the cannel in the back yard, there was a house.

Twenty feet of water does really amazing things.

Katrina: My Best Thanksgiven Yet

Thanksgiving is one of those holidays that you spend with your family. But not this year for me, I spent it with a bunch of people that I wouldn’t have known if it were not for this trip.

If ya’ll have been paying attention then you already know that this trip was over Thanksgiving break. Of course that meant Thanksgiving Day as well. Our fith full day down on the Gulf Coast was Thanksgiving. It had always been a question as to what exactly we were going to do that day. It was decided that we would’t work a full day, but we were so excited about finishing our projects that there was no way we were giong to take the whole day off. We started the day by heading over to the next town, Long Beach, MS. That town was so bad off that you had to have a special pass to get in. We somehow managed to scrounge one up, and went to a church that was practically dead before the storm, but the hurricane destroyed the inside and it doesn’t look like the congregation was even big enough to make it worth rebuilding. But another group was down there trying to rebuild it, praying with a “If we build it they will come” mentality. Around noon we were headed back to Pass Christian. On the way back we saw a cross in the clouds, that was a nice reminder on Thanksgiving day. Not long after we got back to the church 80 Thanksgiving meals were delivered in styrophome “to go” boxes. It was tasty. After we finished that we made a quick turnaround to get out to our job sites. We went back to the Alicia St house we had been working on, we were hoping to get it done so we could do one more house before we left town on Saturday. So we all worked quickly to get most of tht done. A few stayed back to spray bleach to kill the mildew while the rest of us went to start on another house.

By how we were all tired not just from working a hard half day, but after five days of work, I know I was starting to drag and can only imagine that others were too. Someone from Steve Thorson’s group had heard about a fire station the next town up that was serving thanksgiving. While the official plan was just to eat at God’s Katrina Kitchen, our group, Steve’s group and Dr. Olsen’s group were willing to give it a try. And why not, we had heard that there were going to be lots of pies. Keith and Michelle also joined us. So we head there. Now this fire station was considerably smaller than God’s Katrina Kitchen, so I got out of the van and asked if they had room for 21. They assured us they did and would not let us entertain thoughts otherwise. It turns out they really did, because besides us, only a family of four showed up. As we were walking in, they started moving everything around, they had pushed a bunch of tables together so that we would all sit at one big table. They ditched their plan to serve buffet style and instead set the food, in large aluminum cooking trays, in front of us. This group serving was made up of students from Lancaster Bible College, who had met up with a congregation from Maryland and had teamed up with the fire department. Those from up north had travled down with the primary goal of serving Thanksgiving Dinner. The bunch of amateur waiters and waitresses did a great job. The smile on their faces as they got us more tea and instisting that we had not had enough pie yet, really rejuvinated me. They were interested in all our stories and it seems like everyone found something in common with someone in our group. It was also one of the best tasting thanksgivings I had had, the sweep potatoes and stuffing we’re particularly delicious. It was so nice to be served after a week of serving other. That thanksgiving dinner, with what a week earlier would have been 20 strangeers really rejuvenated me and I could have worked for another week. And I count that as my best Thanksgiving yet.

Katrina: Keith & Michelle’s Story

On monday, the students from the trip shared a little bit about the trip in Chapel at Asbury College. A lot of good stories, prayers and fashion.

Caroline, one of the girls in my group, shared about two people, Keith & Michelle, we met while down there. She sums up their story very well. If you have six minutes and some speakers, take a listen.

Katrina: Sunday Service

Our first full day in Mississippi was Sunday. We needed to get the trip off on the right foot and since half of us were staying at a church there was no way we could pass up on the service.

Our home base for the entire week was The First United Methodist Church of Pass Christian. All the girls from our group were staying there. A great guy by the name of Mike Zimmerman had come down from the Mercy Center in North Carolina to lead, and most of all organize, a variety of projects for the stream of groups that would be helping in Pass Christian. Now this was a small church to start with, but luckily the Lord spared it from the worst of the storm. It had only two feet of water inside during the hurricane, and that may sound like a lot but compared to everywhere else that was the least amount of water I heard about. All of the walls, including the interior ones, were made of cinderblock, so besides having the carpeting pulled up, half the pews and everything in the extra rooms destroyed, it was a working church. But because there are so few people who are living in Pass Christian, now the already small church only had a handful of parishioners showing up for sunday services. So it was about a dozen locals and 80 of us from Wilmore on sunday morning.

And it really got to me. Seeing the locals who had been through so much, having virtually everything they owed destroyed, still there praising God, its was truly something and brought a tear to my eye. The songs were good, and there were ones I had sung so many times before, but I saw them in a new light. “On God the solid rock I stand”, has such a literal meaning and makes Matthew 7:24-27 more than a parable. “It is well with my soul” cause it sure ain’t well with my house. To believe that “great is thy faithfulness” when you look outside and couldn’t really object to a non-believer thinking “how can God be good if He let this happen?” Truly amazing and reminded me of a similar reaction I had this past Easter. Commonplace songs breaking through the monotony of routine.

Thursday morning, being Thanksgiving, we had another service. It was in the next town over, Long Beach, were the destruction was even worse. To illustrate my point, we drove by a sign for a “Kangaroo” (how the sign was still there I don’t know) but someone in my van asked what’s a Kangaroo? It was destroyed so bad we couldn’t even tell it was a gas station.

After the service we were ready to get started. There is something about meeting the people who’s town you are going to be helping. It pushed me over the edge and not made me willing to “just take it easy before tomorrow”.

As for the work on sunday (which the trip was not about, something you’ll hear more about later)? The one time I needed the measuring tape I brought, I didn’t have it with me. I built some shelves at a distribution center and got eaten alive but what we would soon dub “F’ing Gnats”. Did anyone knew gnats bite? Well I sure didn’t, but I did end up finding the big dipper on my arm.

Katrina: The Devastation

Last week I went with about 79 or so others, including over 60 current Asburians, to Pass Christian Mississippi.

The first thing you may notice on a drive to the Gulf Coast is how many trees are down. Mississippi, like much of the eastern United States, includes plenty of roadside forests. I was about 100 miles away from the coast and started noticing lots and lots of trees down. Now, my family lives in Central Florida and had three hurricanes travel through their county (Osceola) in 2004. Well they are in the middle of the state, so they only experience catagory 1 winds, but last Christmas when I went down to visit, it noticed lots of damage and lots of trees down. But nothing comes close to what I saw in Mississippi. I knew it would be bad because of how many trees where down an hour or so away from the coast. Now the group traveled down in 9 vans and we stuck in groups of three, which we affectionally refereed to as “Triads”, but back to the story. My triad was the last one in, and it was already dark when we got there, but as we were driving to the Church we were meeting at you could tell that past the darkness that there was some significant destruction.

When the sun rose the next morning, and really the rest of the week for that matter, we had to continually pull our jaws off the floor. A doll in the dirt, a house that had been turned into an parallelogram, a school bus that looks like it was blown up, an entire house sitting on train tracks, slabs on concrete that used to be the foundation for a house, tombs on their side, a car under a house and countless more things that nearly brought me to tears. Now keep in mind, this trip started over two and a half months after the hurricane finished, but it looked like it could of happened last week. I can’t imagine what it really did look like one week after the storm.

Last Christmas in Osceloa country Florida, almost every house was damaged in someway, or at least severe tree damage. In this town, almost every house was completely uninablitable. In fact I did not notice anyone living at their home, the closest I saw was a trailer in their front driveway. And to think we weren’t even in the worst of it. We were in Pass Christian, the towns on either side of this one, were so bad that you had to have a special pass to get in. It wasn’t open to volunteer groups like ours just showing up. And to think that we were in one of the smallest towns in the area. I think criticism of FEMA, the Red Cross, Bush or who ever you want to point fingers at for a slow response are unfortunate. The destruction is so broad and major that I can’t imagine where to start. There are not enough employees, volunteers or housing to go around to handle the significant portion of the population of this county affected by the storm. They could have cleaned off every trailer lot in the country and it wouldn’t even come close. The relief might have been slow, but how to you find places for hundreds of thousands of people to stay in a day or two. Feeding them all would be hard enough. Its a crappy situation, but its amazing what has been done to this point, and amazing how much still needs to be done before the area actually looks like people live there again.

Check out My photo gallery, Asbury College’s Photos (of which I took a couple) and WilmoreToThePass.com for some early pictures and updates of what we did during the trip. I will be posting more pictures and stories in the weeks to come.

Brownies, Brownies Everywhere

There is something about being around missionaries that kind of leads you to think like them.

We were at the ol Wal-Mart. Looking to pick up some items that would make a good little dinner, and we were fancying some brownies for dessert. While we were there deciding if we wanted double chocolate chunk brownies, or deluxe fudge brownies, or brownies with frosting or maybe just get the cheap ones of on the bottom shelf, I realized that this is a uniquely prosperous problem. That was our big dilemma for the night; which pre-packaged, just add eggs, oil and milk brownies to buy for dessert. There we were, standing and staring at a wall of brownies, 3 six footers looking from our toes to over our head at brownies. At this point I realized there are countries that don’t have huge mega stores like Wal-Mart selling a 100 of everything. Even other well off countries don’t have the kind of insane selection that we do here in America. We get used to being the most prosperous country in the world. Then I went on to realize that there are people all around the world who haven’t had a brownie before. Even more then that, there are a billion people who are just lucky if they have something to eat tonight

Now, we bought some kind of brownie, I don’t remember which, but it was darn tasty. I’m not planning on giving up desserts anytime soon. But the G8 Summit and the Live8 concert, have really brought the situation to the forefront of everyone’s mind, lets remember those who haven’t been as blessed as we have. Be thankful for what you have, don’t complain about what you want.

Soundtrack of My Year

Unlike, Julie and Steph, I haven’t quite been able to figure out what the soundtrack of my life would be. However, I have been making a playlist every month the represents songs that I just discovered, can’t get enough of, or describe thoughts/feelings of that month. So here it is, the soundtrack of my year:

May ’04
Don’t Tell Me by Avril Lavigne
Don’t Leave Me by Blink-182
Every Little Thing by Hawk Nelson
Accidentally In Love by Counting Crows
Barrel of a Gun by Guster

June ’04
Who Knows by Avril Lavigne
Shiver by Coldplay
Letter Read by Rachael Yamagata
In This Diary by The Ataris

July ’04
Walkie Talkie Man by Steriogram
California by Hawk Nelson [Free Download]
Girl on LSD by Tom Petty
Low Income (Its Friday!) by Wyclef Jean
Barbie Girl [German] by Rammstein
Spider-Man Theme by Michael Bublé

September ’04
Punk Rock 101 by Bowling for Soup
Always On My Mind by Phantom Planet
Take Me by Hawk Nelson
Vertigo by U2
Who I Am Hates Who I’ve Been by Relient K
German Test Drive by Spymob
Pittsburgh by Huntingtons
What’s My Age Again by Blink-182
One Year, Six Months by Yellowcard
1985 by Bowling for Soup
Ode to a Butterfly by Nickel Creek

October ’04
Be My Escape by Relient K
Age Six Racer by Dashboard Confessional
High Of 75 by Relient K
October Nights by Yellowcard

November ’04
Life Of A Salesman by Yellowcard
Are You Gonna Be My Girl by Jet
A Praise Chorus [Live] by Jimmy Eat World
First Date by Blink-182
My Alien by Simple Plan

December ’04
I Celebrate The Day by Relient K
Christmas Day by MxPx
Green Christmas by Barenaked Ladies
Sleigh Ride by Johnny Mathis

February ’05
Again I Go Unnoticed by Dashboard Confessional
Somewhere Only We Know by Keane
We’re Going To Be Friends by The White Stripes

March ’05
Such Great Heights by The Postal Service [Free Download]
Quit Your Life by MxPx
The Wonderful Cross by Joel Engle
Curbside Prophet [Live] by Jason Mraz

April ’05
Life After Death & Taxes (Failure II) by Relient K
Beautiful Soul by Jesse McCartney
Save the Last Dance for Me by Michael Bublé

New Year, New Site

I haven’t spend time updating this blog recently but that doesn’t mean I don’t know how to waste my time on the internet anymore.

It’s been a while and I am sorry to disappoint this entry is more informative then educational or entertaining. At least its good news. You might have noticed that this blog only gets updated about every month or so. Well I can’t promise that that is going to change anytime soon, but I do have some other great updates for all ya all.

First off, we have launched Pete & Jay’s Tip O Da Day. In it, Jason and I pretty much just make up some crap everyday. So where my blog isn’t getting updated, just check out the Tip of the Day for a daily something or other.

Most of you already knew about that one, but here’s something I bet you didn’t know. Tonight I updated Pappy’s Pictures. I still don’t have any from 2005, but I’ve pretty much got 2004 covered, and as an added bonus there is a new page on there called Matt in Action and of course the update of a county favorite Crazy Headshots. And if you order within the next 10 minute I’ll throw in a new Crazy Jason Pic and AFS. I know there are a lot of great pictures out there that should be posted, just send em my way!

One other fun item you might notice is that pretty much all the new sites are at PeterVCook.com Yes, I bought my own domain name and am pretty much now, officially, a complete geek. So please people, call me up lets go to Chili’s or something, cause at this second I feel like all I do is update my sites (aka. I’m no longer cool).