LULING, LA — The Executive Committee of the General Assembly Council (GAC) spent a day getting the dirt on Presbyterian hurricane recovery efforts in the New Orleans area.
Nineteen GAC members and staff, along with Susan Ryan and John Robinson of Presbyterian Disaster Assistance (PDA), spent a day gutting a home in the Gentilly area of New Orleans.
The committee spent the previous night the volunteer village called FISH Camp. FISH means, "First In Service and Hope," and is sponsored by PDA in partnership with First Union Presbyterian Church in Luling, LA.
Before settling in for the night some took a tour of the devastated New Orleans area with Deborah Corrao, work site coordinator, and Lanny Pratt, construction specialist, from the Luling site. Part of the tour included two New Orleans Presbyterian churches that had been flooded. In Korean Presbyterian Church, recently gutted by members of the congregation and volunteers, the group stopped to pray for the congregation that is faced with the decision whether or not to renovate their existing buildings.
“I’ve seen some of the saddest sights in my life," said the Rev. Joan Gray, newly-elected moderator of the General Assembly. "I’ve felt a great deal of hope for our church because of all the people that are coming together to do something positive in God’s name.”
After being treated to a taste of great New Orleans cuisine — red beans and rice prepared by a local cook — the committee participated in camp devotions with about 70 other volunteers from around the United States. Gray led devotions, prompting volunteers to pray for homeowners and to share with others their hopes for the week of mission ahead of them.
Most committee members said that they had not understood the actual extent of the devastation until they saw it firsthand and that they had not felt the grief until they stood with the homeowner at his flood-damaged home.
“You understand the dynamics in a whole new way,” said the Rev. Clifton Kirkpatrick, stated clerk of the PC(USA). “It’s not only fixing up houses — it’s fixing up lives.”
Kirkpatrick and Linda Bryant Valentine, newly-elected executive director of the GAC, took a break from their work to meet with pastors and church leaders from the New Orleans area at a brown bag lunch at John Calvin Presbyterian Church in Metairie, LA. They listened to concerns raised by the church leaders and answered questions regarding the response of the connectional church to the hard-hit churches in Louisiana.
Staff working with volunteer crews at FISH Camp stressed the need for volunteers to continue to come to the New Orleans area. The anniversary of Hurricane Katrina is August 29 and there are still thousands of homes practically untouched since the storm and thousands of New Orleanians still displaced in other areas of the country. |
