DR report on trip to Mississippi
From Disaster Relief volunteer John Hayes (week of March 16, 2008):
We had at total of 34 (18 adults, 15 teenagers) people who spent their spring vacation in Ocean Springs, Mississippi repairing and building houses destroyed by Hurricane Katrina. We were working with LeMoyne Baptist Church. All of the people on this trip except one, were from Valleydale and Adamsville Baptist churches. We worked on a total of eight different projects.
We performed framing, put up trusses, OSB board on the side, and roofed a new house. We did Insulation and sheetrock work on another. Some of the group painted a house and others installed siding on one house.
We did some chainsaw/cleanup work on the pastor’s yard. He has a garden where the church raises produce and gives it away to the community. There were many down trees and limbs on the area that had not been cleaned up which prevented them from planting the garden. They have been doing this for about 10 years and felt that it would help get the Church back to normal if they started again.
The Church also has a fishing rodeo for kids every April. Some of the teenagers cleaned up the area around the lake. They also moved several loads of broken brick from a yard.
Another group performed sheetrock and did exterior repairs on a house. At this house the husband had been trying to repair his house, but had been in a car wreck and is now disabled.
This is one of the best trips that I have been associated with. We would not have been able to accomplish the work that we did without the equipment on the BBA trailer.
