After the Deluge

by Bill Walsh and Shawn Reeves

Lyrical Lift

Harry Connick Jr.

Rebuilding Community

Brenda Carson-Lawless tells her story of Hurricane Katrina survival reluctantly, insisting that her personal setbacks are nothing, comparatively speaking, and she's right; more than 1,200 people died, more than a million were displaced. The director of the Mobile, Ala., Habitat for Humanity affiliate need look no further than nearby Bayou La Batre to see what might have been.

Life is like a box of chocolates, Forrest Gump told us. Sometimes you get the creamy milk chocolate nuggets; sometimes, as in this small village largely supported by Gulf of Mexico shrimp, you get stuck with...the dark chocolate filberts--or whatever confection sounds less like a treat, more like a bitter pill to you. The small, southern Alabama fishing village--home to Bubba Gump Shrimp Company in the movie--was hit hard by Katrina, and at least 800 families are homeless.

The storm surge reached almost 30 feet in height and three miles from the natural banks of the Gulf, leaving many of these families clinging to life on rooftops and riding out the storm in dinghies. In the days after the storm, red stickers of condemnation adorned many of Bayou La Batre's homes. A lucky few sported yellow stickers, meaning they suffered only significant structural damage but can, theoretically, be made whole again--made whole as much as Mother Nature will allow, given that so many are so clearly sited in the flood plain. Still, people moved back in, red sticker and yellow alike. Like so many in New Orleans and across America's underbelly, they had no place to go and no means to get there.

Flooded homes are deceptive. They can appear virtually undamaged, save for the treasures-turned-to-trash that soak their yards--couches and carpets and mattresses and upholstered La-Z-Boys. The damage is hidden from view from the street, but buckled floors are ubiquitous, and mold and mildew are another disaster, this time a silent killer, waiting to happen. Post-storm rot is an insidious closing act to the photogenic headliner, but equally effective in undermining what the crashing waves seemed to have, mercifully, left standing.

Carson-Lawless did not escape unscathed. She lost part of her roof, saw the mature trees that landscaped her property reduced to kindling, and was without power for days. A beach home on Dauphin Island, owned by her parents and a joy for the entire family, was reduced to a shell by the wind and waves. Worst of all, and so typical of the angst-ridden days after Katrina's landfall, Carson-Lawless lost contact with family. Some days after the storm, she learned that brothers, sisters, in-laws, nieces and nephews rode out the mayhem with her parents, all surviving flooding sufficient to drive them to the upper story, loss of the chimney and part of the roof, and the leveling of a barn that was stout enough to have withstood threats from three tornados.

	Brenda Carson-Lawless is determined to crank up production in the Mobile, Ala., area.
	Give me money, give me staff, help me with materials. I'll build you houses. --Brenda Carson-Lawless

Between the storm's abatement and the reopening of roads and phone lines, Carson-Lawless did what any Habitat employee would have done: She began tracking down partner families.

"We have built 38 homes," she said of her affiliate two weeks after the storm, "and 21 of them were damaged, though only two seem to have been damaged to the point that they will have to be rebuilt." Indeed, across the region, Habitat houses survived quite well, a testament both to volunteers' conviction that if four nails are good, six are excellent, and to partner families having taken to heart the maintenance responsibilities of homeownership.

And why not? They weren't given these homes. They worked hard for them, in terms of sweat equity, in terms of establishing financial wherewithal, in terms, usually, of remaining positive in the face of depressingly negative obstacles.

Within days of Katrina's epic landfall, Habitat for Humanity announced its three-tiered plan for participating in the reconstruction of the Gulf Coast. Part one is to get the affected affiliates back on their feet-no easy task.

Seventeen affiliates across Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana were in the hurricane's crosshairs, and even as this is written weeks later, the extent of the damage to some of those is still undeterminable.

Other affiliates, brushed but unruffled by the wind and spared the savagery of the surf, are equally stressed; the number of evacuees either temporarily or permanently relocating to surrounding cities and states is a pressure that grows by the day.

Houston has an extra 100,000 people. Hattiesburg, Miss., had a pre-Katrina population of 45,000; today, its population has swelled to 55,000. New housing needs are being created by the mass relocations in many more surrounding communities, and the affiliates that serve them are being asked to respond.

Business as usual it's not. The international organization is working to restore the 17 badly damaged affiliates. More importantly, it is working to convince them and many other affiliates that the work they do, admirable as it has been, is insufficient.

Carson-Lawless told a Habitat disaster assessment team that visited Mobile in September that the No. 1 question to which they were seeking an answer is one familiar to every schoolchild: Which came first, the chicken or the egg?

How much, team leader Mario Flores kept pressing the executive director, can you ramp up construction in the face of such vast destruction? How many homes can you build to replace the thousands washed away and blown apart?

That's not the question, Carson-Lawless kept insisting. The number of houses I can build, she said, is a reflection of the support I am going to get from the outside. What is that going to be?

Marshalling an army of volunteers is not a problem in Mobile--or anywhere else in the devastated area, for that matter; volunteers are eager and standing by. And in many parts of the region, finding lots upon which to build will not be an insurmountable hurdle; the American people are stepping up with the same generosity that always characterizes our collective disaster response, and local governments are likely ready to slice red tape in making some of their often considerable collection of lots available.

Sadly, finding qualifying families in need of shelter is not an issue, either.

Material could be a problem. Cement was hard enough to come by before Katrina made landfall. Florida is still gobbling up roofing shingles in response to Ivan and Dennis and the rest, and plywood and 2 x 4s are pricey and apt to be in short supply, given that so many of the industry staples are milled along the Gulf.

Give me money, give me staff, help me with materials, Carson-Lawless said. I'll build you houses.

The can-do attitude of all the Habitat affiliates is, partially, a reflection of the quality of the product. Habitat houses weathered the storm admirably, and the fact that so many are still standing and relatively undamaged is a testament to the skill of construction leaders and the volunteers whom they assist. Exclusionary communities that tend to look askance at "cheap" housing might do well to take notice.

The can-do attitude is, partially, a reflection of the spiritual resilience of the affiliates' leadership and staff. God doesn't hand out problems too big for us to handle.

The can-do attitude is a reflection of our partner families, many of whom, having tidied up their own mess, are calling their local affiliates to find out where they might lend a hand to others.

But Katrina's destructiveness has far outpaced Habitat for Humanity's constructiveness, that much is evident. The ministry faces a need to respond to that challenge.

Step two of Habitat's recovery plan-serving as a catalyst with other organizations, governments, churches, corporations and foundations to bring people together to talk about low-income housing and recovery on a scale that Habitat alone would be unable to do--puts into action an important aspect of the mission outlined in the new five-year strategic plan approved by the organization's international board of directors in October.

Habitat for Humanity is going full bore in the Gulf region, under the banner of "Operation Home Delivery." The first and, particularly, the third steps of the three-tiered plan are getting the most attention. The second may be the most noteworthy because the challenge grows bigger and more complex-certainly on the Gulf coast, but also around a nation where increasing numbers now battle poverty, where health care grows more unaffordable by the day, where adequate housing continues to slip further out of reach. The solution lies in partnering with others "to exponentially increase worldwide access to affordable homes...."

Even with an economy that is advertised as robust, even in an economy that has been adding jobs, Americans now living in poverty rose to 37 million--up another 1.1 million--according to the latest Census Bureau figures. More disheartening, this marks the fourth straight increase in the government's annual poverty measure. The number of jobs that do not pay a living wage has increased dramatically over the last 30 years so that now as many as 25 percent of all employment in the United States pays less than a poverty-level income.

The more things change, the more this ministry will have to change and expand to meet the challenge. To a point.

"Rest assured our emphasis as a Christian ministry seeking to demonstrate the love and teachings of Jesus Christ, and our ultimate goal of a world without poverty housing, will remain unchanged," former CEO Paul Leonard wrote as the strategic plan was being developed.

The problems are complex. A good part of their solution lies in crisp, analytic thinking about modes of action on a macro scale. A good part of their solution, too, remains lodged in the action end of a hammer, and in September, in Los Angeles, in Jackson, Miss., and especially in New York City, there were plenty of people swinging them.


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