I will make this brief. The signal is very bad tonight, as the pastor locked his office and that is where Ed and I do our computer work.

Group one completed all the insulation stapling today and will begin the sheetrocking process tomorrow. They have help from some of the Amish/Amish Mennonite folk with whom they have enjoyed a lot of joking.

Group two has finished tearing out the sheetrock in the Liberto home and all the mold remediation has now been done. New sheetrock began to be installed today and new exterior insulation was installed courtesy of Pam Mitchell (on loan from group 1). Tomorrow begins cabinet installation.

Group three completed sheetrocking the ceiling of the small dining room, Dot pursued more cleaning outside in spite of the rain. Mudding and taping has begun and the kitchen has been painted.

All groups operating well and there seem to be no problems of any kind. Tonight we had a community gathering that included the Chris and Renee Liberto, all three of their boys, and folk from the Long Beach Church. Beth and Shiela and the Amish women did themselves proud, with the Amish folk providing homemade moon pies (what we’d call them, not what they call them) and wonderful chicken spaghetti (from the good folk at St. Barnabas). We saw a DVD about Katrina produced by the local (Biloxi) TV station.

It’s late, and the signal is too weak to upload a picture. To bed.

Dinner is an important time for all. Beth and Shiela are the queens of our mealtime, taking charge so completely that the Amish women defer to Beth. Today they asked her permission for a wheelbarrow to use in taking their dirty clothes to the laundromat. Beth easily gave permission, even though she had no real authority to do it. They returned much later, with their infant (yes, they have an infant here with them) sitting atop a pile of clean clothes in the wheelbarrow.

Ed’s team did some demolition of a ceiling in a home in the far reaches of Gulfport, nearly in Biloxi. Dot tried her hand at cleaning a stove outside in the wonderful weather. Inside the stove, it was not so pleasant! Jims Koehler and McLean and Wilson worked under the falling rock wool of the ceiling.

Rising early, the group was under way from Alexandria by 8:00 after a quick continental breakfast courtesy of the motel.  We figured that the trip to Long Beach would be uneventful.  Moving smoothly over the I-12 Mississippi bridge at Baton Rouge on cruise control, I cheerfully told Ed Bull by cellphone that we’d be in Long Beach in an hour and a half.  Ed, who had spent the weekend in New Orleans at an NGCA (that’s the National Golf Coaches of America) convention, had driven over to Long Beach by himself earlier in the morning.  Well, I turned out to be off by a considerable amount.

An 18 wheeler had jack-knifed and burned in the early morning hours, blocking both of the eastbound lanes of I-12 east of Hammond.  It had still not been completely cleared by afernoon.  After much maneuvering and great patience, three of our cars made it through the jam.  Tara and I took an alternate route that took us miles out of the way but put us into Long Beach ahead of the rest of the group.  We thanked God for cellphones; everyone stayed in touch with one another.

When we pulled up to the church, Ed was just finishing organizing a load of 2 X 4s.  Good timing!  We met Van Richardson, the site manager and a volunteer named Dale who was a professional roofer and who would be coordinating our construction work.  When the entire group had gathered, we got back into our cars and followed Dale to the three sites where we would be working.

The first site, a house owned by Moses Ervin, had been given up for ruin by the professionals but through the perseverance of many work groups was completely framed and sided.  Interior walls were also framed and wired, and duct work was installed—but nothing else.  A group consisting of Rick, Nancy, Brian, Tara, Pam, and Joan will work here, putting insulation in the roof and outer walls, cosmetically building around some of the duct work, and—time permitting—sheetrocking the ceiling and as much of the interior as possible.

Our second visit was to the home of Chris and Renee Liberto and their sons, a family who had roofed their own house shortly after the storm and had redone some of the plumbing but had neglected to reattach the sewer lines.  Raw sewage accumulated under their house and the moisture eventually caused mold to creep into the kitchen area, up all four of the walls behind some newly installed cabinets.  A group consisting of me, Harold, Carl, and Steve will take down the cabinets, tear out the old sheetrock and moldings, dispose of the sheetrock, remediate the mold in the walls, and hang new sheetrock and cabinets.

Our third visit was to the home of Jeanette Lewis, grandmother of an extended family that has had numerous difficulties.   A group consisting of Ed, Jim M, Jim K, Jim W, and Dot (immediately dubbed “Jim squared dot bull”) will clean a profoundly filthy stove, removed it along with the washer and dryer, rip out the sheetrock in the dining room walls and ceiling, and hang new sheetrock.

We are sharing the facilities with an Amish group from Lancaster and Chester Counties, Pennsylvania.  Some of them are skilled carpenters, framing new homes in the area.  Others are doing demolition work to make way for new construction.  Their women are quiet, wearing the traditional garb and working solely in the kitchen.  The men were mildly surprised that the women would be working alongside the men in our group.  We have established very cordial relations with them, but because of the lack of space, it is not possible to share common meals, except on Wednesday.  That’s the day that the homeowners and the community are invited to dinner, at which we are anticipating nearly 70 people.

This evening, Beth and Shiela served a hearty dinner of taco soup, fruit, and homemade cookies and peanut brittle.  We can’t help but think that they will have their work cut out for them on Wednesday!  Following dinner, Van Richardson gave us detailed information about each of the houses and households to which we’ll go.  It was a chronicle of incredible human misery and suffering, too lengthy and grim for this writing.  Our devotional time consisted of lifting up in prayer each of the homeowners, ourselves, those who wanted to come but could not, and others.  We unwound with dominoes, reading, and tea.

It’s been a long day.  As Samuel Pepys would say, “and so to bed.”

After gathering in the parking lot and parceling out the luggage, Walt Colbert took a group picture and Dave Erb sent us off with a blessing. The roster: Dot and Harold Biggs, Brian Evans, myself, Nancy and Rick Haines, Tara Hardin, Jim Koehler, Beth and Jim McLean, Pam and Steve Mitchell, Joan and Carl Thomson, and Jim and Shiela Wilson. With her father’s pacemaker being installed tomorrow, Kelly Burns was unable to go with us. The hope is that by some miraculous good fortune she might perhaps join us on Tuesday.

We had five vehicles in our convoy: Jim and Beth’s full-size sedan with the lion’s share of the food, Tara’s large pickup with the lion’s share of luggage, the Mitchell’s van, Jim Koehler’s van, and the Biggs’ small SUV. The dial of every vehicle was tuned to the Cowboys game for most of the trip to Alexandria and the regrettable interception that ended the game occurred as we wheeled into our motel.

When most of the vehicles had been unloaded, the group headed en masse to the Cracker Barrel a few blocks aways where an especially intrepid waitress set up a long table, seated everyone, and served our 16 people with efficiency and good humor. She effortlessly gave separate checks to the various couples and singles. This was a far cry from the previous year’s first night dinner on the mission trip—a nightmarishly long and darkly funny experience at a Shoney’s in Natchitoches.

We gassed all the vehicles and returned to our motel, where all of us followed his or hers agenda to call home, relax, write, walk, or sleep.