The Ministry of Walking Alongside Others

30 March 2006

Upon our arrival in Pearlington, we found out that the Taylor family, the ones we had come to help, had a death in the family. The funeral was Monday morning. We started the day by getting the address of John and Nan Givens and drove out to see if they needed help. John is pushing 80 and has been a carpenter all his life. He had been trying to do all the work himself, but he had come to realize that he couldn’t. He had help getting his roof done and once he saw Giovanna, he didn’t think he would have any work for us.

We then headed back to the Pearl*Mart and found different jobs to carry us through the morning. We sorted through a shipment of food and put it in the warehouse; we also helped sort out the donated clothes. After lunch there was a job of cleaning up debris by one of the lodges. Gary took the kids and went to the lodge. They spent the afternoon picking up the old shingles around the building while Giovanna picked up shingle nails with a big magnet tied to a pull rope. Corrie stayed at the Pearl*Mart and helped get the boxes ready for delivery to the elderly. Some of the girls from Culver came and helped.

Tuesday and Wednesday were spent at the Taylor house scraping the old glue off the concrete floor in order to get it ready for the new flooring. This was a slow job but we got most of the hallway done and a good portion of the living room and kitchen area. After 2 days, the Taylors said that we had done enough and told us that we could move on to other places where there was work that needed to be done. This attitude of the Pearlington residents is prevalent there. Helping others is more important. Everyone wants the community back and is willing to sacrifice work on their place so that others in need can get help. This is amazing, since almost every home in the town was damaged to some degree.

The job that the kids enjoyed the most and as Charlie Holmes put it, “The job that would mean the most to us at this point in time,” was getting the floor done in the “New” Army tent that went up while we were there. The kids had to take the nails out of the plywood sheets that had been nailed to pallets and take them to the tent and then move the pallets. Thanks to the Americorp volunteers, they moved some of the pallets with a tractor. Once the kids got enough pallets and put them in place, they got to put the plywood boards back in place, nail them down for the floor, and added some other measured and cut scrap wood pieces to even things out. This eventually became the floor of Pearl's Cafe.

The people of Pearlington amaze me. I am a runner and currently training for a marathon. I am week 8 of 18 weeks of training. I have 18 weeks of hard training, and 4 to 4 ½ hours of running the marathon and I am done. The people of Pearlington have been in this race for 7 plus months and it is estimated that it will take 3-5 years to rebuild the town. I spent a week living in a room in the school, using porta-a-potty and a shower that were outside of the school. Some of the Pearlington residents are still in tents. Training for a marathon is peanuts compared to what they face over the next few years.

I have been asked many times if I am glad to be back. I must say that I am struggling with that at the moment. I would have loved to stay another week or two. I once asked a missionary how he could continue going back to a place that is really hard. His response was and is priceless – there is no better place to be than where God has placed your heart. My heart is still in Pearlington.