NEW ORLEANS (August 2007) - Two years after the worst natural disaster in U.S. history, New Orleans is off America's front pages and evening newscasts. Most Americans, hearing that New Orleans is making steady progress toward recovery, have turned their attention elsewhere.

In the city's more affluent neighborhoods, much progress has been made. But low-income minorities displaced by the storms are returning to the most devastated neighborhoods in New Orleans without the resources that others enjoy. The attempts of these tough-minded individuals to rebuild their homes and lives constitute a long and difficult process that will span generations.

Building Better Communities is a catalyst for change and progress among the poor in New Orleans. BBC helps low-income, high-risk families achieve long-term, functional community re-integration and self-reliance. Through BBC, volunteers from hundreds of churches and community organizations, many from out-of-state, have come to New Orleans to let residents know that they are not forgotten.

Statistics include:

• BBC helped 818 people in 2006. This includes supplying volunteer construction labor, donating appliances, donating furniture, donating warehouse supplies, paying bills, and donating gift cards.
• In 2006, BBC's case manager, Angela Murray, conducted 346 interviews and made 148 home visits. She also provided client services, drywall and building materials, interviewed homeowners, and provided appliances and furniture from the BBC warehouse for 569 people. BBC has passionately committed volunteers who work hard and are wonderful people. Yet there is a problem: there are far fewer volunteers today than there once were, and not nearly enough volunteers to go around. Not only are the volunteers more scarce than before, but the funding is no longer coming in like it needs to. Time moves on, new challenges arise that are unrelated to Katrina, and donors lose focus. Donor fatigue sets in or donors fail to appreciate what The Brookings Institution, in its August 2007 report, calls the "stark disparities" between the recovery rate in high-income areas and low-income areas of New Orleans.

Now that the emergency recovery phase is past and the medium- and long-term work of rebuilding homes and lives in the city's low-income communities has begun, who will provide for what the low-income residents of New Orleans know is their real number one need? That need is hope.

BBC provides the low-income residents of New Orleans with hope. In fact, BBC is an oasis of hope in the area. In addition to the practical help BBC provides in donating drywall and the construction volunteers, BBC's greatest strength is that it provides hope through relationships with clients. These relationships are personal, caring, committed and long-term. BBC gives encouragement and help when people feel like giving up or even committing suicide.

BBC encourages people like it did the following people:

• Samuel and Lakenya, a husband and wife with nine children, who returned to New Orleans after Katrina to find that their house was just a shell, with no ceiling or walls. The family lived in a tent inside their house while BBC volunteers worked on the structure and encouraged the family not to give up.
• Deborah, who lost three sisters to Katrina. Deborah has often been close to despondency, but because of the sustaining care, concern and counseling of Angela Murray, a BBC case manager, remarkable change is happening in Deborah's life. She is getting stronger, recovering her will and her smile.
• Dina, a school teacher and single mother, who wandered through several states with her four children and dog after Katrina. For a while, they all lived in a Honda Civic. Dina nearly had a breakdown. Thanks to BBC, Dina's family has a nice home in New Orleans and is doing well.
• Katherine, who can't seem to stop crying tears of joy and thankfulness to BBC. She is in a new home, which is better than the house she lost to Katrina. Her home now has a wheelchair ramp for her husband, James.

Yet there is also Clarence, who is 86 with Alzheimer's, and his wife Esther, who is 84 and hooked to a breathing machine. Time is running out on this couple's dream of ever returning to their own house. They live in the front yard of their home in a small FEMA trailer. Their house needs a lot of re-construction work before they can ever to get back into it, but they are too old and frail to do the work and BBC presently doesn't have enough volunteer laborers and materials to help them.

Approximately 200 New Orleans families are in situations similar to that of Clarence and Esther. These 200 families are on the waiting list to receive services from BBC, and they have nowhere else to turn for help. BBC needs funding to hire another case worker.

BBC employees need training in crisis counseling and grief counseling. Also, BBC needs a lot more money and in-kind donations to acquire construction materials, appliances, and furniture to donate to Katrina victims who literally have nothing.

What’s it like living in a FEMA trailer, one of those white metal rectangular boxes the government supplies to people who return to New Orleans, for two years? In a word, claustrophobic.

A room taken up almost entirely by the master bed. Hangers in the closet that have to be tilted sideways to fit. Food stored in the microwave. Tempers can be short when a family lives in 240 square feet of space. Especially in the New Orleans heat, when there’s no place to be alone. But two years after their homes were damaged or destroyed by Katrina, tens of thousands of people in New Orleans and elsewhere along the Gulf Coast are still living in trailers provided by FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Some of the trailers are parked in the front lawns of homes that are gutted and being worked on. The owners hope to finish reconstruction work on the house and some day move back in.

Other trailers are part of encampments – row after row of FEMA trailers. For people who have no way out to somewhere better, the problem is more than just feeling cramped. You are stuck and without much hope.

Typical FEMA encampments are either locked down tight or lack any security at all, so that crime and drugs run rampant. It’s a perfect scenario for creating mental illness and violence, and cases of stress-related suicide are skyrocketing, authorities say.

Bobbi, a young grandmother who lives alone in a FEMA trailer encampment in New Orleans, wants to buy a house but doesn’t have the cash for a down payment. Bobbi doesn’t like where she lives. It’s noisy, people are angry and frustrated, and there are a lot of drugs, she says. At night there are no lights and no police protection.

But Bobbi keeps going, keeps trying.

Building Better Communities exists to bring change to situations like Bobbi's, to help people go back to a real home.

 

August 29 2005 - The largest national disaster in our nation's history destroyed an historic city in the South called New Orleans. 1,800 people died as a result of the most deadly hurricane since 1928. More than $81 billion in damage was done. 400,000 jobs were lost as a result of the hurricane, sending the Gulf Coast into financial dismay. Over 275,000 homes were destroyed (more than ten times as many as any other natural disaster). The world poured out their hearts and donated money, time, and hands to serve the people of the Gulf Coast.

15 million people were affected, and many still feel the effects today.

August 29 2007 - Two years have passed. The streets of New Orleans' neighborhoods are still lined with devastation. Many are still in the same FEMA trailers they moved into after the hurricane. Two years ago people were supporting the area in every way imaginable. Today, the world has simply forgotten.

January 2008 - Building Better Communities is still providing assistance to the survivors of Hurricane Katrina. The men and women of BBC are working to give hope to people who have suffered, and to bring God into the lives of people who have been forgotten.

 

NEW ORLEANS (August 2007) – Pastor Tim Martin likes a good challenge.

No, it’s much more than that. A good challenge is what makes Martin come alive.

In 2006, when Martin was leaving his job as senior pastor of a church near San Diego, Calif., where he had served for 30 years, he looked for a new challenge.

It had to be a situation that is impossible, that no one else wanted to face, so that when things worked out for good, no one except God would get the glory.

For Martin, the challenge had to be New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.

Today, as executive director of Building Better Communities since June 2006, Martin serves devastated neighborhoods of New Orleans that look like Katrina happened yesterday. Two years after the storm, there’s still no mail delivery in the part of the city where Building Better Communities’ offices are located, and electricity was restored to the office only a few months ago.

Martin leads a staff of 10 who care passionately about the people they serve. Their job descriptions vary, but their common goal is to be the miracle that people in New Orleans need in order to survive.

So far, Building Better Communities has helped 900 people since Katrina hit.

But 200 are still on the waiting list, hoping for assistance.

Martin’s next challenge is to help the folks who are still waiting. Many of them still live in tiny FEMA trailers not knowing when, if ever, they will be able to return home. Martin wants to provide these people not only with dry wall and furniture to reconstruct and refurbish their homes, but also with staff members who can be their friend, advocate, encourager, and prayer partner.

Martin wants to hire more staff. He also wants to find some of these friends and advocates in other churches in the city. But that is a challenge, too, since many congregations are struggling, and members have little energy, time and resources to help others.

Recruiting other churches – African American and white – to help in New Orleans East is a big challenge, and a good challenge. It’s the next challenge Martin is willing to take on.

Don’t refer to Angela Murray as just a caseworker.

Tim Martin, executive director of Building Better Communities, calls his employee a “life coach” or a “journey coach.” Murray refers to herself as a “benevolence counselor.”

But Deborah Whitaker calls Murray her angel.

Whitaker needed an angel after the chaos of Katrina, and often still does.

When the storm hit, Whitaker, then an employee of Lakeland Medical Center in New Orleans, along with the rest of the staff, spent seven days on the hospital’s rooftop waiting to be rescued. During those long days waiting, helicopters dropped cases of water, but no can opener to open the available food.

Whitaker was rescued and taken to San Antonio, but later learned the unthinkable: she had lost three sisters to the storm. One sister who died was so emotionally close to Whitaker that when the siblings talked they would finish each others’ sentences.

“I didn’t even tell my sisters ‘bye,’ ” Whitaker says, weeping.

Depression, unemployment, health problems, weeping and despair followed for Whitaker in the months after Katrina. She spent a year in Houston. Later, back in New Orleans, Murray befriended Whitaker, supplying food, clothes, paint and cabinets from Building Better Communities’ warehouse. Through visits and telephone calls, Murray provided Whitaker with a faithful friendship.

Finally, it was Murray who helped Whitaker turn to God, Whitaker says. “Angela is my angel.”

Murray is thrilled by Whitaker’s breakthroughs in the grief process and her turning from despondency. “You are a miracle in the making,” she tells Whitaker. “Every day something good comes out of your pain and loss.”