Returning to help

EDITOR’S NOTE: Reporter Brianna Bailey will travel to Pascagoula, Miss., with members of Palm Harvest Church to report on the group’s efforts to help victims of Hurricane Katrina. Look for a special report Nov. 6-10.

When Pastor Mike Decker visited the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005, volunteers from across the county slept in tents and there was no place to get ice in Bay St. Louis, Miss., except at a fast food restaurant that had reopened after the storm.

“If we don’t help these people, they’re not going to get help,” Decker remembers thinking.

Two years later, Decker will return to Mississippi for the third time, with more than 70 volunteers from Palm Harvest Church in Costa Mesa, across Orange County and beyond.

The team will sleep in an unheated gymnasium in Pascagoula, Miss., and spend four days in November hanging dry wall and doing electrical work. The town of about 30,000 was devastated by Hurricane Katrina’s 20-foot storm surge and 30- to 55-foot sea waves.

Most Pascagoula residents did not have flood insurance and FEMA trailers still line the streets more than two years after the storm. The team from Costa Mesa hopes to repair 12 to 16 houses this year.

Decker’s wife, Robin, traveled with the Palm Harvest group to Pascagoula in 2006 and helped repair a tiny, one-bedroom house for a single mother during the trip.

The storm-battered house looked like it was about to collapse when the Palm Harvest team arrived, she said.

“When I first saw the house and what condition it was in I thought it would be easier to just bulldoze it and start over again,” she said. “But I realized that this was all that this woman had.”

The trip opened her eyes in unexpected ways, she said.

“It’s not what it does for them, but what it does for us,” she said.

This year’s trip will be the first-time visit for many local volunteers. The team has more than doubled in size from last year’s group of about 30 volunteers. Decker’s goal is to get 100 people to visit Pascagoula for this year’s trip.

Costa Mesa real estate broker Larry Weichman was looking for a way to donate his time in the community when Decker showed him a video he had taken of storm-battered Pascagoula from his last trip to the area in 2006. The images of houses still in disrepair more than a year after Hurricane Katrina moved Weichman to help, he said.

“My hope is to go and help people in need and let people know there’s people out there to help,” Weichman said. “We kid that we live behind the orange curtain in Orange County, and this is a way to reach out to people.”

The Palm Harvest Church building team will host an informational meeting for people who want to volunteer for its upcoming trip at 6:30 p.m. today at Costa Mesa Community Center, 1845 Park Ave. Donations can be made at www.palmharvest.org.

HOW TO HELP

To volunteer for the trip, e-mail Lisa Tatman at pascagoula2007@palmharvest.net.

Visit www.palmharvest.org for more information and photographs of last year’s trip to Pascagoula. Donations for the trip also can be made on the website. Trip organizers also are seeking donors to fund scholarships to send more volunteers to Pascagoula.

BRIANNA BAILEY may be reached at (714) 966-4625 or at brianna.bailey@latimes.com.