‘The best decision I’ve ever made’

Volunteer Donna Dann from Sunkist Community Church in Anaheim loves to laugh and work hard. She sings pop songs while slopping plaster on the walls of hurricane victims’ houses in Pascagoula, Miss., her hands and arms covered with white flecks of the stuff. She’s one of those people who seems to be lit from within by a battery that never runs out of juice.

“You learn new things doing something for somebody,” Dann told me Thursday, sitting on the steps of a shed next to the home of Jeanne Sherman, whose house was flooded with 7 feet of muddy water after Hurricane Katrina.

Sherman has lived in a FEMA trailer and at various houses belonging to family and friends since the storm hit more than two years ago. Dann and other volunteers have spent the last two days putting in electrical wiring, reparing plumbing and plastering at the house.

After two nights of sleeping in on an air mattress in an unheated gymnasium full of volunteers who snore, my feet are dragging and my arms feel like weighed-down wet rags.

Dann looks well-rested, as though she just got back from a long vacation. Her trowel moves at break-neck speed as she plasters, talks and laughs, talks, laughs and plasters. Her hair pulled back in a ponytail under a baseball cap, she looks too young to have two grown children.

Dann’s family is proud of her volunteer work, she said

This is Dann’s second volunteer trip to Pascagoula, which is sponsored by Palm Harvest Church in Costa Mesa.

When she first heard about last year’s trip through an elder in her church, she knew she had to be part of the action. The trip was her chance to make a difference in a few people’s lives, she said.

“I’ve never been on a mission trip, never built a house, and I’ve never been to Mississippi, so I knew I was qualified,” she said. “It was just an opportunity to do something. I knew I had to go, and it’s been the best decision I’ve ever made.”

Dann raised a little extra money to donate to trip organizers this year by making “Braveheart”-themed Halloween costumes for her co-workers and Pacific Life. She made six kilts for her co-workers and asked they each write a ten-dollar check to Palm Harvest Church in return. When she told her coworkers what the money was for, they gave her $155 to donate to the church instead.

Dann, who works as a project manager and disaster recovery coordnator for Pacific Life Insurance in Newport Beach, said she treasures the friendships she has made during her two trips to Pascagoula.

“At the end of the day, there’s Advil, Tylenol,” she said, “but you’re going to form friendships you know will last.”

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