REPORTER’S NOTEBOOK: Work continues through years

Leaving the job unfinished is one of the toughest parts Pastor Mike Decker’s annual visits to Pascagoula, Miss. The group of 67 volunteers from Costa Mesa and beyond will return home today, tired and sore from 10-hour days of hanging drywall, tiling, hammering and drilling. But there’s still more work to be done.

“We’re meeting people, and they’re asking us ‘so, are you going to be around next week?’ and we have to tell them no, we’re leaving on Saturday. It’s difficult,” Decker said Friday, sitting on a cooler in front of the home of Terry Coleman, a local pastor who lives in a FEMA trailer on his daughter’s front lawn. This is Decker’s third visit to the Gulf Coast in 26 months. There’s always enough work to keep him coming back.

Two or three FEMA trailers still sit on every residential block of Pascagoula. I had hoped to tell the stories this week of families that would finally return to their homes this week, but most won’t. The damage to most homes is so extensive, that it takes a succession of crews of volunteers from around the country to finish one house.

Past crews leave messages for the next team scrawled in pencil on the walls of unfinished homes.

“We hope this house will bless you as it has us,” one team of volunteers from a church in New York state wrote on an unfinished wall in Coleman’s house.

Volunteer workers from Palm Harvest and other Orange County churches labored on the house into the night Thursday, struggling to finishing electrical work in Coleman’s home in the dark using head lamps. The group returned before 8 a.m. Friday to finish as much of the job as it could.

The volunteers were tired Friday, but most were still smiling.

My air mattress sits on a linoleum floor of a small storage room in the gymnasium at Victory Praise and Worship church in Pascagoula. I was one of the last to stake my claim to a mattress in this group of 67 volunteers. I wound up sleeping, if you can call it that, next to the kitchen.

I awake each morning at 5 a.m. to the sound of pots and pans clanging. I silently cursed the kitchen workers with my head buried underneath my pillow until one morning I overheard another one of the volunteers arise and poke his head into the kitchen.

“Thank you for working so hard to make breakfast while I lay in bed,” I heard the man say.

The women in the kitchen, also all volunteers, do much of the dirty work on this trip and get little of the glory.

The day begins at 5 a.m. for volunteers Cindy Kirby and Judy Iott, two of a team of four women who work in the kitchen.

“What I appreciate the most is that I have the ability to be here and make a difference,” Kirby said, whose 13-year-old son and husband are repairing houses in the area this week. “Feeding them is a very valuable job.”

The kitchen crew scrambles to dress before cooking up huge vats of eggs, biscuits and gravy and coffee. Breakfast is served at 7 a.m. for the crews of workers who will head out to hurricane-damaged houses across Pascagoula. By the time the breakfast dishes are done, the showers and toilets need to be cleaned, the floors swept and then there’s dinner. The kitchen crew’s job won’t be finished until after dark when the last pots and pans are put away after dinner. The volunteers go through about $200 a day for food.

“Everything has been going great, we’ve just been cooking a lot, we even fed a homeless man who came in off the street yesterday,” Iott said.