REPORTER’S NOTEBOOK:

The group of volunteers is diverse. There are high school students, a few grandmothers, a handful of construction workers and a pastor from a Spanish-speaking Baptist church in Gardenia among the ranks.

The group of 67, sponsored by Costa Mesa-based Palm Harvest Church, will spend the next four days sleeping on air mattresses in an unheated church gymnasium and repairing homes damaged by Hurricane Katrina in Pascagoula, Miss. I’ll be sleeping on the gymnasium floor along with the rest of the group.

The only thing it seems we all have in common today is that we’re all headed to Mobile, Ala., from John Wayne Airport. From there, it’s about an hour drive to Pascagoula.

Over the next few days, I will report on why it has taken Pascagoula so long to recover after the hurricane and what nonprofit groups from across the country like Palm Harvest are doing to help people who have been largely forgotten after all the television news crews packed up and left.

I hope to tell the stories of a few Costa Mesans and why they want to travel across the country to donate their time and sweat hanging drywall. I also hope to tell the stories of a few Pascagoulans who get to move back into their homes this week, 26 months after the storm. I’ll send photographs, words and perhaps video from Pascagoula over the next few days.

I will file most of my stories from the local McDonald’s, one of the few places in this little shipbuilding town that has public wireless Internet access.

Most Pascagoulans who could to afford to move away after the storm did. Many local businesses have only started to reopen in the past year. The Pascagoula public library, which experienced severe flooding, won’t have wireless Internet access for another two weeks.

The few thousand Californians whose homes were devoured by the recent wildfires is “just a drop in the bucket compared to what happened in Pascagoula,” said Palm Harvest Pastor Mike Decker, who is leading the group.

This is Decker’s third trip to the Gulf Coast region since Katrina’s 20-foot storm surge and gigantic sea waves engulfed Pascagoula in August 2005. More than 92% of Pascagoula, once a town of about 30,000, was flooded.

Decker said some feel guilty about traveling across the country to repair homes in Mississippi when there are many Californians in need. But Decker sees a future opportunity to put trained volunteers from the Pascagoula trip to work on houses destroyed by California wildfires.

“We’ll have people coming back from Mississippi who know how to drywall, people who know how to do electrical wiring,” he said.

Leftover church donations from the Pascagoula trip also could go toward wildfire relief efforts, Decker said.