Watery Wednesday

Did you think we got lost at Mardi Gras?
It has been such an action-packed two days that there was no time to blog!

Wednesday began very rainy and therefore a little slowly as we tried to find work for unskilled folks that could be done in the rain. Turns out that trash pickup is it! One crew headed back to Pearlington and picked up construction refuse from houses that had been worked on earlier, the other headed to Turkey Creek (part of Gulfport) to clean up both sides of Rippy Road.



The skies cleared at about 3pm, just as both teams were finishing our work. So we met up in Gulfport and headed down to see what the beach looks like. Turns out it's beautiful!



After this little frolick, we took a tour along Highway 90, the coastal road between Gulfport and Biloxi. Since your main blog photographer was driving, there aren't photos of this amazing journey. Everything -- we mean EVERYTHING is devastated. Huge buildings completely blown out, palm trees uprooted, markers for house slabs because it's not obvious where they are. Folks were comparing it to after Hiroshima, or the predictions of classic movies like The Day After. Of course, what's being rebuilt quickly? The big casinos.

We drove around Biloxi a bit and were amazed at how completely wiped out it was -- still. Very little rebuilding of homes. There was one option for local eating in East Biloxi -- none in West, except for chains. If you need a Waffle, MIssissippi is the place to come. You can't say "Waffle House" in the time it takes to get from one to another.

After dinner, we headed back to Turkey Creek to join the Winchester group again. We watched a locally-made documentary about the effect of Katrina on Mississippi, then heard more from Derek Evans. He's a powerful speaker, and very well-informed -- we're thinking we want to host him as a speaker at home, and his organization is definitely going to be the recipient of the rest of the Chocolate Auction and special offering money. There's so much to tell that it's hard to figure out how to summarize!

One of the most inspiring things here is the fact that everyone running the relief and recovery operations are long-term volunteers. No one is getting paid to do this, It's really mind-boggling that the whole relief/recovery effort has been done by volunteers.