Gulf Coast Needs Skilled Volunteers--a Whole Army of Them
7 February 2007
Though the federal government has allocated billions in hurricane recovery assistance, it is at the hands of volunteers that much of the work has progressed--in fits and starts.
Zipping around the church kitchen offering lemonade, jambalaya, and heaps of encouragement on a recent afternoon, Brenda Puckett was clearly in charge--the kind of volunteer the Gulf Coast has come to prize since hurricanes Katrina and Rita hit.
Though the federal government has allocated billions of dollars in assistance, it is at the hands of volunteers that much of the recovery has progressed--in fits and starts. And the challenges remain daunting: Entire houses need to be built from scratch, sometimes with the help of people who may never have held a hammer before; gangs of visiting volunteers need to be lodged and fed when they come to a community; and families, packed into the tiniest of trailers for months on end, need to wait patiently as the work inches along.
“Our goal, everybody’s goal, is not to leave anybody behind,” said Puckett, cofounder of the Hands of Hope ministry that has been working in the nearly obliterated river town of Phoenix, La. But for some of the tens of thousands of people without decent homes to return to, abandonment is what 16 months of waiting for help has come to feel like.
“The people forgot about us--just like they did the Vietnam veterans,” said Burke Saucier, of Erath, La., whose house still sits on the muddy ground where the storm surge dumped it about 60 feet from its pilings.
Progress in Erath--a town about 10 miles north of Vermilion Bay--has been slow, said Saucier, despite the help of volunteers. Sometimes, it’s two steps forward and one step back. At the house of one of his son’s, for instance, a crew of volunteers hung the interior with sheetrock, and the next volunteer--an experienced house builder from Michigan--had to take it all down because it hadn’t been done correctly.
“They tried,” said Saucier. But the mistake was costly, and time-consuming.
Sometimes, however, houses rise as if by a miracle. Aida Reynon’s brand new aerie in Lafitte, La., is a perfect example. Built high on pilings, it took a crew of volunteers from the Friends Disaster Service (FDS) just five weeks to complete. Southern Mutual Help Association, an Oxfam America partner in the region, is helping FDS coordinate the construction of other homes for needy families.
Attracting Volunteers Takes Commitment and Resources
Some of a community’s success with all of this depends on its ability to attract volunteers. Many of the rural towns dotting Louisiana’s bayous far from New Orleans simply are not on volunteers’ radar screens. They don’t have local coordinators and construction managers who can work with volunteer crews to make sure they use their time effectively. Nor do many communities have the facilities to lodge large groups of workers.
If your town can offer a place to sleep and a hot shower, it stands a better chance of getting some free labor. Jean Lafitte, La., has gone out of its way in that regard, said Marge Winn, one of the FDS volunteers now on her fourth work trip to the coast.
“Lafitte has just bent over backwards to make sure we’re comfortable. Every location isn’t that friendly,” she said. “Mayor Kernan—he’s got the knack. He’s working day and night.”
For instance, local officials turned a community center, formerly rented out for weddings and also used as a roller rink, into a bunkhouse for 48 volunteers and built a couple of showers. Volunteers use the facilities for free. And best of all, said Winn, the bunkhouse has heat--a much-appreciated comfort on raw January days.
In Houma, a city in Terrebonne Parish, La., there are the "i-pods"--so dubbed (casually and unofficially) by a crew of student volunteers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) who have been collaborating with Oxfam America and one of its partners on a design project in the region. Shaped like boxes with peaked roofs and made from sheets of thin ribbed plastic, similar to corrugated cardboard, the blue-and-white shelters belong to Presbyterian Disaster Assistance. They are clustered together, two sleeping cots per pod, into a “volunteer village.”
On cold and rainy nights, it takes a hardy volunteer to find comfort in a little plastic hut with puddles on the floor, especially after a day of hard labor. College kids might not mind too much, but one night of slopping along muddy paths to the porta-potties and listening to the roar of small generators straining to pump heat into the pods was enough for two other visitors. They bailed out--and found beds at a Howard Johnson’s--which points to the challenge all communities face in figuring out how to house volunteers when the locals themselves have no houses to share.
Good with a Hammer and Nails
Communities are happy to have the volunteers. But they’re even happier when that free labor is also highly skilled—something that’s not easy to come by.
In the first stages of the recovery, the skills required for tearing houses apart were far less sophisticated than those needed to put homes back together. Electricians, plumbers, roofers, finish carpenters--all are now in great demand, and teasing out who is really up to the job can sometimes be tricky for aid groups.
“Volunteers a lot of times over-assess their skills,” said Peg Case, executive director of the Terrebonne Readiness and Assistance Coalition (TRAC), an Oxfam America partner in Houma. Since the storms, TRAC has worked with more than 866 volunteers offering a total of 174,000 hours of their time.
To help it figure out where volunteers can do the greatest good, TRAC has developed a skills chart with six levels of ability. If you rate yourself “1” that means you’re considered a “willing helper.” If you give yourself “6” that means you’re a licensed professional. On one recent list of TRAC’s available volunteers, the challenge of rebuilding became immediately clear: Most people had given themselves a “1.” The experienced volunteers--those who were licensed as plumbers or electricians, for instance –were few and far between.
“When we sign volunteers to come here, they have to have at least two knowledgeable people on each job running the crew,” said Gordon Case, TRAC’s construction manager. “If you don’t have no chiefs, nothing gets done right.”
More Volunteers Needed
But if you don’t have volunteers, whatever their skill level, nothing gets done at all. And that’s what has some local leaders on the Gulf Coast a little worried: the army of volunteers that rushed to the region in the months after the storms has shrunk since then--though the need is as great as ever.
“A critical need for us is to have some of the 2,000 volunteers who have been here to come back--or spread the word for new people to come,” said Judy Herring, director of family and community development for the Southern Mutual Help Association, an Oxfam America partner in Louisiana. “I think the greatest worry I had (after the storms) was there was so much to do and so few to do it--I still feel that way.”
For families and individuals who don’t have ties to a local church or a non-profit group that can steer volunteers their way--and there are many--that feeling is heavier than ever: Without volunteer labor, the federal dollars allocated to help those families rebuild won’t cover their full costs.
