IOCC's "Volunteer in the Gulf Coast"

Jim's personal journal from the week.

April 29 - May 5, 2007

Tuesday

We’re staying at a new church development in Mandeville. Officially called the St Timothy United Methodist Church East Campus, the facility is a former rehabilitation and convalescent home that the Methodists purchased. One wing houses a day care center. The other wing is rented to Habitat for Humanity to house volunteers. It also has a professional kitchen that we were free to use, and both an indoor and outdoor dining area. The church also built a sanctuary adjacent to the facility. We didn't know where we would be staying until we arrived in New Orleans and were expecting the worst as far as housing, but this is really a very nice facility. Each room has a private bathroom. The only problem is that we are sleeping on cots. I didn’t sleep well last night and am sore this morning from my night of tossing and turning on an uncomfortable cot.

The St. Tammany West affiliate of Habitat for Humanity has four professional carpenters on full time staff. In addition there are a handful of full time volunteer carpenters. These people are project managers and site managers. They not only coordinate the work to be done by the volunteers, but teach the volunteers how to do the work.

Surprisingly, the system seems to work.

Our site supervisor is Ben Bigler. His religious background is Assembly of God and Foursquare Gospel. He’s a musician and singer. He was even part of a band for a while. He has given his two week resignation notice to Habitat because he just accepted a job as Youth Director in a nearby mainline Presbyterian Church (USA). Since I grew up in the Bible Church and served as a PC(USA) pastor for more than two decades, and have tinkered with writing and recording music, we have a lot to talk about.

It’s hard to explain the peculiar inner workings of the Presbyterian Church and lay flooring at the same time. Ben wisely went to a different room to help someone else.

Ben is responsible for four houses being built on four adjacent lots. Our job this week is to lay flooring in one house, put in window sills in a couple of the houses and hang all the doors in the fourth house. We start with flooring. We’re not too good at it. We ruin a fair share of pieces. We have to occasionally rip up flooring because we didn’t do it right. But in the end we get the job done and it looks good!

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