IOCC's "Volunteer in the Gulf Coast"

Jim's personal journal from the week.

April 29 - May 5, 2007

Thursday

By this time we’re getting a feel for the North Shore. People genuinely seem pleased to have us in town. Habitat clients, waitresses, and grocery store clerks have all expressed their gratitude for our coming down to New Orleans to help. They also seem glad that their plight has not been forgotten, even though the hurricane was twenty months ago.

Today I revisit the nagging concern that I talked about yesterday: is this an effective way to help? Teams volunteer for a week at a time. Habitat’s work week is Tuesday through Saturday and most teams have to fly out on Saturday afternoon. That means each team provides four and a half days work. Most volunteers are unskilled, so learning how to do the job must be built into the short work week. It seems a terribly inefficient way to get a job done. Wouldn’t it be better to send money so they could hire someone to do the job?

Things in New Orleans aren’t that simple. Housing is in short supply. Construction workers are in extremely short supply. We went to church in Meterie on Sunday and visited with one woman who had just moved back into her house. She was completely insured and was able to get a quick settlement after Katrina. She had the cash to get the job done, but it took her eighteen months to get her roof put back on her house and the insides repaired. There is a severe shortage of both supplies and workers.

Ideally whole construction teams would simply move to the area for weeks or months at a time. A construction team could build a house in just a few weeks time. It would be more efficient both in time and money. But there is nowhere to house a host of construction workers. It is unrealistic to assume that they would be willing to live on cots for a month at a time. Furthermore, because of the construction boom, construction workers who go there to work for Habitat, or a similar agency, tend to get lured away by the high salaries being paid by regular construction companies. (It is similar to the problem facing Shelby.)

This system of volunteers coming for a week at a time fits the circumstances of the Gulf Coast very well. And while it is not an efficient system, it is quite amazing how much work they have gotten done in the twenty months since the storm. A highly structured and streamlined system of recovery, such as the one offered by FEMA, broke down immediately because it couldn't deal with the realities of the broken infrastructure. But the occasional nature of the volunteer system overcomes the problems and actually works. In the end it is better to have an inefficient system of rebuilding that works rather than an efficient system that can't get anything done.

Read Friday's Journal Entry

Copyright © 2007 James E. Nelson (Just Another Jim). All Rights Reserved.
You are free to distribute as long as attribution and web address is included.
Site support by C T E K