Pursuing Holiness

No, not that kind of payback - they haven’t massed, armed with pitchforks and torches, outside the Corps of Engineers’ offices. I mean the good kind of payback. Thousands - maybe tens of thousands - of volunteers have come from all over the country to help us gut houses and rebuild. And now folks from the New Orleans metro area are doing the same for Iowans:

N.O. volunteers bring knowledge, compassion to Iowa victims
Aldrich, one of thousands affected by river flooding June 11, said he spent days alone in his basement, using a brush to scrub away black mold and then dousing the plaster walls with potent Lysol. He had made three passes so far.

“Man, you don’t have to do that,” said Sidney Gonzales, an electrician whose home in Kenner took on 3 feet of water during Hurricane Katrina. “You get a spray and put it in a pressure washer. It’s a solution. They sell it at the hardware store. I used it when I did my house.”

Gonzales, 62, came to Cedar Falls with a group from The Vineyard Church to repay the generosity of volunteers from the same Christian community’s Boise, Idaho, congregation who helped him gut his house in the fall of 2005.

… In making the journey, Gonzales, along with myriad other New Orleans area volunteers who have headed north since last month’s historic Midwestern flooding, has gotten the chance to impart a measure of the expertise and sympathy gained during the past three years in the Louisiana flood zone.

From removing mold to securing a federal loan to fending off government bids to wipe a neighborhood off the map, southeast Louisiana residents have grabbed the chance to provide the kind of battle-tested assistance they received after Katrina from survivors of other disasters, including representatives from Kobe, Japan, who offered lessons gleaned from their own recovery from a massive earthquake in 1995.

Iowa flood photo via pyraxsys on Flickr

written by Laura