Project Children's Good Deeds In The South

By Aine Fox

August 25 2005: Hurricane Katrina hits America, devastating parts of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama. Bay St. Louis in Waveland, Mississippi is flooded with up to 8 feet of water, homes are completely destroyed and a large portion of the population moves out.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina many who stayed were left without electricity for months.

Today, three years on, some still do not have permanent homes. There is no local grocery store, a Walmart is the only place to serve the family shopping needs. A casino rebuilt relatively quickly is the main employer within the community.

The American government has been criticized over the past three years for the apparent delay in terms of relief and even then, for the lack of hands-on help they have provided local communities with.

One resident admitted "They just handed out money, lots of money. And I think they hoped people would just move on. The smaller areas which aren't seen as major tourist attractions are obviously worth less to them. The tourist region of New Orleans was rebuilt more or less immediately."

In light of this, Habitat for Humanity has set up a 'hand-up, not a hand-out' scheme where they work with local communities and volunteers to help make home ownership possible for people who would otherwise be left to sort out the devastation themselves.

The Blitz build scheme, which began in 2006, involves around 200 people (including the home owners themselves) working for five days to build 7 houses.

June of this year saw a group of 17 young people from Northern Ireland travel all the way to Mississippi as part of Project Children to do exactly that.

Project Children was established by Cork native Denis Mulcahy and his brother Pat in 1975 and has given kids from Northern Ireland the chance to spend part of their summer in America.

Having expanded to University students over the past number of years, around 22,000 young people have benefited from the scheme.

The students are given the chance to live and work in the USA, gaining work as well as life experience.

Mulcahy is modest about his achievements but is not short of praise from host families, co-ordinators, friends and the interns themselves.

His interest in each and every child is astounding; he has affected the lives of many in a very positive way.

Here is my story: I was elated to receive the news that I had been accepted on the Project Children program to spend the summer in America. Flights, a host family, a base in New York for eight weeks - what's not to love?

There was one further perk though: aside from interning in Manhattan and adding a ton to my CV, I would be one of the lucky few to experience the first week in Mississippi helping out with the post-Katrina rebuild.

Stories from the previous year told me it would be tough but worth it - a once in a lifetime opportunity.

The news pictures immediately after the hurricane depicted devastation but as time passed they were forgotten and replaced with other stories.

Although three years on much has been rebuilt or cleared away, small streets which used to be home to local communities lie in a state of disrepair, having been ignored in the rebuild.

Outdoor garden furniture and a car door lay rusted at the back of the site we would build on - a sign of life before the storm.

Driving from New Orleans airport to our base for the week at Bay St. Louis just over the Mississippi-Louisiana border, we were reminded that most of what we would see on the drive had been covered by up to 16 feet of water.

The roads were long and for a duration surrounded on either side by greenery.

As we neared Bay St. Louis contrasting images began to appear - the tired remains of some former homes alongside new freshly painted houses for sale sitting proudly on stilts on the beach.

The Southern states are certainly different to their northern counterparts, immediately contrasting my initial experience with New York City.

The accent reflects the pace of life, everything is much slower and a sense of community is evident.

One woman told me that everyone had known everyone else before the storm but "Katrina brought people a whole lot closer. Standing in lines for food, living beside each other in relief centres - it was inevitable that people would get to know each other a lot better. We were all going through this disaster together."

Our accommodation at Lagniappe in Waveland was a shock to the system to say the least.

Cabins with wooden bunk beds and paper walls greeted us but, as it turned out, so exhausted would we be that our standards went out the window and any form of bed was welcomed.

Lagniappe's site housed the bunks we slept in, the canteen we ate in and the bathrooms we washed in.

A Presbyterian church before Katrina hit, it was destroyed and rebuilt as a base for volunteers interested in restoring the community of Bay St. Louis.

The House-building blitzes since 2006 have provided more than 800 homes for families across America, with post-Katrina projects a priority.

Without such projects as these it is difficult to see how many families would have recovered after such devastation.

I asked the mother of the young woman we were building the house for how she and her husband picked up the pieces after losing everything. "We thought about moving, it was a natural reaction of course," she said. "But having built our home together here, we just couldn't leave."

Both Mrs Zoerner and her husband have seen friends leave since 2005 and say they don't think the area could handle another disaster: "If this happened again, this place would be a ghost town".

Our five-day mammoth task to build a new home for a young family began at 7.30am on Monday 23rd June - the whole group was refreshed and raring to go. That lasted until around 8.30am!

The searing heat of the day coupled with the dense humidity slowed the whole process down.

I honestly reckon we could have had the house ready in a shorter time period had the weather been nearer Northern Ireland temperatures.

With team leaders and permanent Habitat relief workers to help out, we measured, cut, nailed, applied and reapplied layers of sun-cream, sanded, painted and drank around 10 bottles of water each day!

Struggling on in the heat, we managed to be the only group not to lose anyone to heat exhaustion or dehydration - it is worth noting all the other groups were American!

Seeing the house come together and being able to point out the part you had helped put together made it all bearable, and by Friday I would actually say enjoyable. It was only in talking to the soon-to-be homeowners that the significance of what we were part of down in Mississippi could be realised.

Sonia Zoerner, who will move in to the house with her fiancée Andrae and 16-month-old daughter Gaby, spoke of the high regard in which she holds the volunteers:

"They're a special kind of people, to come all this way and to work in this heat just to help us out."

The Habitat scheme heavily emphasises a combined effort from homeowners as well as the volunteers and skilled builders involved.

Sonia sees this as a much more beneficial way of rebuilding homes as well as the community: "I think its good that they don't just give it away, people won't let something just fall apart if they have played a part in the building process itself."

On completion of her new home, Sonia was presented with a key and a Project Children plaque which she had requested, "as a rememberance of how this all got here."

Visibly moved by the occasion, she described her plans to put together a book of the whole process from beginning to end.

Something which stood out of the whole experience for me was the genuine appreciation of people in the area that we were there to help - from locals in the street, to the families themselves.

One elderly man and his daughter even travelled from another area to meet us having read of our work in a local paper.

A news station was eager to interview 'the volunteers all the way from Ireland.'

Help is certainly still needed in the Waveland area, that is clear not only from the physical evidence but from the reactions of the people when they actually receive it.

The experience was unanimously agreed to have been an educational and challenging but very worthwhile one by all the Interns.

We can only extend our thanks to Project Children for making it possible.