Sunday December 30, 2007

We had a wonderful, but very filling, dinner last night at a steakhouse recommended by the desk clerk at our hotel. Came back, read for a while and went to bed. We woke up during the night to a massive thunder and lightening storm. Fortunately, the rained stopped long enough for us to pack up the car and we were on the road again. We were in the car only a short time when the skies opened up again - it poured buckets through the rest of Florida and all of Alabama. We stopped at the Welcome Center in Mississippi and chatted with the folks there for a while. They suggested that we go down to route 90 along the shore for the rest of our journey. We did so and saw some amazing sights. The devastation here is still quite evident almost two and a half years after Katrina. Only about 1 in 30 houses facing the Gulf was not damaged or destroyed. There were many front steps to nowhere and also driveways leading to empty lots. A few houses are being rebuilt, but most lots have for sale signs in front of them. We saw the steeple of a church just sitting on the ground with no church in sight, a foundation of a house with no house yet a swimming pool looking intact. There were hundreds of empty parking lots in front of empty lots where obviously stores and shopping centers had been. The damage appeared to extend a quarter to a half a mile back from the road in some places. Many of the beautiful live oaks were dead or broken. On a positive note, those trees in the median whose tops were gone had been carved into beautiful dolphins, herons and the like. We got to Bay St. Louis in the afternoon. We are a week ahead of schedule, but we will work here for a while for Habitat for Humanity and then continue on to Texas. The place we are staying is a church with bunkhouses for the workers. We are with a church group from PA - 24 adults and teens who will be here until Thursday. More people will probably be coming in later in the week. The church fed us dinner of chicken corn chowder, salad, and biscuits and we shared a tub of fudge with everyone. We will find out our work assignment tomorrow and meet with the local Habitat representative. We look forward to a productive week.