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When the rain subsided on the next day, father and daughters returned to their house, but as Mr. Wallace said flatly, “We couldn’t even stay there. It was a total disaster.” The next few days became a whirlwind tour of temporary residences. Mr. Wallace’s wife and four sons were at his mother-in-law’s house at the time, so they stayed put. It began a nearly four-month-long separation for the family.

Mr. Wallace and his daughters were not the only ones to flee Marrero. Even the local operators of emergency pumping stations had deserted - a controversial decision that ultimately destroyed the Wallaces’ neighborhood. The family tried their luck carving out space in a trailer owned by one of Mr. Wallace’s sisters in nearby Napoleonville. But after a week, the trailer filled up with other relatives, and so the three Wallaces once again moved on. They ended up at a temporary shelter at Nicholls State University in Thibodaux, a small bayou town 60 miles west of New Orleans. They stayed for a little more than three weeks - the longest stop on their continuing journey.

During that time, Mr. Wallace grew increasingly desperate, unsure how to proceed. How would he be able to care for his family once the shelters shut down and the handouts stopped? Unable to support his wife and children adequately before the storm with the wages from his $5.70-an-hour garbage truck “hop” job in New Orleans, he was looking to make a fresh start, but he didn’t know how to go about it. All he could do, he reasoned, was wait, and pray.

Parting the Red Tape

Wallace wasn’t the only one. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, victims throughout the Gulf Coast region were waiting and praying. That strategy proved at least as effective as relying on any kind of secular or public support network. In the days, weeks, and months after the hurricane, as the media told indignant stories of communities let down by shortfalls at every level of government, it was Christian groups who were quietly picking up the pieces.

One of the most striking examples of this religious outreach was Campus Crusade for Christ International, an evangelical missionary group that has organized more than 15,000 volunteers to travel to the Gulf Coast region since last September. At first, its volunteers provided manpower at relief centers and feeding stations, according to the group’s website. Later, they expanded their efforts to removing debris from victims’ homes, schools, churches, and parks. More recently, the group brought more than 10,000 college students to the region to spend their spring breaks cleaning yards and installing sheetrock.

Then there is God’s Katrina Kitchen, located halfway between New Orleans and Biloxi, in the appropriately named town of Pass Christian, Mississippi. Started by Kentuckian Greg Porter, funded entirely by donations, and led by a team of Christian volunteers who, according to Porter, “answer to God first and foremost,” God’s Katrina Kitchen bills itself as, “amidst the devastation and debris, a place of peace, hope, caring, love and comfort… the result of God’s calling people … to serve.” When Porter first arrived in Pass Christian last September 14th, “Highway 90 - a four-lane highway - looked like it had been hit by mortars.” Undeterred, Porter set up in the middle of the road, cooking and serving over 120 hamburgers that day for lunch. With its cadre of volunteer cooks, servers, and skilled and unskilled workers, God’s Katrina Kitchen has been serving three meals a day to local residents and workers every day since. Although G.K.K. is non-denominational - their motto is “Many Churches, One God” - their shared faith and hopes of evangelism bind them together. As Porter explained to me in an email message in June, “We have never been about feeding and distribution only - we are here to show God’s Love to the People of the Gulf Coast.”

Beyond such notable large-scale operations were the efforts of congregations across the nation, whose members “adopted” Gulf Coast churches; collected and delivered donations of food, water, and clothing; and sent carloads of volunteers to destroyed neighborhoods. Interviewing hurricane victims about their experiences, the stories of religious charity grew familiar: a Canadian group called Samaritan’s Purse sent ten men equipped with chainsaws and Bobcats to a neighborhood on the Mississippi coast to clear trees from yards. Three church girls from Pennsylvania showed up one weekend to drag muddy rugs out of an elderly woman’s house on the Mississippi gulf coast. “If the religious groups had not come to help, I think we would’ve been back three or four months ago waiting on government assistance,” Mississippi hurricane victim Ginnie Smith told me. Deanne Kimball, a parishioner at Bible Fellowship Church, whose members have housed numerous teams of volunteer relief workers in its hurricane-ravaged home of coastal Mississippi, concurred. Also in agreement was Jane Griffin, an Auburn University sophomore and Louisiana native who spent a weekend last fall doing Katrina relief work as part of a college church group: “The government… took a long time deciding what to do, whereas the church groups jumped on it and found ways to help [the Katrina victims]: they cared, gave, fed, clothed, loved, and served.”

The Damage Done in Pass Christian

Nowhere do these statements ring truer than in the tiny fishing village and retirement community of Pass Christian. Pronounced “Pass Kristy-Ann,” the town takes its name from a local deepwater pass, which in turn was named for Nicholas Christian L’Adnier, a French property owner who moved to nearby Cat Island in 1745, just before the start of the French and Indian War. When Katrina hit, the town caught a 30-foot surge of water, pushing many historic houses out to sea and knocking others right off their foundations. Ginnie Smith, an 80-year-old widow and longtime Pass Christian resident was unharmed by the storm, but her house, a renovated gardener’s cottage that sat behind a huge historic house on the beach, was completely decimated. According to Mrs. Smith’s daughter, Cecette Bassett, “The house literally floated off its foundation and moved inland about eight feet, destroying it and everything in it.” The “sweet little” wood-framed home - including the full-length gallery Smith had added across the front, with French doors, rocking chairs, and ceiling fans - had become, in Bassett’s words, “nothing but rubble, matchstick rubble - I mean just trash.” Although it has gotten scant media coverage compared to larger cities in the area, Pass Christian has been in rough shape since last August. Four months after the hurricane struck, most of the 6,700 residents were still without running water. The only groceries were at a local distribution center run by missionaries, or at stores in Gulfport, 30 miles away. Hundreds of residents were camping out in tents, and according to the local Clarion-Ledger, as of late December, “tons of debris remain[ed] to be cleared” and 80 percent of the city was still “in ruins.” Although 3,000 homes were destroyed or severely damaged, only 160 building permits had been issued for rebuilding, and the town was “still trying to provide basic services.”

Contributing to the town’s slow recovery process was its mayor, Billy McDonald, whose leadership style in the months following the hurricane was described by a local alderman as “absent.” In mid-December, in fact, the board of aldermen voted to slice the mayor’s salary by ten percent due to his “lackluster” performance. (The mayor later vetoed the motion - but he could not veto the sentiment behind the decision.)

Mrs. Smith was in a particularly harrowing situation. “I’m 80 years old, and I don’t have a house,” she said, a week before Christmas last year. Her insurance company claimed she should have had a flood insurance plan that the government had told her she didn’t need. Her bank was clamoring for mortgage payments on a house that was no longer livable, and her worldly belongings had been destroyed. Her FEMA relief check came in at a mere $2,000, so Mrs. Smith found herself in a position that she - the widow of a Texas oil executive - never would have imagined. “I never thought I’d be homeless when I’m 80,” she said last December. She began eating three meals a day at God’s Katrina Kitchen.

Three Matts on a Mission

While Emmett Wallace and his daughters were idling at Nicholls State University, the answers to his prayers for deliverance - in the form of three men named Matt - were climbing into a van in Ohio.

It was Matt Pardi’s idea to adopt a family of evacuees. Pardi, 37, is the pastor of H20 Ministries in Bowling Green, Ohio, a college town an hour and a half south of Detroit. H20, a non-denominational church that is part of an umbrella organization, Great Commission Ministries, is composed almost entirely of young people - 95 percent of members are college students - and its mission, according to staff member Matt Olszewski, 25, “is to effectively communicate and live out the transforming power of Jesus Christ.”

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, Pastor Pardi felt that God was telling him to go down to New Orleans. So Pardi, Olszewski, and another staff member, Matt Hilderbran, 31, set off for Louisiana in Pardi’s van. The three Matts were uncertain about what would happen during their trip. The three men spent the twenty-hour drive on their cell phones, calling Louisiana shelters in search of someone who needed their help while phoning contacts in Bowling Green to make arrangements for spare apartments in case they found a family to bring back.

What they saw on their drive encouraged them. “We drove down one street in Slidell [a town on the northeast bank of Lake Pontchartrain], and each church it seemed had at least 30 to 50 people that they were feeding and finding places for them to sleep,” said Hilderbran. After a couple of days of calling around and bouncing from shelter to shelter without success, one of the Matts received a call from the Nicholls State gym: a single, 24-year-old French Quarter prep cook, Don Williams, was interested in their proposition. Although the H20 team was still hoping to take home a family, they followed this lead to the shelter in Cajun County - to a university that sells sweatshirts reading “Harvard on the Bayou.” When the Matts arrived to pick up Williams, they spoke to a Red Cross worker who made an announcement on their behalf over the loudspeaker - “something like, ‘There are some individuals here from a church in Ohio, and they are willing to help out a family that may want to relocate to Ohio. If you are interested in this, come up to the info table,’” Matt Pardi recalled. The Red Cross worker explained the arrangement: six months of an all-expense-paid new life in Bowling Green, Ohio, with no pressure to stay permanently or attend church - “and you will need to be willing to work.”

Emmett Wallace and his daughters heard the announcement. So did Wallace’s distant cousin, Michelle Burnside, 44, who was staying at the shelter along with her daughter Tiffany, 26, and Tiffany’s three young boys. It was Burnside, a widow, who approached the Matts, expressing interest in going back to Ohio with them. “But,” Emmett told me, “the only way she was gonna leave was if her cousin Emmett was going with her.”

Nine people was a little more than the Matts had bargained for. “I was nervous about the enormity of the project,” Pardi said. “We initially imagined one family and guessed about six to eight thousand in expense. Now with three families we were looking at over $20,000. That was a little scary!” The three men drove a couple miles down the road, bought a cheap minivan and loaded everyone up for the trip back to Bowling Green.
Following the long drive, the church workers ushered Wallace and his family into a furnished two-bedroom apartment, stocked the refrigerator, and set him up with what he described as a “nice job” in a warehouse, packing print labels for a food safety system for $8 an hour - nearly 50 percent more than he’d earned in Louisiana. Soon after arriving, he sent for his then-estranged wife Gloria - they reconciled - and his six-year-old son, Terry. The rest of the couple’s children remain with Gloria’s mother, who relocated to Arkansas.
Every day for months, H20 church members gave the Wallaces rides, taking them grocery shopping and to football games. They told Emmett they would continue to do so until he figured out how to pay the outstanding Louisiana speeding ticket that he claimed was delaying him from getting an Ohio driver’s license. “They all are wonderful people, they truly are,” Mr. Wallace told me last December.

Though the Matts made it clear that the Wallaces’ coming to church wasn’t a condition of their staying, the Wallaces came anyway. “We go to church with the organization that came and got us,” Wallace explained.
And compared to the chaos in Marrero - where, eleven weeks after the storm, many residents were still homeless and FEMA was half-heartedly handing out trailers - Emmett Wallace was finding that he actually liked life in Ohio. In fact, in some ways, things were better than they had been before Katrina.

“My family feels great, and so do I,” he told me last December. “It’s a blessing to me, because I’m able to take care of my family the way I wanted to. Really, in Louisiana, I couldn’t.” The other evacuees that the Matts had taken back with them - Michelle and her family, and Don - were unable to take root in this small Midwestern town, and so they all returned to New Orleans in January. As of late June, however, Emmett was still living with his family in Bowling Green, working full time as a cook. He has stopped receiving financial assistance from H20 - “If he was in a bind we could help him, but Emmett knows that we can’t support him,” Hilderbran says. “We’re not one of those big mega-churches that have a lot of money to throw at things.” Over time, the men’s roles have changed: from rescuer and victim, to friendly neighbors with separate lives - or in the case of Pardi, who still talks to Emmett several times a week, “now that there are no strings attached,” it has become “more of a friendship.”

A Cross of Rubble

In Pass Christian, the government - starved of sales tax revenue after losing 100 percent of downtown buildings - has struggled to rebuild infrastructure. Running water and a primitive sewer system were not restored until early spring. Residents are wary of the fast road to recovery through private redevelopment, as in neighboring oceanfront town Biloxi, where thousands of companies are bidding to come in and build large condominium high-rises and casinos along its shore. Still, the severe need for housing has changed many locals’ attitudes toward developers.

Town officials have accepted an offer from Wal-Mart to turn the once-historic downtown, formerly a strip of antique shops, boutiques, and health food stores shaded by a canopy of 300-year-old live oaks, into an area to be known as Pass Christian Wal-Mart Village. According to the Mississippi Renewal Forum, a consortium started last October by Governor Haley Barbour, the retail giant has partnered with a New Orleans-based real-estate development company called Historic Restoration, Inc. “to develop the mixed-use housing portion of the project.”

Meanwhile, the missionaries at God’s Katrina Kitchen can at least offer spiritual support to a community whose churches were universally destroyed. At some point after the storm, according to Cecette Bassett, Ginnie Smith’s daughter, the missionaries built a huge cross on the beach out of trash and started holding free services every night at 8 p.m. Large businesses have kicked in too: Robin Roberts of Good Morning America, who happens to be a Pass Christian native, organized fund-raising efforts involving Salvation Army, Home Depot, Staples, and AmeriCorps’ parent company, the Corporation for National and Community Service.

You might think that someone like Mrs. Smith, an 80-year-old widow without a home, would have wanted to flee all this chaos. But she wouldn’t even consider the thought.

In the end, her house was unfixable; it had to be completely torn down and rebuilt. Despite her lack of flood insurance, the government is helping, providing Mrs. Smith with a federal grant tailored for homeowners outside the “flood zone” who nonetheless lost property, and a small-business loan. So now Mrs. Smith has hired a contractor to rebuild her house on the same footprint as it was before. In the meantime, she lives in the gardener’s cottage of a friend’s house and is trying slowly to rebuild her life. I called Mrs. Smith in late April to see how she was doing. “I just got a telephone yesterday!” she reported triumphantly.

Bassett is impressed by the vivacity of her mother and her mostly elderly, widowed friends: “It looks like Afghanistan bombed their town, and they’re still partying up a storm,” she told me. “It’s amazing, all these women who refuse to leave - they’re just gonna live there, stay in their community. They all feel like they’re Scarlett O’Hara: ‘The South will rise again!’”

As of late April, God’s Katrina Kitchen was still set up on the beach in Pass Christian, distributing Clorox and gloves, three meals a day, and other needed supplies.

Scott Kimball, a parishioner at Bible Fellowship Church in Pass Christian, continues to be impressed by the revolving crew of volunteers. His small congregation’s initial goal, after Katrina hit, was yard cleanup for members and their neighbors. But eight months after the hurricane, most of their energy continues to be spent on housing volunteer teams from all over the U.S.

“God has met the needs in amazing ways,” Kimball told me. While most volunteers stay only a short while, “the few long-term volunteers I’ve spoken with have no immediate plans for pulling out - even with another hurricane season looming.”

Campus Crusade for Christ International
www.ccci.org

God’s Katrina Kitchen
www.godskatrinakitchen.org

Great Commission Ministries International, Inc. (the umbrella organization for H20 Church)
www.gmci.net

Historic Restoration Inc. of New Orleans
www.hrihci.com

Mississippi Renewal Forum: Governor’s Commission on Recovery, Rebuilding, and Renewal (includes information about the Pass Christian Wal-Mart Village)
www.mississippirenewal.com

Pass Christian Historical Society
www.frogbellies.com/passchristianhistory

Samaritan’s Purse International Relief
www.samaritanspurse.org

Schmucker, Jane. “3 B.G. Men Give Shelter from Storm: Church Leaders Travel to Louisana, Drive 10 Victims back to Ohio.” Toledo Blade 3 Oct. 2005. www.toledoblade.com

This article appeared in the Fall 2006 issue of Next American City magazine. SUBSCRIBE NOW!