From the ruin comes a meaning for life
Published in the Biloxi Sun Herald's Katrina anniversary edition

August, 2006

At the end of a long day of tearing down walls and hauling soggy debris, there was nothing like an outdoor shower, a fresh shirt and a walk in the golf course before sunset.

Located behind our hurricane camp at the Beauvoir Methodist Church on Pass Road, the golf course beckoned us with its surreal beauty. The Biloxi breeze, ever a constant, blew balmy through the overgrown grass.  Uprooted trees lay on their sides, inviting a squat and a chat. Turtles sunned themselves on the island in the pond; cranes and ducks drifted quietly nearby. Swarms of minute insects wafted in the air like puffs of dust. Like everything in Biloxi, the golf course had once enjoyed a purpose and function in the real world.  But like everything in Biloxi back then, Katrina had washed its original meaning away.

Just as it destroyed the walls and physical structures of the community, the storm created a new, temporary reality, without rules or authority or conventions-- a world of possibility, in which the survivors and the dreamers were left to create new meaning for themselves. And so an abandoned golf course became a sanctuary--a place to flip flop around the concrete paths, to walk an adopted puppy, to read a book under a tree, to feel the breeze on bare legs, or lie under the stars and listen to the frogs chirp. And at that certain hour of the day, with the sun sinking lower, a place to sigh with gratitude at the simple pleasures of being safe, healthy and alive.

It was within this world that I spent a few happy moments last May as a volunteer with Hands On Gulf Coast.

Every day in Biloxi was a gift. I was free from the cubical farm, the chemical lights and the recycled air. Unlike the vacuous conference calls and status meetings that characterized my job in New York, work here had a real purpose.  And for the first time in four years, I got out of bed without hitting Snooze.

I tore up plywood, drywall and tongue and groove. I came home covered in insulation and rat dung.  I crawled under abandoned houses looking for feral cats. I sat in the cool of a darkened kitchen, nibbling watermelon and listening to a Vietnamese family’s story of loss and survival. I rode down Highway 90 in the back of rattletrap pickup trucks. I got dirt under my toenails.

I sat in the shade of Live Oaks and listened to children fiddle and banjo, I danced in bare feet, I watched the birds fly into a ripening sunset over the shambles of a New Orleans neighborhood.

I clapped my hands and stomped my feet to Gospel music. I ate fried chicken, hush puppies, turnip greens, fried okra.

I climbed, pounded, bent, lifted, dragged, mucked, hauled, scrubbed, swept, crouched, sweated, tore, chopped, danced, laughed and fell into my bed every night exhausted and fulfilled. 

Mississippi reconnected me to the parts of myself that I used to like and helped me excavate the belief that one person can change the world, and in doing so, change her life.
When I graduated from college, I had wanted to do something meaningful with my life. I was young, but capable, and I just wanted the chance to show the world what I could do.
But after September 11th and nine months of unemployment, I accepted a job at an advertising agency with the hope that it would not be “that bad” and knowing for certain that it was better than nothing.

Besides, I was moving to New York to find my tribe—to meet the people who change the world. And any job that would help me join them was worth the sacrifice.  But as time went on, and I drifted further and further from where I started out, I stopped thinking of myself as one of them any more.  I was just a boring sell-out who didn’t even have enough money to quit and do something that I actually believed in.

And then I came to Biloxi.

After years of wandering alone through the desert, I stumbled into the oasis that I had long stopped believing existed. In the middle of a disaster zone, my tribe had spontaneously congregated. Jess was an AIDS researcher. Sue was a dispatcher for a trucking company. Ben was a bicycle messenger. Charlie was a cook at Outback Steakhouse. Armando was a former Menonite from Belize, a cowboy, a fisherman and a carpenter.

We heard something, met someone, felt something. We came to help. We caught a glimpse of a world that we wanted, needed to be a part of. We stayed. We returned. We believed that affordable housing should be a right, not a privilege. We believed that the cultural value of a community is worth more than the land it sits on. We believed that motivation was the only credential that mattered.

Within this environment, young people had opportunities that would never have existed in the real world. Leaders emerged and individual passions ignited. Julie led all-women interior crews. Guillermo conducted a scientific experiment to determine the best way to remediate mold. Animal Ben registered all the pets in East Biloxi. Dan started a summer camp. Niko rebuilt a park.  And around the campfire at night, future doctors, lawyers, writers, artists, leaders, architects, social workers, activists, musicians and environmentalists came together to share a beer, a cigarette and their ideas about the world. 

For better or for worse, those days are over now. Amazingly, the gutting work in East Biloxi is largely complete and we are now learning how to hang drywall to rebuild what we once tore down. The hole to the golf course has been blocked and the campfire snuffed out for good. The walls are coming back. But for a little while, despite the suffering and pain that surrounded us, the intoxicating energy of this place invited a generation to believe in the possibility of a better, more equitable world.  Of a life where no matter how hard, how hot or how difficult, they could just pick up a sledge hammer and ‘git ‘er done.’

Those of us who came in contact with the dream and the dreamers were forever changed by it.