Dr. Ricketts describes relief efforts

From: Travis Ricketts

Greetings friends and prayer partners! All 80 students, faculty, and staff made it back from Louisiana either early Saturday AM or late Saturday PM. It was quite a week . . . which seemed like a month!

Upon arrival in Baton Rouge, the team split up into 4 groups, 3 of which would return to the same church to sleep every night.  I’ll give you a paragraph describing what was happening w/ each of the 4 groups.

The first group of 20-25 left about 6:15 every morning to go to the River City Center (a Red Cross evacuation center) in downtown Baton Rouge. They would return about 7:00 PM every evening. The River City Center held 2,000- 7,000 “clients,” known in non-politically correct circles as evacuees, and it epitomized much of what’s wrong in America. Red Cross workers (male & female) “sleeping” on cots side by side in their quarters, young children running all over the place w/ parents (presumably not giving a rip) nowhere to be seen and often times not even on the premises for the day, and numbers of them (certainly not all) very content to let the Red Cross and the government provide for them for the rest of their lives. Six stories from the River City Center:

• One of my friends, as she walked through an area, would often be flagged down by a lady who would tell her “Mrs. Jackson has to go to the restroom.” Mrs. Jackson was the mother of the fully functional grown lady who flagged down my friend, but rather than help her own elderly mother to the restroom, she consistently chose to flag down a volunteer to do it. Oh, to love the unlovable.
  
  
• Yolanda was a 30-something-year-old single working lady who was scheduled to get treatment for cataracts just before the arrival of Katrina. As the floodwaters rose around her, she found that she had gone completely blind. As one of our team helped her around the unfamiliar territory of the River City Center, men in the center would come up to her and poke and pinch her, asking “who did that, Yolanda?” She was scheduled to be sent to “Trailer City” (see below) where, she confided to my friend, she knew that she would become a victim. Good News: On the last day the River City Center was open she was “adopted” into the home of a local pastor and his family. She is finally scheduled for cataract surgery this week.
  
  
• On the evening I visited the River City Center, I spent some time w/ a 60-year old Vietnam vet who had lost his daughter and two grandchildren in Katrina. He recognized that God would not give a believer more than they could handle, but he was starting to wonder about it. I related to him the reality of our faith: Unlike all other world religions, Christianity has a God who actually did something for his people that cost Him something – his Son on the cross. Additionally, the Christian response to evil is different from the naturalist response (sorry. Bad luck…. you’re an accident and the evil that befell you is too) or the transcendental response (sorry that you’re feeling that evil befell you. Don’t worry, that evil is not really reality, it’s just the impression of reality.). Christ is with us, and empathizes with us, in the midst of evil and suffering. Remember the shortest verse in the Bible? (Read John 11 to find out how Christianity addresses the problem of evil.)
  
  
• One of our girls in the center, Laura, ministered extensively to an 8-year-old girl (we’ll call her Natalie) and her infant half sister. The girls’ parents were drug users and were rarely in the center during the day. The only people that the infant would let hold her were Laura and Natalie. To make a long and painful story short, when the extent of the abuse suffered by these two children became known, social services decided to put them in a foster home and then up for adoption. Natalie was heartbroken by the predicament because she recognized that as half-sisters, they would probably not end up in the same home. She asked Laura, “Why can’t you be my mom?” How do you answer that question to an 8-year-old who had been functioning as a mom herself? Laura reminded Natalie that she never had to be alone, that Jesus would always be with her. As they looked up on the full moon their last night together, they made a pact that they would pray for each other for the rest of their lives every time they saw a full moon.
  
  
• National Guardsman: There was a unit of National Guardsmen in the center to provide security. Many of them had their homes destroyed as well. One particular fellow noticed something different in the countenance of our people. He began asking questions, came to the church where we were staying on three different evenings and asked more excellent questions, and eventually was led to the Lord by some of our students.
  
  
• As it turns out, our group ministered just as much to the Red Cross personnel as they did to the evacuees. Many of these folks had been “on the line” since the hurricane hit. When they thanked my friend for coming at the end of the week, my friend replied, “We just wanted to come and serve as Jesus would serve if He was here in your midst. Our prayer is that you’ve gotten a glimpse of Him in our lives.” She said, without exception, the Red Cross workers wept.

The second group was at “Trailer City,” a settlement of 500 trailers brought in by FEMA, for 12 hours / day. The goal was to remove the evacuees from the River City Center and get them in these “private” residences rent-free for 18 months. Over the course of the week, our volunteers became experts at the city, so much so that when the mayor of New Orleans showed up, one of our students and an alumn, Rachel Clegg, who accompanied us on the trip were conscripted to give the mayor a tour and explain how the community was working. The mayor asked them what should be done to make the situation work better. He probably got more than he bargained for as one of the students has thrived over the last year in my political readings class where we’ve discussed the Federalist Papers and the political philosophies of Edmund Burke! Regardless, Rachel was asked to consider moving to Baton Rouge and work as the coordinator of volunteers in this FEMA facility. (Last I knew, her plan was to do so, but she had to leave that evening because her mother was in the emergency room in Jackson, MS, with heart trouble. Please pray for them.)

What did ministry look like for this team? I never saw it, but I understand that their days consisted of playing with children, listening to those who needed an ear, helping people move in, and using a college van to transport residents to their first shopping trip to Wal-Mart in over a month. Let’s hope that a significant number of these people don’t squander this opportunity. For many of them, their accommodations are now better than the ones in which they lived before this hurricane. They can “make hay while the sun shines,” or find themselves homeless and on welfare in 18 months.

The third group of 25 left Baton Rouge after spending just one night there, and we wouldn’t see them again for 5 days. They headed down to Slidell LA (2.5 hours away) with 10 sets of phone numbers of residents who had requested assistance with their homes. As it turned out, the contacts were not contactable. So, they found a devastated African-American neighborhood and made their own contacts. In the course of the week, they removed trees, drywall, cabinets, etc…. from 10 homes that suffered severe water and wind damage. When they asked the residents if they wanted help, the typical response was “how much do you want for it?” The residents were stunned and skeptical when the reply was “nothing.” By the middle of the week, word quickly circulated around the neighborhood about this group of college students who came to serve.

The fourth group was a group of 6-8. For this group, the benefits of ministry were not immediately tangible; it was more an exercise in obedience. Their job was work in a warehouse of www.prccompassion.org (check out this group the next time you’re interested in support disaster relief in the U.S.). They sorted, stacked, and wrapped with plastic all week long. My particular task for them was to drive the 24-foot Budget rental box truck loaded with relief supplies to Port Arthur, TX; Lake Charles, LA; Lafayette, LA; and New Orleans, LA. The typical way this worked was that I moved supplies from the Baton Rouge warehouse to a warehouse in an affected area. I didn’t generally get to see much more “ministry” than those in the warehouse did. The way this ministry works is that pastors would compile lists of what their flocks needed and then secure the supplies from the satellite warehouses, so it often seemed as if I was moving things back and forth. 

On the next to the last day, though, on my first trip to New Orleans, I was stunned. A LARGE church there had set up two huge tents, a warehouse, barbecue grill, and THINGS WERE HOPPIN’. They (really, everyone I met there was a volunteer from another church somewhere in the US) supplied sacks of food to families who needed it, and they cooked 15,000 meals there on site and they plan on doing that for the next year and a half. In my opinion, this is the way that the Church is supposed to function, and it put to shame any government aid or aid from bureaucratically cumbersome organizations. I don’t mean to imply that they were perfect. For example, on my first trip to this site, the volunteers at the PRC warehouse in Lafayette loaded my truck while I was trying to get some other challenges straightened out on my cell phone. I had 10 pallets on my truck, and although I had no idea what they were, it was supposed to be “stuff” that was needed there in New Orleans. As we were unloading it in New Orleans, the forklift operator’s face was crestfallen as I identified one pallet of clothes, 2 pallets of makeup, 2 pallets of water, and one pallet of junk. I said, “OK, tell me what you need.” He gave me a list, I called the students (it appears to me now that I unintentionally circumvented standard procedure) in the warehouse back in Baton Rouge, they got it ready, loaded it, and a couple of them took it back down that evening. At that point, the warehouse was out of one particular item that they were desperately short of, so we went to Sam’s the next morning, bought it, and took it down.

I suppose that I learned four lessons in my experience in this ministry: 1) Obedience is far more important than expectations (I had my chain saw all ready to go but didn’t see it or my pickup truck until the trip was over). 2) When considering donating to relief situations, be certain of what is needed (they’ll scream in Baton Rouge if they see one more load of clothes, and they’ve got more pallets of water than they know what to do with). 3) The generosity of donors who made this trip possible has encouraged me to hold my possessions more loosely. And 4) Bryan College has some fabulous and talented servants of the Lord.

Through His Grace,

Travis Ricketts