Volunteers included (seated) Bill Gay; (second row, from left) Megan Lyons, Brooke Newman, Jim Reynolds, George Sheets; (third row) Wanda Lyons, Dympse Bowlin, Chris Walker; (back) Eddie Motley, Jim Hoffman, Bob Halsey and E.J. Durham.

Volunteers help areas hit hard by Katrina

First the good news: Most of the damage from Hurricane Katrina has been repaired in the inland communities that we visited in the McComb, Mississippi area. Now the bad: More than a year and half after the storm, little has been done to rebuild thousands of homes in the New Orleans area. That effort will take years to finish and some of the abandoned dwellings will probably be bulldozed to the ground. Volunteers will be needed for a long, long time to help coastal residents restore homes that were ripped apart by wind and water.

Our group of 10 volunteers from Alleghany, Ashe and Wilkes counties drove nearly 800 miles to McComb, Miss. to spend the week after Easter doing what we could to help out. Most of us are members of the Peak Creek Church of the Brethren in Laurel Springs, but friends from Baptist and Methodist churches came with us.

The morning after we arrived, we were split up into two work teams and headed out to the job sites. The group that I was assigned to had two projects. The first was in the nearby community of Summit, at the home Eunice Reed. She is a live-at-home grandmother, and the house is filled with her children and a grandchild. We patched her leaky roof, treated ceiling mold, ripped out a badly soiled carpet and replaced it with vinyl tile. While we were there, Eunice's 19-month-old grandson Jeremiah stole both our hearts and our tools. At first he was shy but then he walked over and wrapped his tiny hand around my little finger. He wanted to help us as we worked. As I knelt to lay tile, he tried to pull a screwdriver out of my back pocket.

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