We sleep in the fellowship hall; many more sleep upstairs in the sanctuary, belfry, and pulpit area. We share three single toilets on site; the one shared shower, in the pastor’s parsonage, is a block away. On our own for meals, 30+ volunteers forage in the church kitchen, but our foursome sets aside Mark to prep and cook meals (eggs & sausage every morning, meat & cheese sandwiches for lunch, spaghetti or stew at night).
Most other volunteer groups hail from nearby, a 3-hour drive from NY, NJ, CT or PA. An 11-member group come from Earlham College (IN), including students from Brazil and Ecuador. Our combined workforce consists of men & women, straight & gay, college students & retired guys, skilled & unskilled laborers, believers & agnostics.
Disaster response teams are not alone in this building. We make room for Alcoholics Anonymous groups, almost daily; they want privacy, of course. To cope with Sandy, people drink; likewise, AA attendance is up.
chaplain opportunities this week.
The first answer to that prayer comes as we engage Earlham College students in a “dorm talk.” We start out innocently enough, with so-called Quaker questions; in my case, I ask how they differ from other religious groups, even what “famous” alumni this Quaker-affiliated school claims. As each student would also be alumni of Earlham one day, I ask: “How will you make Earlham proud?” or “What would you like to be noted for?”
The influx of volunteers grows throughout the week, including eight from Danbury (CT), neighbors to the Newtown school kids murdered just the week before. Members of their church were among the heroes, their church youth among the victims and traumatized survivors; the whole community is grieving all the deaths, all the time—their own 9/11. I went into chaplain mode, listening, doing grief work well into the night with Zeke, who came to Staten Island, in part, to escape the tragedy back home.
One displaced family I talk with will have their first home-cooked meal on
Christmas Eve. That’s rare, as most will wait until February or later. It will take waves of volunteers and an occupying workforce several months to undo what Sandy did in a few nightmarish hours. As displaced local residents have services cut off or delayed by insurance companies, tensions rise and police are ubiquitous. We get an earful over a lunch hosted by the “Occupy” movement, relocating its operations here to be more useful, supporting the hardest hit of “the 99%”.
I am both eager and apprehensive to extend hope to these devastated families. We learn of two who rode out the storm in their attic. Sadly, one attic-dweller had to bear with the screams of a desperate neighbor who then died. One survivor rode on the roof as it floated half-mile away. One woman we helped—on the phone with her daughter during Sandy—reported neck-deep water just as their phone went dead (she survived). Another homeowner we helped carried out two drowning neighbors on his back. Talk about heroes!
A fourth homeowner seems re-traumatized in telling us, “God took it all. I have nothing left, not even my faith.” Upon seeing we
are nonjudgmental and unfazed by that admission, she opens up considerably about being a single mom of three girls under
10. She welcomes our prayers, even my Christmas card, given so we can keep in touch. When Supervisor Scott (a
contractor/carpenter from Bloomington, MN) calls her that night, she extols our work, our conversation and prayers.
Besides heroes and saints, we find grateful survivors. One “thank-you” sign, placed on a garage nearby, says it all: “Thank you so much!... to everyone who is helping the refugees and
survivors clean, repair, demolish, and
rebuild our homes. Special thanks to the
volunteers,... "
It was a week of hard work, made easier by such gratitude.
For more stories, interviews of residents impacted by Sandy and the clean-up efforts afterwards, even a video, including a profile of Scott, see front page of the NYTmes website posted during the week we were there:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/19/nyregion/small-victories-in-hurricane-cleanup-on-staten-island.html?hp&_r=0