UMs have been helping Katrina victims for 2 years

By Rachel L. Toalson
Staff Writer
Pastor Marilyn Roeder chooses to vacation in New Orleans.
Even when she returns to Victoria, where she is associate pastor at First UMC, Roeder already is planning for her next trek to the Crescent City. There she will clean out still-dirty homes, fix meals for still-hungry families and smile hope into the lives of still-hurting people.
Her passion to help the people of New Orleans began soon after the first winds of Hurricane Katrina hit the city two years ago—Aug. 29, 2005.
In the aftermath of history’s costliest hurricane, Roeder worked with the American Red Cross in Victoria, coordinating meals with the shelter that held many evacuees. First UMC has a health-inspected kitchen, Roeder said, and wanted to help with meals.
Roeder met Elvina and Vince DiBartolo and their family of 11. She met their 6-year-old granddaughter, who was sad because she would turn 7 in a few days and didn’t have a place to celebrate her birthday.
Roeder threw a party for her in the church gym.
The DiBartolo family exchanged contact information with Roeder and returned to New Orleans.
In the meantime, the Victoria food bank had run out of room for supplies donated by the community. Roeder said she began storing food in her garage. In October 2005, she rented a U-Haul trailer, hooked it up to her pickup truck and drove all night to New Orleans.
Elvina DiBartolo, a principal at a Roman Catholic school in the Big Easy, distributed the food Roeder brought to her parish’s food pantry. She offered her home to Roeder for the duration of her trip.
In March 2006, Roeder took her first team of 16 volunteers from Victoria to New Orleans to help strip and clean out damaged homes. The team stayed with DiBartolo, who cooked meals for the volunteers during the week.
Since then, Roeder has organized seven New Orleans trips. Teams stay for a week—always with the DiBartolos—and work emptying homes, knocking out walls, rewiring and blowing in insulation.
“We don’t all have the rebuilding skills,” Roeder said. “But they have the heart to do the cleaning and the emptying of homes, and New Orleans is in need of that now.”
Victoria teams have worked in many of the same homes, Roeder said—and many of the homeowners have worked right alongside them.
During the most recent trip, Roeder said, her team worked in a Lower Ninth Ward fourplex. Water damage had bowed the wooden floor, and the team had to remove it.
Her team says the recovery work is fulfilling.
“After the first time, you just get addicted,” said Phyllis Fissel, a 77-year-old originally from Pennsylvania. “It’s such a good feeling to help someone else. Volunteerism is in my blood.”
Nancy Farris, 72, who has accompanied Fissel and Roeder on all seven trips, said, “This is one opportunity for me to do something for somebody else. It’s not just New Orleans. It would be anywhere I could go and help. This opportunity just presented itself, and I was ready to go.”
Clifford Kunkel, who has been on four trips, said, “It just seems to call us.”
In their years of work, Roeder said, Victoria United Methodists have seen slow but continuous progress in the rebuilding of New Orleans.
“The need is still tremendous,” she said. “Everybody says New Orleans will never be the same because the people there are moving and others are coming in, and that’s true. But it is coming back.”
Progress is slower in the Ninth Ward, she added, because so much of the damage was to rental property.
“There’s plenty of work still to do,” Fissel said. “We do see progress. We do see homes that are completed. Just down the street from where we were working, there were three houses that were landscaped and everything.
“It’s very slow, but a lot of it is because they don’t have any manpower. People get on a waiting list and wait months for something to get done. It’s going to be a long process.”
All the Victoria volunteers say they have made many strong friendships with people in New Orleans. Farris said she is looking forward to the next mission trip in October.
“It’s such a fulfilling experience to help these people and see that we can do a little,” she said. “There’s so much to be done. But these people in whose homes we’ve been working are so appreciative. And we’ve made so many friends.”
All her team members, Roeder said, keep picture albums filled with shots from their work in New Orleans.
During the June trip, Roeder said she saw a woman she had met in March 2006—Joyce—out mowing her yard. She waved on her way by. Later that day, a family member called Roeder to say Joyce had had a heart attack while mowing and was asking to see her. Four of Roeder’s team joined her at the intensive care unit.
“It’s not just repairing homes,” Roeder said. “It’s truly repairing lives and building relationships.”