It was dark when I flew into New Orleans, so it was hard to tell whether the expanses of blackness below were water or former neighborhoods without power. It wasn’t until the next morning that I learned just how bad the situation remains over a year after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita hit the city.

Shortly after the 2005 hurricanes, Father Ron Culmer urged our parish (St. Clare’s, Pleasanton) to respond with more than just money. “One act of compassion has the power to transform the world,” he said. “I felt that we at St. Clare’s needed to share our time, our talent and our selves to help transform the suffering into hope and joy.”

So in October 2006, Culmer, Hardy Lipscomb, Brian Clay, Dan Grahn, and I went to New Orleans to work with The Episcopal Diocese of Louisiana’s office of disaster response. I also invited my father and members of his parish in Kentucky (Church of the Resurrection, Nicholasville) to meet us there.

We spent four days working with the gutting ministry, led by a group of committed college students who help homeowners strip devastated homes down to the studs. The city is setting deadlines, threatening to bulldoze homes that aren’t gutted –– at the homeowner’s expense –– and families that lost everything are afraid of losing even the hope of rebuilding.

Before the storm, the neat rows of single-story homes in New Orlean’s neighborhoods probably looked like many in the East Bay. Now, some are simply gone. Some are being repaired while the family lives in a trailer in the front yard. Many more remain untouched. All have a spray-painted cross with the date it was searched by the National Guard Unit and an ominous number – how many bodies were found inside.

In the Lower Ninth Ward, a huge breach in the levees sent a wall of water up to 30 feet high smashing into the two-story brick home of retired school teacher Patricia Speares. The family across the street drowned, and the house next door was swept off its slab and dropped just six inches from her back room. The water stood 10 feet deep for weeks. Here there are no trailers, because there are no services. The neighborhood only got potable water in mid October 2006, and portable toilets dropped off by FEMA a year ago have never been cleaned out.

Tears rolled down Miss Patricia’s thin dark face as we pulled on our work gloves and donned protective masks to keep us safe from mold. I took the kitchen, where cabinets sagged off the walls, dumping muddy china and broken glassware onto the floor. My kitchen is the heart of my home, and that mess of memories was almost more than I could bear. Worse still were the rusty canned goods, which shattered as I shoveled them out, releasing the nauseating smell of spoiled food and a scattering of giant cockroaches.

I found some dishes and crystal that were intact, and someone else brought out a brass clock that Miss Patricia lovingly swabbed clean with clumps of grass. But most of her former life was shoveled into wheelbarrows and dumped on the curb. And when we were done, Miss Patricia and Miss Vanessa – her friend and former neighbor, who lost four family members in the flood – prayed for us and joined us in singing ‘Amazing Grace.’

“Never forget,” Miss Vanessa told me, “God is good, so good.”

A banner at St. Clare’s in Pleasanton proclaims our mission:  “To know Christ; to grow in Christ; to serve Christ; and to share Christ.”In New Orleans, I learned that no part of that mission stands alone. In serving Christ and sharing Christ with the people there, I have grown in Christ and come to know Him better.

Any parish, group, or individual interested in volunteering or donating to help in New Orleans should contact Holly Heine in the Diocese of Louisiana's Office of Disaster Response at 504.895.4303 or This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it .