hurricane relief

on saturday, a few lutherans headed down to galveston island to see what we could do to help. the synod announced the clean up day on monday, with the goal of about 100 people. by wednesday we had 200 signed up....on wednesday we had 300 signed up, and by friday night we had 417 signed up! i'm not sure what the actual count was, but i think we stayed pretty true to the 400 count. we had 42 congregations total show up - sometimes it was just a father son team, some just had the pastors show up, and one church brought 45 people! pretty cool.

our retreat cancelled, so we decided as a staff to go down to help out. since there were so many people, when the synod staff saw that we were coming, they asked us to help with registration. we thought sure, no problem, we run crazy registrations all the time during the summer! haha. well, 400 adults is a little different than 100 kids, but it worked pretty well. here's a picture of our high tech registration set up.

i hope this is big enough that you can see that we used a baby swing as a sign holder, as well as a water-logged bookshelf. we were resourceful! registration was run right outside of zion lutheran in galveston. we then sent people to 2 other churches, homes, and businesses of congregation members and friends. we stayed and worked at zion. here are some more pictures of the inside.

the workers ended up tearing out the entire altar. it's a little strange to see an altar ripped out, but it had to be done. the church had about 3 feet of water in it, so everything below the 3 foot mark had to be taken out.
i think the most interesting thing to me was watching people interact. we all had to wear masks , so it was very different working with people when you couldn't see the majority of their face. i would find myself smiling at people, and then realizing that they don't really know what facial expression i'm trying to make. but, it was also interesting because no one really knew who anyone was, and the masks certainly exacerbated that. a lot of people were wearing the free shirts that lutheran disaster relief gave us, so we lost another part of our identity that way. it was just very interesting to see a bunch of strangers working together for a common goal, who all having something in common, but are indeed strangers. strange, but cool.

that shows our pile of trash that we took out of the church. before the end of the day, the trash people had come and collected ALL of it. it was pretty amazing. it was hard though, because to me that pile represented all of our hard work - it was a tangible thing. when they took it away, it was hard to see how much we had accomplished. demolition is a lot different than building, and this was my first experience with demolition.

when we were finished with the church, we went over to a lady's house that other people had been working on. it was much harder to see a person's home than a church destroyed.

on our way to galveston, there are boats on the road that had been washed up during the hurricane. some were destroyed, but some were just fine, just chillin' on the bridges and highways.

seeing the boats that were washed up reminded me of my time spent in thailand after the tsunami. the biggest difference was that it took me 24 hours of plane flights to get to thailand, we didn't speak the same language, and their houses were poverty level in the us. a much different situation than galveston yesterday, where it only took us 2.5 hours to drive there, we all spoke english, and the houses were typical us houses.

Here's a picture of Bishop Mike, hard at work! It's pretty cool that even the bishop was working with us.