The Blogging Continues!

Joanna and I completed the 24-hour blogathon to raise money for Katrina victims in Pearlington, MS, but we aren't stopping there. We're going to keep going by adding at least one new thing a day to the Pearlington blog up until the Katrina anniversary on August 29. Please help us pass the word along, and if you weren't able to drop by to leave a comment during the blogathon, it's all still there. Come on over when you get a chance.

The Blogging Begins!

As you may or may not have noticed, the planned blogathon for Pearlington had to be postponed because I had a funeral to go to last weekend. Joanna and I are blogging all day today and all night tonight, however, on behalf of the small town of Pearlington, MS that was just obliterated by Katrina.Come on over and contribute what you can, whether it's money, labor, or good old-fashioned good wishes.

Katrina Victims Still Need Our Help

And I have an idea for how we can help them. Actually, Joanna has an idea, and we are running with it.

Please join us next Saturday, July 29, when we blog for Pearlington. We are participating in Blogathon 2006 to raise money for hurricane recovery efforts in Pearlington, MS.

It's just like the old walkathons with all the walking done at a keyboard. We blog. You sponsor--if you please.

We need all of the support we can get, and the people of Pearlington need all of the help they can get. Please help us spread the word, and don't forget to meet us at the blog next Saturday when we talk all day about Pearlington, the needs of the people there, what they've been through this year, what various churches and other volunteer organizations have been able to accomplish, and what we can all still do to help.

Donations will go to the Pearlington Recovery Fund at University Baptist Church. The money will be spent on building supplies for families who lost their homes in Katrina.

And So It Goes With God

I just finished reading Life of Pi for the second time. I'm supposed to discuss it with a reading group Sunday afternoon, so I'm going to save blogging about the book as a whole until later. But there is one line I just had to comment on now.

At the end of the book, Pi is telling his story to some men who clearly do not believe him, so after giving up on convincing them he is telling the truth, he tells them an alternate version of the story that he suggests they might find more plausible. This seems to only confuse them even more. Then he asks which story makes the better story, the first one he's told about his experiences in surviving months in a lifeboat on the Pacific Ocean, the story that is full of animals, or the second story that has no tiger in it.

The men agree. The better story is the one with animals.

To which Pi replies, "And so it goes with God."

Wow. That line gives me shivers. I'm going to spend the next few days deciding what I think it means.

Mammaw's Family

We had a family thing today, and though Mammaw has been gone for many years, it was basically about getting her family together. Mammaw's family has, over the years, gotten both bigger and smaller, spreading out more and more as it keeps growing so that it's not nearly as big a group as I imagine when we actually get ourselves together. But then it's still us. Except that it's not. It's some weird older version of us. People kept commenting today on how the kids are growing up faster than we can keep up, and I kept looking around thinking, "Who are these old people, and what have they done with my family?" And that's just when I looked at my brothers and sisters (Heh. Kidding. Sort of.).

Time is such an odd little critter. It drags on and on when there is something you really want to happen and slows to a creepy crawl when you just wish some terrible situation would be over already. I'm not one to really keep up with my own aging process, but I was born in 1967, which should make me about 25 by now I figure. I'm not sure where other people found the years in there to get older.

But the main thing is that this reminded me that we don't get together enough. Of course, everybody has responsibilities, and everybody has their own children and their own friends and their own jobs to worry about. But somehow we keep finding ourselves inexplicably catapulted out into the future with no real idea of where the time went. It's a shame when those moment of realizing the time has gone keep cropping up at funerals, as they all too often do.

There are a lot of things you can find time for later. Getting together with the people you love as they are right now is not one of them. You can use up everything you have in you running around willy nilly just trying to deal with the most immediate pressures first, but there are few situations in which your time and attention are more valuable than in simply sitting down to visit.

Ya'll come to see us. The roads work both ways. Ya hear?

One Shovel Full at a Time

Monday afternoon I helped bag up insulation that had been torn out of a house in Pearlington. For a while there, the more we worked the bigger the pile looked. That feeling of working and working and working only to see the pile get bigger is pretty well representative of the overall situation on the Gulf Coast right now.

If you read the Pearlington Recover Center blog, you can see that there are several recent posts that allude to rising frustrations. I'm sure it's not hard to imagine the tension level felt by people who have been displaced all year, living in very diminished conditions on their own properties, and who still see no real end in sight. Add to that organizations facing a situation like nothing they've ever dealt with before, necessitating a kind of make-up-the-rules-as-we-go operating procedure in which nobody really knows what they've been promised or what they can expect. Add to that volunteers suffering from heat exhaustion and raw nerves. Add to that the fact that everyone's story is so traumatic and so heart-wrenching that even small groups of volunteers have trouble agreeing where their resources will best be put to use. Add to that the fact that the harder you work, the bigger the pile gets. I could go on, but I think the point is made.

Life is hard in Pearlington. I worked with some very wonderful people--Mack, Erin, and Caroline--who had driven down from North Carolina to help. Mack is a pastor, and when we started talking about mission trips to other countries and comparing them to Pearlington, he said, "I've been to a lot of places, and this is as rustic as any of them."

I made it two days for my first week of work as a volunteer in Pearlington. I may go back tomorrow, but unless I am called and asked to come to do a specific task, I'll probably wait until Monday. I have responsibilities at home, and I need to pace myself. I need to rest, regroup, soak it all in, and work up the energy to go again.

It's hard. Everything is hard. The living conditions are primitive. It's hot. The bugs are terrible. The work that needs to be done is physically demanding. And the job isn't finished without sitting down to talk to the family, and every family has a story to tell that will just use up every emotion you have to offer.

But I'm going back next week and the week after that and the week after that and as much as I can manage all summer without wearing myself out to the point that I can't take care of the rest of my life.

As hard as everything is in Pearlington, every day is a very unique and rich experience. The people are incredible. The volunteers, the locals, they are all worth getting to know. They are all very special to my heart. And every day in Pearlington there are things that I can do that I know are of real help to people in real need. Every day that we keep raising money and keep working on houses and keep listening to people's stories is another shovel full off the pile. It may take a very long time, but if we just keep going, we'll see that pile get smaller.

God bless the families who've lost their homes and their livelihoods and everything about the world as they knew it. God bless the volunteers who've given so much time and money and energy to help these good people of my home state. God bless Pearlington.

Sharon v. Pearlington

Monday morning, I'm headed for Pearlington, MS where it looks like I will be running Baptist errands most of the summer as various groups come in from around the country to work on the recovery efforts. There is a tiny camper for me to use, putting me very high up on the comfort scale in Pearlington. I won't have to sleep in a tent or on the floor of a gym. I will even have my own tiny refrigerator in my tiny camper. Life will be good.

This is the part where I'm supposed to say something poignant about how enriching mission experiences are and how I'm thankful for the opportunity to be of service. In all honesty, though, I'm equally repulsed and delighted by the idea.

Only 70 miles down the road will be my pillow-top mattress, hot shower, air conditioning, and cable T.V. It will be awfully hard to stay there, given that I have a terrible aversion to port-a-potties. I'll have to really feel like I'm doing some good.

So far all of my trips to Pearlington have been day trips. Each time, I've been hesitant, thinking I wouldn't be able to do any good. Each time, I've left feeling very good about what I was able to accomplish. I imagine this will be the same, except that at some point I'm going to have to face my fear the less than perfect bathroom facilities.

All of this is just to say that if I'm at the blog very often this summer, it means I've either chickened out or I'm cheating and driving home at night. Distinctly possible either way.

I know there are wonderful people living and working in Pearlington, though, and I'm looking forward to getting to know them. I will try to check in from time to time just to tell their stories. They need telling.

Have a great summer, dear readers. Both of you. And if you can spare a day or two, come meet me at the Pearl-Mart. The bug spray is on me.