Two members of the Lander University family spent nearly a week in New Orleans this past fall helping residents of that city rebuild homes and restart lives.
Stan Ligon, assistant director of campus recreation at Lander University, and Danae McCarty, a 2001 graduate, help rebuild a home destroyed by Hurricane Katrina. They went with a missions team from North Side Baptist Church, Greenwood.Stan Ligon, assistant director of campus recreation at Lander, and Danae McCarty, a 2001 Lander mass communication graduate, traveled to Louisiana in September as part of a seven-member mission team from North Side Baptist Church that focused on assisting the victims of Hurricane Katrina.
The Greenwood church became involved in the Katrina relief effort though a congregation member’s work with the New Orleans Area Homes (NOAH) Rebuild project. McCarty said that after reading about the upcoming trip in a church bulletin, she and her husband Scott knew they had to go.
“It was just a ‘God thing,'” McCarty, a mother of two, said. “I had never done anything like this before in my life, but I just felt it in my heart that I needed to go down there.”
Ligon said North Side “is a church whose mission is missions,” and he said the Lord led him to take part in the Katrina effort. Though he has worked with Habitat for Humanity and other mission projects with North Side, the Katrina relief mission was his first outside the state.
When Scott and Danae McCarty and Ligon arrived in Louisiana with the North Side team, they were shocked by what they saw. Even after more than a year of recovery efforts in the region, the effects of the hurricane were evident everywhere they looked.
“I was amazed at the level of the water and how high it had come up into the houses,” Ligon said. “There was devastation from the time we entered into Mississippi. I had never seen anything like it.”
McCarty said debris, including appliances, automobiles and rubble, still lined the roadways into many wards of New Orleans.
“It made you feel like Katrina happened yesterday, not a year and a half ago. It is unbelievable,” she said, adding that schools, businesses, restaurants, banks and stores remain closed and covered with plywood. The businesses that have reopened are staffed with “skeleton crews,” and many residents are living in small trailers provided by the federal government, she said.
“There is nothing. Imagine if you lived in Greenwood and there wasn’t any type of restaurant or any type of store. How these people are surviving just blows my mind,” McCarty said. “Their whole world has been turned upside down.”
The North Side crew worked day and night to complete work on two homes in New Orleans. Ligon said the group was able to finish major construction on one home and begin hanging sheet rock on the second. The work was grueling and tiring, but the team found motivation to continue when one homeowner stopped by for a visit.
Danae McCarty and Louisiana resident and Hurricane Katrina survivor Jonathan Emmanuel Whittaker met while McCarty was on a North Side Baptist Church mission trip this past fall to New Orleans. McCarty said Whittaker is an “angel” who changed her life.The homeowner, who is a teacher, drove more than an hour each day in order to work.
“She was truly an inspiration,” McCarty said, adding that the gratitude for the team’s efforts didn’t stop with the homeowner. “All of the people we helped were so grateful. They would come up and say, ‘Thank you so much for being here and giving your time.’ Their graciousness was amazing.”
Though the team was able to meet and connect with many New Orleans residents during their week in the city, a resident they met on the final day of the trip has made a lasting impression on Ligon and McCarty.
Jonathan Emmanuel Whittaker was one of about 30 men at a gas station waiting for the opportunity to do construction work in exchange for pay, and he struck up a conversation with McCarty and the mission team.
McCarty said they learned that Whittaker had lost his home, family and job following Katrina. He rode a free bus each morning from Baton Rouge to New Orleans in search of work. Carrying a duffel bag covered with scriptures, Whittaker also gave spiritual support to the evacuees, McCarty added.
The team offered the man a ride, and for half a day, Whittaker helped the North Side group with construction on the two houses. When their work was complete, they drove Whittaker back to the gas station and gave him a bag of food and some money.
In return, Whittaker offered the team a few prayers.
“Every one of us was sobbing by the time he got out of the van,” McCarty said, adding that Whittaker then distributed the food to other evacuees at the station. “He gave everything he had away.”
McCarty said the experience with Whittaker was life-changing. At the time of the trip, she had been struggling with the decision to remain at her job or accept another position that paid less but was more personally rewarding. Whittaker, she said, was an “angel” who led her to make the right choice.
“He influenced me and showed me that money is not everything. There he was with nothing, but he was living life for the Lord,” McCarty said. “I ended up taking the new job, and it has been great. I still think he’s my angel, and I pray for him every night.”
Upon their return, the mission team brought back stories and photos of their time in New Orleans, but they also brought back something that can’t be expressed in words or images.
“There is a special bond among the seven of us. There’s no doubt about that,” Ligon said. “When you deal with God’s purpose and plan for your life, the people that he puts around you in those times are going to have substantial meaning to you from that point on because you each have taken part in an awesome thing he wanted done.
“The biggest thing is that it is about helping other people,” Ligon said. “That’s part of God’s plan for all of us.”