Sunday, June 24, 2012

Well, well!  I seem to have published the week’s announcements on the Rebuild blog instead of the Announcement blog!  However, that may not be such a bad thing.  It may serve as a helpful reminder that the rebuild process is taking place in the context of our ongoing parish life; and though our average Sunday attendance is right around 40 people, we have many people in the congregation who are involved behind the scenes in the process of long-term recovery from last year’s floods.  Thank you, All Saints’ parishioners!

 

Deacon Alice Yeager is on vacation for two weeks. If you can VOLUNTEER with the SOUP KITCHEN the next two Thursdays, you can help this wonderful program to run smoothly even though Alice will not be there to offer her wisdom, skill, and love.  We’ve been having increased numbers—averaging more than 70—since late this spring.  Please help.  Come around 10 am, and plan to stay until about 1:30.

Wednesday noon Bible study and Wednesday Evening Prayer RESUME on June 27^th, and WILL NOT take place on July 4^th.  They will resume again on July 11.

All Saints’ next VESTRY MEETING is scheduled for 6 pm TOMORROW,  Monday, June 25.

Do you possess a washer and dryer? If so, please sign up to help with laundering the kitchen linens. There’s a sign up sheet on the Secretary’s Office for Sunday or Wednesday pick-up. With our many guests staying at All Saints’ this spring and summer, our kitchen is getting heavy use, and this is a simple way that you can help.
Do you have the occasional evening or Saturday to help with smaller projects as we help get people back into their homes? If so, call Paul Zaharia (720-2880) to let him know of your availability. We want to keep the work going even when there’s not a volunteer rebuilding team to work.

WELCOME to the next REBUILD VOLUNTEER TEAM, arriving this evening, from Christ Church, Kalispell, Montana.  Their rector, The Rev. Joan Grant, and Mother Mary have been friends since the 1990’s when they were both in Columbus, Ohio, in the Diocese of Southern Ohio.  This team of twelve includes youth and adults, men and women, an electrician and an architect.  Interested in welcoming them with a meal tonight?  Contact Mother Mary at 770-655-1713, or speak to her after today’s worship.

Episcopal Church’s Presiding Bishop Visits North Dakota

The Most Reverend Katharine Jefferts Schori, Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, came to North Dakota earlier this week to attend the 140th Niobrara Convocation, a gathering of Native American congregations from what was at the time the Niobrara Missionary District.  Bishop Katharine graciously took time to meet with the clergy of the western part of the Diocese of North Dakota last Wednesday.  We were able to share with her about the challenges of long term recovery after Minot’s flood last summer, compounded by the explosive growth and rapid social change that the Williston region is experiencing as a result of the Bakken Oil Boom.   She took our stories and wove some of them into her homily at that evening’s Choral Evensong at St. George’s, Bismarck.

A couple of months ago, North Dakota’s oil production surpassed that of Alaska, making our state second only to Texas in US oil production.  This has put enormous strains on housing, infrastructure, and social services in the western half of our state; and has certainly made the need for Minot to rebuild and recover housing after the flood more urgent. 

The Rev. Marianne Ell and I were honored to be able to welcome Bishop Katharine in a short address during Evensong that evening, summarizing our respective situations for her and for the congregation. 

I presented her with one of our All Saints’ rebuild t-shirts, and brochures about volunteering in Minot and HOPE Village. 

It was an exciting evening, and a great opportunity to give our story some “legs.”

Valorous Vail Volunteers

In the middle of May, a team of highly experienced volunteers came to All Saints’ from Transfiguration Church in Vail, Colorado.  Led by Deacon Stephen Baird, this group had cut its teeth as rebuilders in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana.  The work there for volunteers is largely drying up, so they were looking for a new challenge.  ER-D’s website led them to the story of Minot’s flood, and they decided to come soon after the ski slopes (where several of them work in “post-retirement” jobs) had closed for the season.

You can see the All Saints’ tool trailer in this picture, too.  It can be moved from site to site with all the tools needed to accomplish a job, right where they are needed.

They made major progress on sheetrocking and cleaning up the yard at the home of a Minot resident named Judy.

Karen and Judy measured and cut sheetrock.

And they had so much fun, both while working together and when their long days on the job site were over.

They stayed at All Saints’. As they relaxed and ate meals together, they got to know members of the AmeriCorps team that was arriving at the end of the week.

They admitted that they had some reservations about having to go to the YMCA for showers.

But by the end of the week, they said that they appreciated the immaculate and spacious shower facilities at the “Y” and decided it actually was a very convenient way to get spruced up after a long and dusty work day.

Tom and Steve, Judy (the homeowner), Jim, Karen, Karen, and Sarah.

Thank you, Deacon Steve and Karen Baird; Tom and Lynda Tasillo; and Karen, Jim and Sara Haeffner.  Thanks for sharing these photos.  And thanks, also, to the Mission Committee of Transfiguration Church, which offered financial support to help cover the tools and building supplies the team used!

Nashotah Seminarians rebuild over Easter Week

We were blessed during Easter Week to have three students from Nashotah House, the Episcopal Seminary in Wisconsin, volunteering in Minot.  Christian, Evan, and Caleb left Easter Monday morning at about 5 am.  For you lay people out there, having survived the emotional highs and lows of Holy Week and Easter Day, there is probably no day in the entire year when clergy and seminarians are more exhausted and brain dead and more likely to want to JUST SLEEP IN  than Easter Monday.  This was a real sacrifice.  I tried to make it up to them by a supper of homemade soup and salad, and bread hot from the oven when they arrived 13 hours later.  These three men are members of Nashotah House’s Jackson Kemper Missionary Society; and, like Bishop Kemper, they weren’t going to let a few hardships keep them from serving God’s people “in the West.”

They moved forward on Jody’s place where the Young Lifers left off.  Jim Probst,

a very young-at-heart local retiree with a lot of home handyman experience, showed them the ropes, and they were apt learners.  Jim, Christian, Evan, and Caleb worked Tuesday through Friday at Jody’s place.  By then Jim was hooked!  He’s returned to Jody’s place almost every day since.  The work our volunteers are putting in will, we hope, leave Jody with a “better than new” home.

Thanks be to God for these willing workers!  The Nashotah Seminarians, like the group from Standing Rock, had such a good time that they are hoping to recruit others to make the trip and help out.    Any way we can help you with that project, guys?

Surviving the Great Flood of 2011: Faith, Family, Friends, and FEMA

John Williams was a familiar voice on the radio waves in North Dakota for decades.  He is also a beloved member of All Saints’ Church–and you can hear that stentorian, confident voice on many Sundays as John reads lessons when we worship together.  But John was also a victim of last year’s floods.

Here is his essay about how he coped, how in his communities of faith, friends and family, and even in a federal agency, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, he received the help and encouragement he needed.

If you’ve been following this blog, you’ve seen John’s picture before.  He’s one of the recipients of the Christmas trees we had to share.  The photo below was taken by Joanne Slanger, whose own home was flooded.  She and her husband George now live in the Twin Cities.

HOW I SURVIVED MINOT’S DISASTROUS FLOOD OF 2011

The Four “F’s”: Faith, Family, Friends and FEMA

 

By John Williams—Homeless for more than 10 months

and cared for by the Above

            The wailing of civil defense sirens on that warm June day came as no surprise to the thousands in Minot’s Souris river Valley who had already undergone, days earlier, the orderly evacuation of their homes as a precaution.  But today, there was a difference.  The Souris was rising frighteningly and the homes they were now being asked to flee were in real danger.  This was the real thing.

            I was among those who, until that morning, had arisen with the expectation of having until 6 that evening the last-minute chance to save belongings.  But it was not to be.

            At mid-morning, 8 hours before the previously-announced deadline, the word went out; sirens would soon be sounding and would mean only one thing.  It was time to flee our homes, regardless of whether we’d saved everything or not.

            My motorhome had been packed for the first evacuation, spent at the home of friends on the city’s more rural outskirts.  Now, it was time to lock the house—as if that would protect it from what was to come—and drive again to safety.

            I was in denial.  Not that a flood was impossible, but in my belief it could not invade my home, a west side condo, to a height greater than 3 feet.  Because of that denial, I had protected nothing higher than that level.  I would ultimately return to a home in which the water had risen to within a few inches of the main floor ceiling.

            In the more than 50 years that I had lived in Minot, this would be my third flood experience.  I had moved out of the valley to rented quarters on South Hill a year before the 1969 flood—one considered an historic event at the time, but which would be considered nothing more than a dress rehearsal for what would come in 2011.  As a radio and TV journalist, I covered the 1969 flood extensively.

            In the 2011 flood, little was said of the fight that the city had had to mount in 1976 in the face of rising waters.  I had always felt, at that time, that the railroad line, just a few feet from the condo, would be a sufficient protection.  How wrong I was.  Wiser heads ordered the construction of an earthen levee, at least five feet higher, stretching from near Perkett School, westward past the south side of the tracks and then over them to run parallel to homes along 2^nd Ave SW.  We were allowed into our homes for a brief check of property on Easter Sunday.  I remember the silence of the neighborhood, the almost total absence of any human movement or activity.  After my authorized check, I took the liberty of scaling the dike and was shocked by the reality of what I was seeing.  A lake stretched from the top of the levee, southward to the golf course area and west to where the bypass is.  Water lapped just inches from the top of the dike.  I learned later that a breach in the dike had threatened my condo a day earlier, not with flooding, but with total destruction.

            We survived, thanks to the Corps of Engineers and the work of volunteers.

            But this was 2011—June—and floods don’t happen in June, or so we thought.  A hard winter had been followed by heavy spring rains in portions of the Souris River watershed.  Mother Nature conspired against all along the river, wreaking havoc from southern Saskatchewan to well into Manitoba, its exit point from our state.

FAITH

I had always held the belief that God never gives us more than we can handle; but that belief would be sorely tested in the months ahead as we fled our homes.

            When a friend had phoned at mid-morning on that final day, I felt a sense of panic.  I knew the dikes were already showing signs of weakness to the west of me and had a vision of a wall of water engulfing me before I could move to safety.  And so, with a growing sense of dread, I fled.

            Was my faith sorely tested in the days, weeks and months that followed?  Actually, my faith felt strengthened, in large part by the other three “f’s” in this essay.

            My mind was numb in the early days of evacuation.  I almost felt as if I could well experience, for the first time in my life, a full blown nervous breakdown.  Going to church the first Sunday after flight, my mental misery was eased somewhat by the expressed concerns of my church family.  And, as the days passed, that cloud that had seemingly enveloped me lifted.  Questions that had smothered me: where will I live? how will I be able to rebuild my home? will I have a home to return to?—faded a little, but never completely left my mind.

            Members of my church were my rock of strength.  They prayed for me and other who had been displaced with no knowledge of what awaited them when the waters receded.  More than a dozen households of our small congregation had suffered partial or total loss of their homes; some would never return to them.

            I felt that Christmas would be my first serious test of faith.  I should never have worried.  By then I was in my FEMA trailer and one Sunday afternoon in December, several members of the congregation were at my door bearing a tree and decorations, along with some seasonal snacks.  Within an hour, a beautifully decorated tree was up—something I didn’t think I’d have room for.  Outside, the more athletic of the group had climbed a ladder, stringing lights along my trailer’s roofline.  Some colored lights on the railing outside completed the decorating.  What a lift to my spirits, one that would last long beyond the holiday season.

            Faith:  without it we fall victim to all the fears—most of them unfounded—of our situation.  Homeless we might be, but we would survive, given our faith in better days to come. 

 

FAMILY

           

What would we do without the love and support of family?  I had a friend who was an only child.  He had no brothers or sisters to give him nieces and nephews.  At the time of his passing, his only living relative was an elderly mother, unable to attend his modest funeral. 

            By contrast, I was almost overrun with family, and I say that in the kindest way.  My three siblings gave me a total of nine nieces and nephews, and each of them has given me the benefit of their love, and in large part an even larger gathering of great nieces and nephews.

            From the start,  I knew I had the love and support of all of them as I faced an uncertain future.  We were in constant communication.  In large part, I was able to face that uncertain future thanks to my family.

            In the months during my “homelessness” I visited the two closest branches of my family in Canada.  Being with them seemed to bring about a shedding of all the fears I had about the future.

 

FRIENDS

 

            If “family” was at the heart of my flood survival, my friends weren’t far behind.   While the closest of my family was hundreds of miles away, the proximity of friends was a godsend.  I couldn’t have done without them.

            So far, I’ve not given the names of anyone that helped, but, at this point, I can’t continue without acknowledging the contributions to my well-being by long time friends Perry and Margo Moll.  In no way can I diminish the role played by all my friends, but in Perry and Margo, I had an everyday source of help and emotional support.

           Within minutes of the broadcast announcements that evacuation had been ordered, the Molls’ younger son, Cameron, and his friend, Josh, were at my door to move furniture and other items to upstairs safety.  Days earlier, I’d undergone surgery for a patch of skin cancer on my right shoulder and had been sent home with the admonition that I wasn’t to lift anything heavier than a hot dog for several weeks.

            I couldn’t stand by and not help, so I tackled smaller and lighter items.  It still took a toll as the work led to the popping of several stitches.

            And that’s the way it was in the days that followed, with the Moll family taking care of me through the summer and into the autumn season.  Their contributions to my welfare were numerous.  Perry’s father,  Arnold, and brother, Nathan, appeared one Saturday soon after I and my motorhome were placed on the Moll homestead just south of the city.  They had come to upgrade my electrical service to 30 amp so that the air conditioners could be run in the hotter weather of summer.

            Time and again I was part of their family at gatherings, and supper with Perry and Margo became a welcome routine—one which I’ll probably never be able to repay in kind.

            My friends helped me through a very difficult time and I will always be indebted to all of them.

FEMA

 

            In the late days of my evacuation, I stopped to speak to those manning a flood information booth at our mall, and voiced my appreciation of that FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) had done for me, and was surprised to learn that I was the only one who had expressed that sentiment to them.

            Without FEMA, the long, hard road back would not have been possible.  Early in my evacuation, FEMA put money in my bank account to cover “transitional” costs.  But, the real financial help came during the summer.  A FEMA inspector came to my home with the aim of determining the extent of loss (all of the first floor), and the square footage of the affected area.

            Within a few days, a substantial amount of money was placed in my bank account to assist with the repair and rehabilitation of my home.  A constant question in my mind was, “What would I have done without that help?”

            But they weren’t done with me yet.  Towards fall, and with the valuable help of my “advocate,” Paul Zaharia, who just happened to be a member of my church, I secured the use over the winter of what city residents came to refer to as “FEMA trailers.”  Thousands of them were brought into the city.  Getting into one wasn’t the problem; making sites usable was.  My eventual deployment had me in a previously flooded trailer court, Holiday Village, deep in the valley on Minot’s east side.  I was just thankful to have a roof over my head for the winter.  I expected to stay in my unit until I could return home in late April, or early May.

            FEMA imposed no payment for rent or utilities.  The trailer is small, to be sure, but I have been very comfortable throughout my stay.  It will eventually be towed away to serve someone else facing a natural disaster.

            Because of infrastructure damage or loss, getting secondary services had to wait a while after my siting.  Phone service and cable television, which I, of course, was required to pay for, finally came to Lot 406 at Holiday Village. 

LAST THOUGHTS

            It’s said that “all good things must come to an end,” and so it is, too, with adversity.  My life has seen its share of good times and bad, but I never thought I’d be forced from my home by a natural disaster.  At this writing, nine months after fleeing my threatened home, I’m still dealing with the realization that the worst is in the past, and that I soon can resume a more normal life—thanks in large part to the people and entities named in this essay.

            I know that my neighborhood will never be fully whole, that some have moved away, abandoning their homes, and even moving to other cities.  But as relocated businesses return and homes again are lit in the hours of darkness, I’ll know that  again “all is right with God’s world.”

 

Standing Rock Young Life sends its Advance team to help rebuild in Minot

On March 15th, Deacon Terry Star pulled into the All Saints’ parking lot with two members of the Standing Rock Young Life Club,

who gave up their spring break days to help to insulate the manufactured home of a single grandmother.  We’d all planned for about 8 students, but some ended up having to be in school, and others had changes of plans.  However, after the students who did join Terry on this trip: Christopher (Ferby) Ell and Trent Silk, texted pictures back to their friends about their experience, it looks like the Young Life group is going to make plans to take another trip to Minot and help out again.  I’ll bet it will be a larger group next time.

Jody, the owner of this trailer, had been working hard on her own for months in the evenings, when she was finished with her day job at the bakery of a grocery store.  Last June, there were about 4 feet of water in her home.  She was one of the few people in her trailer court whose home did not have to be totally demolished. Manufactured homes, especially the older ones, are often built with materials and techniques that mean they simply don’t survive flooding.  But Jody figured that the best way to stretch the dollars she had from FEMA and from savings was to try to save her trailer.  She, gutted it, taking it back to the studs, saving what little she could.   Jody and her family and friends helped her to replace and reinforce the sagging sub-flooring.  She was lucky enough to find an electrician who rewired her home for a fair price.  She was able to obtain a furnace.  She had received 40 sheets of sheet rock and some insulation from the organizations that were helping homeowners through giveaways last fall.

Construction coordinator Paul Zaharia helped Jody make sure she had the right kind of insulation, and then he showed Ferby and Trent how to install it and to cover the exterior walls with a vapor barrier before hanging sheet rock.

When the insulation was finished, they even had a chance to start some sheet rocking before they needed to get back home on Saturday afternoon.  You’ll note that Trent’s not in too many of these pictures.  That’s because most often he was the photographer.

 

Paul got the vapor barrier from the Recovery Warehouse.  Mary Barker, the manager of the Recovery Warehouse, said later that this was the first official use of Recovery Warehouse materials.  It may just have been a couple of rolls of vapor barrier, but it was a First to be celebrated, and the beginning of what will be a spring and summer of vigorous materials distribution through HOPE Village for rebuilding Minot’s flooded homes.

Come on back, guys–and bring the rest of the Club.  You’ll be able to show them how to do the things you learned!

 

Visit to Virginia

Last weekend I traveled to Aquia Episcopal Church in Stafford, Virginia to recruit volunteer groups to Minot to help with rebuilding.  The Diocese of Virginia has a Disaster Preparedness and Response Team that is doing excellent work. They invited leaders from all of the churches in this large diocese to learn about how to make their own parishes ready for a disaster in their own communities; and how to plan and execute a disaster response/rebuild mission trip.  They invited representatives from all of the places where Episcopal Relief and Development is supporting long-term recovery after disaster.  And Alison Hare, or ERD was also there.  I was happy to tell our story with a PowerPoint presentation.  I hope it brings us some skilled and willing hands!   I also created a brochure for Rebuild about  Minot that I’m putting up on this blog so that anyone may reproduce it as they consider getting a group together on a rebuild trip.

Many thanks to Dan Wilmoth and Pete Gustin, co-chairs of the Diocese of Virginia Disaster Preparedness and Response team for the warm welcome and the platform.

Flood Victim Tribute

 

To get a sense of the emotional impact of last summer’s flooding on Minot’s flooded residents, click below.  The reporter lost his own home in this flood.

Flood Victim Tribute – KXNet – Bismarck/Minot/Williston/Dickinson.

Hope Village–The Churches working Together to Rebuild

The flood of 2011 was a truly awful event.  But God often brings great good out of terrible tragedy.  One thing I’ve heard people say again and again is: “This flood has helped me remember what is really important.  Things don’t matter; our family, friends, and community are important.”  Or:  “It was a terrible shock to see all the piles of debris outside our house–everything that was left in the house was ruined.  But what a blessing that nobody died in this flood.”

Another great good has been that the churches of Minot have agreed to set aside the  differences that divide us, and pool our labors to bring the best, most effective recovery and rebuild process to our community.  The result is HOPE VILLAGE: an ecumenical community being built on the property of a Missouri Synod Lutheran church, Our Savior, to house and deploy volunteers willing to give their time and skills to rebuild Minot homes.  The Presbyterians will host the Village, which can house a couple of hundred volunteers in sleeping bays that each hold two dozen participants, and provide space for a dozen RV’s and campers; the Methodists will do case management for the citizens who need our services; the Southern Baptists will cook meals for everybody; and the ELCA Lutherans will match volunteers coming in with projects that need workers.

All Saints’ is in a sense a bit player in this exciting venture: we will send willing workers, and we will serve as an overflow site for housing. Some Episcopal groups volunteering may prefer to stay at All Saints’, where you have access to worship and small-group meeting space and can build community by making meals yourselves.  Others may choose to stay at HOPE Village.  I can help you understand the different options if you get in touch with me by cell phone or email: mjp0619@gmail.com

If you are interested in volunteering in Minot, you MUST register with Hope Village.  This ecumenical organization will become the single point of entry for almost all of the rebuild work that will be done on houses in the community.

CHECK OUT HOPE VILLAGE’S WEBSITE here:

If you feel yourself being called to help rebuild in Minot, here are the starting steps.

STEP 1: Figure out when you would like to come–and how many folks are joining your rebuilding team.  Call Mary Johnson, the All Saints’ Coordinator of Volunteers at 770-655-1713 if you have questions.

STEP 2: If you would like to stay at Hope Village, Call the Hope Village Toll Free Number–staffed by Presbyterians in Little Rock!  855-720-9804 

If you would like to stay at All Saints’–(you will need to plan to stay at All Saints’ if you have youth under age 16 in your group), call Hope Village at their local number: 701-833-4676.

STEP 3: Complete the forms that Hope Village needs and mail them to the appropriate address.

STEP 4: Complete the forms that confirm with All Saints’ that you are coming. You can submit these by email.  Then we’ll have ample time to prepare for your coming and even provide you with T-shirts to identify you as a group with Episcopal connections.  Yes, you guessed it: the shirts are Episcopal Purple.

Living through the Rebuild Process

One Saturday in January I visited with my friend and parishioner, Jean Parish.  She agreed to be interviewed and to let me give you a virtual tour of her FEMA trailer and home in order to help you understand how important volunteer workers are to the post-flood rebuilding effort  here in Minot.

Jean is a North Dakota native.  She grew up on a farm near the Canadian border, and moved east to Cleveland during the 2^nd World War.  She lived with her sister, attended business college and worked hard.  After the War, she met and married Rex Parish and by 1964 the couple and their two teenage sons had moved back to North Dakota, to Minot, into the house she continued to live in until the floods last June.

It was the place where she loved to cook and entertain, where the grandchildren came to visit.  She remodeled her kitchen a few years ago, and had recently replaced the carpet.  Like Jean, the house has “good bones.”  It is in a neighborhood of well-kept, modest homes, close to one of Minot’s loveliest parks.  The river meanders nearby, but even in 1969, when low-lying parts of Minot flooded as the Mouse River went above flood stage, the Parish home stayed dry.

So Jean didn’t worry unduly when there was talk of flooding last spring.  But, she said, last summer became “the summer from hell.”  When the first evacuation order came, Jean and her son and some friends moved everything from the basement.  They took what they could load onto a flatbed towed behind a pickup truck, and followed a long line of traffic to storage in a warehouse further west in Ward County. They returned to their home, but a few days later came the second evacuation.

When I asked this wise, intellectually sharp woman about the chronology of those next few days, she admitted that, from seven months out, much of it was just a blur.  The day the river began breaking records and the levees were overtopped, Jean said, the news reporters on TV kept pushing the time of evacuation forward.  Finally the sirens went off and they had to leave.  Jean went to the home of another single woman, a retired teacher.  Jean’s son stayed with some of his friends.  Nobody knew how long they would be gone.  She tried to remember what made it into storage and what she’d had to leave behind.  Her computer came with her. The printer got left behind.  Her filing cabinets were in storage, and she has had many occasions to wish she’d taken more papers with her to Monica’s house.

The next few weeks were frustrating in the extreme.  The water did not recede for almost a month, and she and Monica would drive to the edge of the neighborhood, hoping to be able to see what damage her house had sustained.  But they were turned back by Red Cross workers.  “Well, we decided that if we couldn’t drive, we would just walk.  But they wouldn’t let us go in on foot, either.  They said there was too much debris we could cut ourselves on.  So we just had to wait.”

The days of waiting were accompanied by a different kind of flood.  Paperwork for insurance claims, for FEMA, took time.  There were lines.  Traffic was snarled because an earthen dike had been built across some major roads, and others remained flooded.  Disaster workers and oil workers parked their pickups and their campers among the campers and tents of the folks whose homes had been flooded.

The days stretched into weeks, and the weeks into months as Jean stayed with Monica.  The two wise, intelligent, principled, highly independent women admitted, in November, when Jean moved into a FEMA trailer behind her house, that it was a good thing, because much as they valued each other’s friendship, they were both ready to be on their own again.  In fact, one of them said, “we were about ready to kill each other!”  They both laughed, but there was the teeniest bit of tension in their voices that led me to believe that it had taken all the patience and forbearance each had to make the temporary living arrangement work.

As Jean and I talked over coffee in the FEMA trailer she shares with her son, it was clear that she was cozy and relatively comfortable.  FEMA provides a small sofa, a table and four chairs, a stove, refrigerator, and microwave , two bunks in one bedroom and a double bed in the other.  The floors and walls are neutral laminates. The furnaces managed to keep her warm on the few really cold and windy days we have had this winter. In North Dakota, it was important to have an entry way that served as a transition point between the wind and chill and the main room of the THU (“Temporary Housing Unit,” FEMA’s acronym for these compact manufactured homes).   FEMA has provided clean, efficient housing as well as funds to help with rebuilding.  Another member of All Saints’, also a senior citizen in a FEMA trailer said, “If anybody asks me how I survived the flood, I tell them it was the Four F’s: FAITH, FAMILY, FRIENDS, and FEMA.”

On the table were the plans for Jean’s new kitchen. The water that had stood in Jean’s house for nearly a month had picked up dirt, mud, slime, mold, and any number of toxic chemicals as it made its way out of the channel of the Mouse River and crossed farmland, residential, and industrial sites.  It was seldom possible to save any interior furniture or fixtures.  Jean’s carefully planned remodeled kitchen, just two or three years old, was a total loss.  The new one, she admitted, was a much more plain-vanilla plan than the one it was replacing.  But the design was sensible and pleasing, and the materials were chosen with a good eye for color and texture.  Jean doesn’t think she’ll put in much carpet this time.  She told me it was just too hard to see all that new carpet, wet and muddy, sliced up and carried out to the curb.

We walked into Jean’s house after we’d polished off our second pot of coffee and a couple of doughnuts and muffins—like the ones Jean has each day for the volunteers from Mennonite Disaster Services who had helped her with her rebuilding work.  Members of All Saints’ had helped Jean get her home insulated last fall and started the process of installing sheetrock.  Then other volunteers moved forward with the rebuilding.  The Faith-based Volunteer community has a mission: to help those who can least manage on their own (low income, seniors, chronically ill, single parents, disabled, etc.) to be able to return to homes where essential living space is safe, sanitary, and secure.

Though she is in her 80’s, and has a deck chair set up in her living room so she can watch the work progress, Jean didn’t just sit around since the flood.  She scrubbed the water line off the siding on her house by hand.  (“I’d heard that it wasn’t good for the siding to be pressure washed,” she said.)  She pulled all the carpet tacks out of the subflooring herself.  She was still planning to scrub the basement stairs again to try to get them even cleaner.  She was looking forward to being able to mop up all the drywall dust.   “No, I don’t need help doing that,” she said, when I asked her if she could use volunteer help with that part of the job.

The house was clean inside, and smelled like fresh paint, lumber, and drywall.  The electrician had been there to wire the house before the insulation and sheetrock went up.  He was about to come back to finish his work and make the kitchen ready.

It won’t be long before the house is ready for Jean to move back in.  But she has no plans to do so before spring.  She wants to be sure that there won’t be any more flooding this year.  “I don’t think I could live through being flooded again,” she told me.  “It was just too hard.  I’ll wait until the danger of flooding is over in 2012.”

But the 2011 flood disaster is, in some parts of Ward County, blending into the 2012 flooding.  Some areas of the county are already experiencing flooding and there are some roads that have as much as ten feet of water over them, according to Ward County Emergency Management Director, Amanda Schooling.

The City of Minot is moving as quickly as is practicable to design and carry out a flood mitigation plan.  It will likely involve building some dikes and levees, possibly re-directing some smaller streams, designating some flooding-prone areas for greenspace, buying out and demolishing certain homes in those zones or that are too extensively damaged to be saved. Optimizing the plan and getting approvals is a long process.  Many people are tired of living with the uncertainty.  As soon as the plan is stabilized, there will be a lot of work to be done.  Many people who didn’t know which side of a dike their homes would be on, for example, had simply walked away from them.  There was no use putting labor into a house that might have to be destroyed.  Many of these houses will NOT be in the “mitigation zones.”  Volunteers will be needed to start at the beginning with these homes.  There will be a “cut and muck” process, where everything is emptied from such a house and the house is cleaned and made sanitary.  When it is dried out, the electrical systems must be redone,  and then insulation, sheet-rocking and taping, painting, installation of cabinetry and fixtures and new flooring can take place.

The ecumenical rebuilding partners are working together to make the most of our volunteers’ time and skills, and to pair them with households who can most use our assistance.   Come and make a difference to people like Jean in Minot!