Baptists’ post-Katrina efforts in Louisiana still under way

Updated: 3/02/07

Baptists’ post-Katrina efforts
in Louisiana still under way

By Carla Wynn

Cooperative Baptist Fellowship

LACOMBE, La. (ABP)—It’s been a long road for the home of Loretta and Samuel Ducre of Lacombe, La.

Their original home is gone—destroyed in August 2005 when Hurricane Katrina mauled the Gulf Coast. And its replacement, built and furnished by volunteers, has been on its way for nearly a year.

It started in Kelowna, British Columbia, where Trinity Baptist Church members constructed a modular home in the church parking lot, furnished it, packed it and sent it on its way to Lacombe. The town near New Orleans is a small African-American community, where the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship also still is building and restoring homes for Katrina’s victims.

The two parts of the modular home got as far as Kansas before another natural disaster—a tornado—destroyed half the home April 30, 2006.

“Something beautiful will emerge from the disappointment,” Reid Doster, disaster response coordinator for CBF of Louisiana, said last May.

And now, after delays caused by weather and government red tape, signs of progress are apparent. The surviving half of the home has been raised seven feet off the Ducres’ property, most likely alleviating future flood threats. A blitz build is scheduled soon to finish construction on the other half of the home, with help from CBF partner churches and volunteers from the Rotary Club of Little Rock, Ark.

The Arkansas club has partnered with CBF of Louisiana to do hurricane relief in Lacombe. University Baptist Church in Baton Rouge also is donating $7,000 toward furnishings for the new half of the home.

Meanwhile, in New Orleans, nearly 270 CBF volunteers renovated five churches and four pastors’ houses. Since the Fellowship’s six-month project in New Orleans concluded Dec. 31, volunteers are needed for restoration efforts in Lacombe and nearby Slidell, La. More than 200 volunteers are scheduled to come this year.

“We are now shifting our focus back to the northern shore of Lake Pontchartrain, especially in Slidell, where floodwaters ran thousands out of their homes,” Doster said.

“CBF will continue our ministry here so long as we have volunteers willing to let God use them to ease human suffering. As with CBF’s continued efforts in post-tsunami Southeast Asia, the work goes on right here in post-Katrina Southeast Louisiana.”

CBF partner congregation Bridgewater Church in Mandeville, La., helped a Slidell school, where many students and teachers lost everything to Katrina. Bridgewater and churches in Vermont and Florida filled 300 shoeboxes with personal items and distributed them in early January to students and faculty at Abney Elementary School.

Bridgewater also networked with an advertising agency in California to provide items on the school’s “Top 10 Wish List.” Monte Vista Baptist Church in Maryville, Tenn., donated 100 third-grade grammar books to the school, and a Bridgewater church member donated art supplies and has volunteered to teach watercolor painting at the school.