Working to Rebuild the Gulf
Here’s some stories about the continuing efforts to rebuild America’s Gulf coast.
ZDNet
As veterans of Burning Man, the annual art festival held in a remote Nevada desert, Tom Price and a group of about 20 others who have been volunteering with post-Hurricane Katrina reconstruction in Mississippi are used to persevering in forbidding environments.
But when members of the group wanted to stay in touch with friends and family, and needed to keep up with the contract jobs that allow them to spend weeks and months on the Gulf Coast, the nearly complete lack of Internet access posed a problem.
Now the group, known as Burners Without Borders, is using new Kyocera mobile hot-spot technology to create a wide-area-network in an area with little, if any, Internet access. Their shoestring network, based on $250 routers and $150 wireless cards, could prove to be a model for other volunteer groups in disaster areas.
“People are trying to work virtually, so they can stay down here,” said Price, a journalist and former Washington lobbyist who has been in Mississippi on and off for months since Katrina hit. “We have Web designers and database managers and writers attempting to be in two places at once. Before we got wired up, that meant driving (20 minutes) into town and parking outside a Best Western that had Wi-Fi and trying to jam out a few e-mail messages.”
PR Newswire
Some Lutheran college students are planning to spend spring break this year in the U.S. Gulf Coast mucking out homes, tearing down drywall and bleaching moldy walls in an effort to rebuild homes damaged during the 2005 hurricane season. “What a Relief!” is an opportunity for students and others in campus communities to get involved in disaster relief work.
“I see it as an amazing experience to be a part of something that is so much bigger than me,” said Patrick Jenkins, a senior at Northern Illinois University, Dekalb, and member of Trinity Lutheran Church, Canton, Ill. Jenkins said he hopes the experience will “impact my life and faith, as well as the people I meet and work alongside.”
For Nicole R. Rigby, a junior at Carthage College, Kenosha, Wis., participating in What a Relief! allows her another chance to participate in Hurricane Katrina relief operations. Carthage is a college of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA).
“Over Christmas break I volunteered in Mississippi, along with my dad and sister,” said Rigby. That experience and “seeing the needs of people there has (remained) in my heart,” she said.
Representing 55 U.S. colleges and universities, about 1,100 students will participate in What a Relief! Coordinated in part by Lutheran Disaster Response, 16 of the ELCA’s 28 college and universities are participating in the program. Lutheran Disaster Response, based here, is a ministry of the ELCA and Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod.
“We need volunteers for months and years to come,” said Heather L. Feltman, director for Lutheran Disaster Response and ELCA Domestic Disaster Response.
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