Making a Difference

Transcribed recollections from Violet:

Travis was a regular at Camp Hope. By regular, I mean he stopped in for an evening meal twice a week, usually on weekends. The EC volunteers knew him as a long-time visitor from their Made with Love Cafe and Grill in Arabi, which closed down at the end of May. He moved with them to Camp Hope when they opened at the beginning of June.

It was fairly recently that Travis finally got his FEMA trailer, parked in the front yard of his house. His wife has just returned from Mississippi, with their two elementary school age kids, where they had stayed with her family.

Travis is one of the fortunate ones who had job left to go to after the floods. He works in sales for a heavy equipment company and business has been brisk since Katrina. But he didn’t have a place to live and had to find someplace affordable.

Rents skyrocketed after Katrina. The law of supply and demand. He found a place across Lake Pontchartrain. It wasn’t an ideal situation, but it was a place to live.

His commute suddenly jumped to two hours each way. His house was another hour away on top of that. That left him only weekends to work on his house. He and his wife both felt a sense of crushing hopelessness. How do you rebuild your entire life in four weekends a month? The long string of weekends seemed to stretch out endlessly into the future. Their request for a FEMA trailer was delayed time and time again.

The volunteers offered a place for food and support. He liked stopping in when he was down to work on the house. He liked the people and the chance to talk. The food was great, too. He was able to catch up with local news and talk with neighbors.

He learned about the house gutting services that AmeriCorps and Habitat for Humanity and some of the Emergency Community volunteers were providing. He signed up and then things started happening.

When his turn came, the crews had his house gutted and cleaned out in three days. Three days! Work that would have taken him months of weekends. Once the house was cleaned out, he could begin rebuilding on the weekends. That crushing sense of hopelessness started to lift almost immediately.

Now Travis and his family have a trailer. It came just a couple of weeks ago. He left the lodgings across the lake and is back at his old address. His commute is under an hour once again. He can work on his house every night after work and his family is back with him. Things are moving along quickly now. The money earmarked for rent across the lake is going into the house. He’s putting up the dry wall now.

The day before I left Camp Hope, Travis and his wife stopped in to say hello. He’s not the regular that he used to be, but he laughed and said there wasn’t a classier place to take his bride for a night out on the town.

His wife talked with us while they were there. She said she was grateful for the support that AmeriCorps and the volunteer community have given them. Especially Travis. They were there for him when she couldn’t be. She said that God has been with them through the worst, but the volunteers came right out of God’s own pocket. She leaned across the table and looked at each of us. “I believe that with all my heart. I will never stop thanking God for you people who leave your lives behind to come and encourage and help rebuild the lives of strangers. We will never forget you.”