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| YWAM-NEW ORLEANS RESTORING HOPE: NEARLY FOUR YEARS AFTER HURRICANE KATRINA |
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“You’re not just restoring our homes. You’re restoring our lives.” Over and over again, YWAM New Orleans directors Steve and Bronwen Niles have heard comments like these coming from the New Orleans residents they are helping throughout the city. Using every square inch of their available facilities to house work-teams as often as possible, YWAM has had so many teams come through they literally lost count of the exact numbers. “There is so much hopelessness and despair,” Bronwen says. “Sometimes we just sit and listen to people tell their stories. But it’s a wonderful time to talk to people about the Lord.” Steve tells of meeting a 65-year-old man named Ned, who was standing in line with him at Home Depot. “When I told him we could help him with his house, he started crying right in the store. Nobody else had offered to help him with his house that had received 8 feet of water during Katrina.” The YWAM teams are focusing on gutting houses. Houses that are cited by the city for not being gutted are bulldozed if the gutting is not completed within 30 days. Steve met one elderly woman who returned to the city not even knowing she had been cited, only to discover her home was no longer there. YWAM often guts multiple houses at one time. YWAM’s Pregnancy Counseling Center flooded during Katrina, and will reopen in October 2007, at its new location. During one of their gutting assignments, an YWAM team was able to recover some precious belongings for an 87-year-old woman who relocated to Fort Worth after Katrina. “Our connection with Miss Hattie began when she contacted our YWAM office about our free house-gutting services”, Steve says. During that initial conversation, she said that her house had received 10 feet of water during Katrina. “You are doing a job my daughter and I could not physically do,” she told them. “While our team was doing the dirty job of removing all the moldy furniture and belongings from the house, a teenage girl saw something sparkling in the midst of the rubble on the floor, which we later discovered was Miss Hattie’s diamond engagement ring.” Steve recalls. “The other items found that day included silver dollars dated back to 1880 and complete set of dishes with gold trim.” Steve and Bronwen visited Fort Worth to personally deliver the diamond engagement ring, the silver dollars, and the wedding dishes. While there, they learned that the recovery of each of these items was a specific answer to prayer. “Unknown to us,” they said, “Miss Hattie had been praying that God would help our team find these specific items while they were gutting her home. The silver dollars had a lot of sentimental value to Miss Hattie because they were a gift from a woman she worked for after her husband died. The dishes belonged to her daughter whose husband died suddenly five years ago. The only thing her daughter had wanted from their house was her wedding dishes.” “All of us were in tears, “Bronwen says. “When we left she said, “I will never forget you but I know I’ll see you again.” |
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