Canaan Fellowship

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the United Methodist church organised teams to go down to Biloxi and other areas along the gulf coast. For the last 4 years volunteers from our church have gone to Biloxi MS for a week with the Poughkeepsie United Methodist (PUMC) church to help with the rebuilding effort. The trip has generally been towards the end of May.

The first year, 2006, my sister Martha, and cousin Becky went down to Pass Christian with her Uncle and his United Methodist Church from western NY. Later that year I went down with Team #15 which was led by Paul Mosley from PUMC. Patty Little, Grace Raunick, Tony Hagin, Pauline Huff, Don McNeil, Mike Shields, and Bill Yates from PUMC. Howard Dennis also went with us from Connecticut. On this trip we started the week off with several smaller jobs including adding ridge vents to a recently roofed house, framing work on a gutted house, and some scraping and misc work at another house, before we started working on our main project which was a house where we did some sheet-rocking, and built a porch. While we were down there youth group of 70 people came down. They were really organised so we ended up sharing meals with them. Some of the older youth and I went to the old quarter of New Orleans the night before we left.

In 2007, Team #45 was led by Paul again, Lynn Joslin and Vicki Troise came from PUMC. James Williams, Ezra San Millan, Josiah Patton, and I went from Canaan. Mark Mosley, Paul's brother also came down from NC to join us. We worked on one house that week, gutting the upstairs, and mudding and priming the downstairs. At the end of the week before we left, the whole team minus James (who left early) went to see some of New Orleans.

In 2008, Patty Little led team #70. Josh Little, Dale Borchert, Sherm Lockard, and John Hicks went from PUMC. My sisters Martha and Emily, my cousin Sara Hatch, and Josiah, Eric Schnackenberg and I went from Canaan. We were a big enough team that we were split into two groups, one group working on a porch, and the other team working on a brand new house that just had the pylons in the ground. At the end of the week the first group had finished the porch, and the second had framed most of the exterior walls. John (the owner of the first groups house), invited the whole team to his house warming party, as they were moving back into their house that weekend. It was really great, and they had Jambalaya!

This year Patty again led the team, #93. Martha, Emily, Josiah, Eric, James and I came from Canaan. Anne Polivka a friend of Patty's came from the DC area and Al Alo joined us from another Methodist church in the Kingston area. This year we worked on two main sites, one painting the exterior of a house, and the other working on the trim of another house. We also did a little work on a third house helping prepare trim, and building a walk up to the house. Before we left, we took some pictures of the houses we had worked on previous years.

The following is a video I put together for the PUMC missions night. It summarises the work each team did and while the area down there looks much better than it did the first year, there are still many homes that need work.

Carl Hempel