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VIDOR?Some folks in the thick piney woods of deep Southeast Texas remember a week or two worth of national media attention and a few weeks more of no electricity.
The big media left early. The national relief agencies eventually left, too.
But it might surprise those outside the path of Hurricane Rita that two years after it hit, many of its
victims are still struggling.
When Rita reached the Texas Gulf Coast on Sept. 29, 2005?one month after Katrina hit Mississippi and Louisiana?it swept across the pines, snapping them like matchsticks in places and occasionally uprooting them despite roots sometimes 12 feet deep.
“The sad thing is, there are a number of homes where families are still living with the damage that was done by Rita,” said Gordon Knight, the SBTC’s state coordinator for Southeast Texas Recovery.
“They are falling through the cracks,” Knight said, because the elderly, poor families and single parents often lack adequate insurance coverage as well as a discernable political voice.
That explains the blue tarp that is so visible driving through towns such as Vidor, population 12,000, just east of Beaumont, or Port Arthur, on the coast. Instead of receiving insurance money to fix their homes, many resident make do with scrap lumber and the plastic tarp while giving up hope that someone will help them or waiting for the government or a social service agency to come through.
Knight said he had spoken with a family of six people earlier that week living in two rooms of their home.
Knight started his duties with the SBTC Aug. 1, leaving behind a pastorate at First Baptist Church of Pinewood to rally church groups to come to the Gulf Coast and inland counties to the north to make homes livable for people still suffering from the storm’s damage.
Knight is teamed with Nehemiah’s Vision, a non-profit ministry begun by First Baptist Church of Vidor and some local Christian businessmen in the aftermath of Katrina but which was quickly employed for Rita.
Knight and his wife, Joan, always ones to travel light during their years of ministry, are living in an RV parked near the First Baptist Church gymnasium while he works out of the Nehemiah’s Vision office near the church.
“My wife and I have never had a problem picking up and going when the Lord says go,” said Knight, an East Texas native who understands the culture of the region.
Most of the work Nehemiah’s Vision has done has been in four counties: Jefferson, Hardin, Orange, Jasper and Newton, explained Andy Narramore, executive director of Nehemiah’s Vision.
Nehemiah’s Vision was just organizing when Rita hit, and the ministry has been swamped with work ever since. As of Aug. 29, they had coordinated 404 home rebuilds with volunteer laborers and had 844 homeowners on a waiting list.
The last week in August, a 21-person team from First Baptist Church of Forney had traveled to Vidor to rebuild a home owned by 72-year-old Joyce Burge that was nearly unsalvageable after a large tree split the roof.
In three days working in intermittent rain, the team had the walls framed and was preparing to hang rafters on the 900-square-foot home with the end game for the week to have the roof on. All that was left of the old home was the kitchen.
By the end of October, Knight said Nehemiah’s Vision hopes to have Burge’s house completed. Told that news during a break from her job at Wal-Mart, Burge smiled widely.
“It was terrible,” Burge said of living in two rooms of the home for nearly two years while battling chronic respiratory illness. “Rain coming in through my roof, sheetrock falling down. It’s been horrible.”
Knight said Burge didn’t think Nehemiah’s Vision would assist her when a co-worker suggested she contact them about help.
“I was depressed,” she said. “I was at the point of giving up.”
Knight said he noticed Burge’s countenance change the day she visited the work site and the volunteers from First Baptist Church of Forney were transforming her home. “They are fantastic people,” Burge remarked.
Leticia Corral, a member of First Baptist Church of Sunnyvale and a 23-year Dallas Police Department veteran, was one of three women among the Forney team. She told the TEXAN between cutting sheets of plywood that she took vacation time to make the trip, her 11th with an FBC Forney construction crew.
“The Lord calls us to go out and make disciples of all nations,” Corral said. “Of course, it’s a honor to be his hands and feet and I feel it’s a privilege that he would use me in a small way.”
Sam Bushnell, a retired chemical engineer from Forney, said, “It’s good to see men helping people. I think it’s wonderful. I really retired so I would have time to do this. Since last January, I have worked on four churches and one other home.”
It is volunteers like Bushnell and church groups from Southern Baptist churches like FBC Forney that Knight hopes to rally to help in Southeast Texas, he said.
“We’re the forgotten hurricane,” Knight said, repeating a phrase heard several times among those living in the Vidor area. “It’s all over the radio today that this is the anniversary of Katrina. But nobody remembers Rita.”
Knight said he figures the work will take at least another two years if enough church groups tackle the more than 800 projects on the waiting list.
Also, the federal government has announced it will soon release $210 million for aid in rebuilding?the first such federal disbursement. Soon after the storm the federal government provided $26 million for humanitarian needs?but nothing to assist in rebuilding homes and other structures, Narramore said.
Over two years, Nehemiah’s Vision has helped guide volunteers to lend more than 50,000 volunteer labor hours?valued by the government at $18.25 an hour?and more than $2.5 million in materials, Narramore said.
“If you add it all up,” said Gordon Hightower, Nehemiah’s Vision director of field operations, “we did more than the federal government can do in two years. And we’re doing it out of the depths of our love for Christ and not for any other reason. The people receiving it are grateful, and they’re receptive to the gospel.”
People expect the government to help; they don’t expect average citizens to sacrifice their time and money, which changes their attitudes, Hightower noted.
Terry Wright, pastor of FBC Vidor and one of the principal founders of Nehemiah’s Vision, said God’s faithfulness has been evident amid the continued suffering of some area residents.
“The homes that have been refurbished thus far, it’s been all God and God’s people being obedient,” Wright said.
“We are out-of-sight, out-of-mind kinds of people. I’ve lived in this country all of my life, and I’ve forgotten most every hurricane that has come through. I won’t ever do that again,” he said.
Wright said the businessmen who sit on the Nehemiah’s Vision board “have a passion for what we’re doing and to see this thing out and beyond.”
Speaking of an unchurched brother and sister, barely out of their teens, whose house was damaged by Rita and then repaired by Baptist volunteers, Knight said: “They are going to remember that for a lifetime. And they’re going to remember that it was Christian people who did it.”
“The blessing is greater to the giver than to the one receiving it,” Knight remarked.
For information on how to volunteer in Southeast Texas Recovery, contact Knight at gknight87@hotmail.com or call the Nehemiah’s Vision office at 409-769-1616.
