CHALMETTE, La. — A full recovery is still a long way off, but the Rev. John Dee Jeffries believes nothing can be accomplished without first having a vision.
It's how blueprints emerged to renovate the First Baptist Church of Chalmette, La., after Hurricane Katrina destroyed it. It was in the back of relief workers' minds as they installed drywall and hammered nails.
And, as Jeffries told his parishioners at a prayer service last week — the first held at the church's former site since Katrina — it's how he knows the building one day will be full of people, just like before.
"People say, 'Well, how do you know that?'" Jeffries told the roughly 20 people in attendance. "Vision. That's what keeps you going."
Two years after Hurricane Katrina raged through the Gulf Coast, including New Orleans and its suburbs, the people who call the region home still sift through the wreckage. Those residents who choose to rebuild do so with the staunch belief that southeast Louisiana will recover to be even better than it was when the storm found it.
It just has to. They won't accept anything less.
Jeffries, soft-spoken and articulate, envisions the First Baptist Church bringing his congregation back together — they had attended services first in Baton Rouge and then at Chalmette High School — and uplifting an entire community.
"We lost more than a church. We lost the people," he said. "There's a large, large group of people who are still displaced and want to come back."
But before any vision can become reality, it takes a lot of work.
Last year alone, 2,500 volunteers from 235 church or school groups in 31 states worked on the First Baptist Church, administrative assistant Carol Saling said. Volunteers have been from a range of denominations.
About 160 students, parents and staff members from Traverse City Christian School spent the past week helping to rebuild the Chalmette church, as well as assisting with reconstruction efforts at several New Orleans homes. First Baptist members said the group was among the largest to have volunteered there.
"These folks will never know how grateful I am and this congregation is. How do you say thank you?" Jeffries said. "Some of them don't think they've done anything. Many people have done work that will be invisible to the naked eye, but it will be visible to God."
Gaining perspective
Student workers say they gained just as much from the experience as the people they helped. Many kept homeowners and parishioners in their thoughts as they worked throughout the week.
It helped them remember why they were there.
"She's going to have a house," Laura Snyder, 17, said about the owner of a New Orleans home she helped drywall. "She'll be able to be warm because we put in insulation."
Laura, a junior, is a new student at Traverse City Christian. She moved to Michigan from Florida after the holiday break.
It is her first trip to New Orleans. But it isn't her first experience with hurricane relief.
She grew up in Stuart, Fla., north of West Palm Beach. Her father was a police officer, so she stayed at the station during hurricanes. Her family lost the roof and two rooms of their house to Jeanne in 2004, she said, and a tarp covered their home during Wilma in 2005.
But it was nothing like what Katrina survivors experienced.
"It's been really neat to see how strong the people are," Laura said. "A lot of the joy is gone, but they're still happy and friendly."
That optimism comes from believing in the future, Jeffries said. Without faith, there's nothing left.
He knows the church someday will be bigger than it was, even if it takes a dozen years to get there.
Jeffries had never evacuated before Katrina. It wasn't until President Bush made a televised announcement urging residents to leave, he said, that he began to take the impending storm seriously. He stayed near Baton Rouge.
"We thought, like most people, we were going to be gone for three days," he said. "It ended up being almost three years."
His two-story home in Chalmette took on 20 feet of water after the storm. But volunteers were able to save it, and Jeffries returned for good two weeks before Christmas 2007.
"The backdrop of your life truly goes asunder," he said. "It's difficult for people to understand that. It's losing, in this sense, the context of your whole life."
Making a difference
The church only flooded with about 3 feet of water, significantly less than Jeffries' home, but the roof of its adjacent education building blew off, leaving the structure susceptible to rain and wind damage.
The building couldn't be saved.
"We had water from top to bottom, and they said it would cost more to bring it up to code than it would to build a new building," Jeffries said.
The new education building will be attached to the main church, Saling said. That's where most of the Traverse City volunteers worked.
Adding the new building makes the church appear deceptively large, Jeffries said. In truth, the new complex will be smaller in many respects than it used to be, with fewer classrooms and seats in the sanctuary, as well as less square footage.
The structure isn't the only thing that's smaller after Katrina.
The congregation dropped from at least 150 members to about 40 now, Saling said. And Jeffries said the church lost three members in the storm, including a 42-year-old woman named Denise who had decided to tough it out with family members.
None of them made it.
"It makes you feel more grateful for all the stuff you have now, even when you're complaining," sophomore Kimberly Gilbert, 16, said of hearing residents' storm stories. "I kind of wish we were staying longer."
She met at least one resident while working on houses in New Orleans, and she shared stories with the woman while sitting outside on her backyard deck.
"Sometimes I'll be talking to my family and say, 'I wish we had this better,'" Kimberly said. "But I have it a lot better."
Now they're making it better for other people.
And, the students say, that's the most gratifying part of the whole trip.
"The hardest thing would be to start over — your house, and your job, and you don't know if your job will still be there," said Katie VanVreede, 15, a freshman. "It took this long, and they still need help. It's too bad we're only down here for a week."
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