“Chirens, Chirens” It’s 7:10 in the morning and Water One is being awoken by Brother Jon, one of the site supervisors, walking toward our sleeping quarters loudly reminding us that we have to be ready for work at 8. To help this fact sink in he has turned on the lights 20 minutes too early (the unspoken rule on the team being the lights come on at 7:30 whether or not you’re up.) Don’t get me wrong Brother Jon was an interesting person to work with even making us laugh once and a while but not at 7:10 in the morning. We were in Corinth, MS to respond to a natural disaster caused by flash flooding, working with The Assembly of God Disaster Relief Team. When I think of disaster response, I think of sheltering and being able to use our training from CTI but alas that was not the case. For us, responding meant mucking and gutting houses. We were living in the FEMA head quarters located in the conference rooms of The Crossroads Arena. We were given the back section of head quarters which was then divided up into a sleeping area and a common space complete with a TV and cable. Our sleeping area was then divided up into guys and gals to give the illusion of privacy but how much privacy can thin blue curtain dividers really provide? It was here that we were greeted every morning by the FEMA staff and Brother Jon.
So now that the entire team and the neighboring houses are awake some of the team stumbles into the make shift kitchen to scrounge up some breakfast. Ok maybe scrounge is not the right word because there is no lack of food here. The kitchen was stocked with snacks galore, the kind of snacks that you consumed as a kid but try not to eat now. There were chips of every kind, pudding cups, little Debbie snacks, every kind of soda, and for the people trying to be healthy peanut butter, lots and lots of peanut butter. If on that rare occasion you can’t find what you are looking for our host would gladly get it for you. Breakfast was the one meal of the day on a daily bases where we had to make our own food. The rest of the meals were provided for. The day we arrived we were told that the Episcopalian Church would be making dinner for us. Thinking that this was a welcome to Corinth dinner we were just glad that we didn’t have to cook the first night there in a kitchen that didn’t even have a stove just a two burner hot plate. Little did we know that this would be a recurring thing for dinner and lunch.
As you might our team is very dietary challenged with 3 vegetarians, 1 vegan, 1 who is gluten free, 1 who doesn’t eat red meat and pork, and 1 who doesn’t eat pork . All of this makes cooking as a team difficult but even harder when people who are not used to cooking this way are told of our challenges. Over all the churches were very accommodating of our dietary needs. There were those occasional dinners were some us were only able to eat salad because everything we were served had meat in it including the veggies. I have never seen so much meat served in one meal before. Meat and desert were guarantees for almost every meal. Desert was served with every meal without fail and most of the time it was homemade. The pounds we burned working all day we gained back through the food but mostly the desert. Who can resist a homemade chocolate cake or hot brownies?
By eight o’clock the team was in the van ready to go to work, not knowing where we would be going. Most days we would just follow Brother Jon and Wade in their truck to the house or houses we would be working at for the day. This made for numerous hours of driving a day. Some days it felt like we spent more time in the car driving around then we did working. The one advantage to doing so much driving is that we were able to get to know the area fairly well. One of the areas we worked at the most was the housing projects of Corinth. Before leaving campus the entire team was fitted with respirators and given three pairs of coveralls each, all of this was for the mold and foul smell we would encounter. This is not all they are good for; they also act as your own personal sauna to help you lose pounds by sweating them off. The only difference between the two is that in a real sauna the sweat dissipates or falls to floor were as in the masks it pools in the bottom and the sides, causing puddles to drip out when you take it off.
Our PPEs came in handy when working in the apartments of the housing projects because some of them had not been cleaned out much when we got there. This meant that they still had moldy food on the counter, while others still had wet and molding clothing in the closest. Along with removing all the furniture and other personal items we also used crowbars and hammers to take out the bottom cabinets, baseboards, and doors. When this was all removed the apartments where sprayed with bleach to kill the mold. It took the team three and half days with the help of a church group for a day to gut twenty apartments. We also worked on individual homes doing roughly the same thing but we would also cut out the wall four feet from the floor and remove the floor in some cases if it was too damaged. In total we gutted about 10 houses. Mucking houses might sound like easy work right pulling out baseboards sounds easy but not so much when you add temperatures in the upper 90’s, respirators, and coveralls. All of this combined made for slow, hot and dirty work.
Over all I think the team enjoyed working in Corinth, MS if nothing else it will make for a few great stories down the road.
