First off, let me thank the folks at Crimson House Ministries as well as Omar & Misty Lara for donating a few boxes’ worth of school supplies. They are going to be put to good use and are much needed at this point in time.
As for me, where do I begin? The reason I went down to Houston in the first place, as you may remember from an earlier posting, is that my friend Mark Hobson — the COGOP state youth director in Texas and a counselor for his local school district — posted a request for help with supplies and manpower. Normally I would send money or something, but I felt the good Lord tell me to go and I did. Thanks to those that in essence went with me, with prayer support.
To be honest, there wasn’t much in the way of manual labor to do this weekend, which was a good thing in the sense that the people who needed help originally ended up getting most of what they needed cleaned up. Most of my time was spent doing smaller tasks to help people get back to normal, ranging from cleaning out moldy refrigerators to simply talking with someone and offering them an encouraging word.
Yesterday after Mark came home from work we went to a couple schools in Seabrook, one of the hardest-hit areas. A counselor there said that over one hundred kids from that school alone were homeless. Just imagine to be a kid and be expected to go to school, and you have nothing but the clothes on your back. I can’t even begin to fathom how traumatic the past two and a half weeks have been for some of these kids.
It’s gotta be tough on the older folks, too. The elderly can barely stand the heat, and in some areas with electricity not due to be restored until November at the earliest, their only recourse is to camp out in their front yards.
Driving through Galveston on Monday was a surreal experience. On the south end of the causeway, boats whipped about by Ike’s surge found their way into either the median of the freeway or hung up on the barriers. Streets were littered with debris and it’s going to take Galveston months to fully recover. The neighboring island, the Bolivar Peninsula, is still off-limits to everyone including residents.
All in all, Houston is the U.S.’s fourth-largest city, and while most of Houston proper was spared enormous damage, a LOT of the city’s residents are still struggling to cope in the aftermath of Ike.
It was a wonderful experience to be able to meet some good people this weekend, help out with what I could, and even see Eagle Eye with Mark. God bless the folks down there and I hope to return and find the place in much better shape, and the people finally healed from the horror they have been through in the past weeks.
Awesome story man. Thanks for sharing it.
No problem-o and it was my privilege to go down there.
Next time I think I have a bad day at work or something, I’ll just think back to the family I saw just sitting in a tent outside their house and waiting for time to pass.
No problem-o and it was my privilege to go down there.
Next time I think I have a bad day at work or something, I'll just think back to the family I saw just sitting in a tent outside their house and waiting for time to pass.