Mission Trip for Hurricane Relief
January 2006

Mission Trip Presentation
Sunday, March 12, 2006 at 8:00am & 10:30am

     In January 2006, Christ Church organized a mission trip through the United Church of Christ to provide relief aid from those whose homes were damaged from the 2004 and 2005 hurricane seasons.

     The first home we worked on belonged to Betty.  She is a woman who is in her 80s, she is blind in one eye and going blind in the other.  She doesn't leave her home and relies on a walker.  Unfortunately, some fly-by-night shady contractors took advantage of her following the hurricane.  They charged her for work that they either did not do at all or did very poorly.
     We completely redid the eaves on her house in a way that will resist high winds, patched her roof, dry-walled a ceiling and painted that room, replaced the screening and fixed the door of her enclosed porch, repaired the gate to her backyard, and cleaned.

     At another home we helped a woman, Gail, box up salvageable belongings.  Unfortunately, we needed to throw many of her belongings away, 16 bags of items, because of water and mold damage.  The mold in her home is severe and cannot be worked on without specialized equipment.  Unfortunately, the most cost-effective course of action will be to sell it to someone who can afford to level it and begin building again.  She lived her home for 15 years, and a new development was built with insufficient drainage resulting in water flowing onto her property.  The city and county disagree with one another about the problem, and so nothing is being done.  She had no shingle or similar damage, so the insurance company is considering it flood damage and not hurricane damage, which means they are not paying her a single cent.

     We finished the week at Walter and Louise's home.  Their chimney was unused, damaged in the storms, and resulting in a leaking roof.  We removed the chimney and repaired that part of the roof and another section of roof.  There was a room that suffered great storm and water damage.  In that room we replaced the ceiling, hung modeling, painted, replaced the floor, cleaned, and repaired window screens.
     We used an RV to travel to Florida, and while working on Walter and Louise's house we were asked by a number of neighbors if we were from the TV show "Extreme Makeover," and many people drove up and down the street to see what was going on and stopped by to ask, which gave us the opportunity to share that we were there through the United Church of Christ because of our Christian faith and God's love for these people.

     Seven of us traveled to Daytona Beach, Florida to work for a week on these three homes.  Four of us were from Christ Church UCC, two were from Calvary Lutheran in Laureldale, and one from St. John-Hill UCC in Boyertown.  While there we stayed in the vacant parsonage of a Korean Baptist Church, and teamed up with two other UCC mission groups, one from Sojourners UCC in Charlottesville, Virginia and another from First Congregational UCC in New London, Connecticut.