Mizzou BSU spends Spring Break doing hurricane relief work
By Brooke Tacker, posted 4/22/06

Spring Break on the coast: soft sand between one’s toes, clear waves crashing onto the shore, and a week spent repairing roofs, cleaning up buildings and houses, and installing insulation. Is that the picture that comes to mind? Not to mine either.

A group of 45 students and leaders from Mizzou’s Baptist Student Union went to Diamondhead, Mississippi over Spring Break to do whatever clean-up and relief work needed from hurricane damage. They left Saturday, March 26 and returned to Columbia on Friday, March 31. The local Baptist church in Diamondhead, besides holding services on Sunday, is continually having groups from around the United States come and do work for the people in the surrounding areas.

The BSU was just one group that has gone down there to help. They did jobs like insulation, putting up sheetrock, building fences, roofing and any other odd jobs needed. One of the first jobs was cleaning out a Texaco station that had not been touched since the hurricanes last summer. All the merchandise was still inside the service station, except for an ATM, which was completely empty.

“The kitchen refrigerator had about 70 pounds of meat from September and this was mixed with about 70 pounds of rats,” Alex Smith said.

During this job, BSU workers packed up all the left over goods and threw them away. They also took out all the electrical appliances and wiring and removed the dry wall insulation.

Another crew worked on building a fence for one of local families that Monday. Whenever they were getting ready to set the last post they realized that they were going to run out of concrete. However, they had no way to get to a hardware store. The owners of the house were unavailable to drive them, and because of insurance liability issues, it was not a good idea for the owners to let the crew drive their vehicle either. Brian Haefele, one of the BSU workers, spotted one of the neighbor’s doing some flowering in her backyard,. He went over and explained the situation and asked her if she could give him a ride to a hardware store. She took him and they were able to get the post set and finished the fence on Wednesday.

“The people seemed to be readily available to help,” Haefele said, and from this scenario it seems true.

Smith also had a story where all they did was move furniture for an older woman and she was so thankful that she gave them cookies, baked them a cake, and handed them a $100 bill when they left. The money went as a donation to continue relief work.

Another man gave the BSU workers two and a half boxes of Meals Ready to Eat (M.R.E’s) that he had received from FEMA about a month after the hurricane.

“They weren’t that bad,” Smith said.

The local people did not seem bitter, but rather just thankful that there were other people, like the BSU crews, who were still coming to help.

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