View From The Basement

Back from New Orleans

I'm back from our relief trip to New Orleans. The pic to the left is of the street made fanous by Tennessee Williams in his play A Street Car Named Desire. Anyway now the effects of jet lag are fading I'll try and post more about the trip early next week.

New Orleans Mission

It's nearly a year since Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans and the surrounding area bringing with it devastation and death. On September 4th 2006 Aaron Broussard, Jefferson Parish President, said "we have been abandoned by our own country. Hurricane Katrina will go down in history as one of the worst storms ever to hot an American coast. But the aftermath of hurricane Katrina will go down as one of the worst abandonments of Americans on American soil ever in US history ...it's not just Katrina that caused all these deaths in New Orleans here. Bureaucracy has committed murder here in the greater New Orleans are".

A week on Wednesday, i.e. 14th June, a team of eight of us from the youth work here at QP will fly out to New Orleans to get involved with the on-going relief work. We will spend two weeks at The Good News Camp getting involved with the different projects they have running.

This Camp is located in Metairie which is part of Jefferson Parish, which is why in part I included the quote from Broussard. What strikes me about the response to Katrina and the people of New Orleans in particular is that it's been like a modern day story of the "Good Samaritan" (Luke 10:25 - 37). There have been many, many good Samaritan's and the fact that places like Camp Good New exist are testament to this. Yet as Broussard says there has also been failures. I have been surprised at the number of people here in the UK to whom I've spoken whose attitude has been one of "America is a rich country they can care for their own". On one level this is of course true, America is a very rich country, but that does not mean she does not need "out-side" help.

So next Wednesday eight would be Scottish good Samaritan's will head off to New Orleans to spread a bit of God's love and clean up and fix some houses in the process. Thanks goes to the generosity of the people of QP who have given significantly to help make this happen and to the venerable Mr Si Johnston who put me in contact with the people who have put me in contact with Camp Good News.