Baptist minister from Carolinas devotes free time to helping Mississippi town

PASS CHRISTIAN, Miss. (ABP) — When Amy Hardee came from North Carolina to “the Pass” (as the locals call it) immediately after Hurricane Katrina, the place was a mess.

A year after Katrina's monstrous storm surge virtually wiped Pass Christian, Miss., off the map, it's still something of a mess. But thanks in part to Hardee, at least it's a far better-organized mess — and one on which that she is working diligently to return to its former glory as a Southern beach town.

“The real problem is that our volunteers are drying up — that people think a year is long enough…to be able to recover. And it's not,” she said in an Aug. 3 interview in a temporary building in Pass Christian's former downtown. “We're just getting the debris picked up. We're just getting to the edge where we're going to start building.”

Hardee has become one of the organizational gurus at a small, temporary building locals have dubbed “The Gray Hut.” It is the decimated town's volunteer coordination center, where residents go to request help gutting a home and volunteer groups visit to find out what should be done to help ongoing recovery.

Sitting in the building, the minister and former Cooperative Baptist Fellowship missions volunteer from Hillsborough, N.C., recalled how she has given virtually all her free time the past year to help a town nearly 800 miles away recover from oblivion.

Less than a month after the hurricane's Aug. 29, 2005, landfall, Hardee — who currently serves as the minister of education at a Presbyterian church — accompanied a truckload of emergency supplies donated by Hillsborough's citizens and destined for Pass Christian (pronounced “Chris-CHAN”). She said she fully intended to return to North Carolina after that.

But what she found compelled her to stay for a while, and then return nine times in the past year, including a stint that began June 1 and lasted through the first week of August.

Pass Christian and the nearby towns of Bay St. Louis, Waveland and Long Beach were ground zero for Katrina's storm surge. The surge broke records for the area — with churning water at heights estimated at 30 feet or more above mean sea level flattening almost everything within a half-mile of the beachfront.

When Hardee arrived, there were still two-story-high piles of debris from beachfront antebellum mansions, historic churches and the shotgun houses of the impoverished. Around town she found several points of distribution for emergency supplies with lots of donated goods, lots of people who needed help, and lots of volunteers. But there was little accompanying coordination that could link residents' needs with outside resources to meet them.

A natural organizer, Hardee decided she had better coordinate the relief efforts. “I went by and asked everybody for their spiral notebook” that various supply-distribution sites had been keeping, she said. They contained the names of residents who needed help and names of volunteers with skills or resources.

Those scattered spiral notebooks have been turned by Hardee and her fellow organizer — Pass resident Mariah Furze — into a computer database. The various points of distribution and volunteer coordination have given way to the Gray Hut, now the nerve center of the town's reconstruction effort. A “tent city” of eager college-age AmeriCorps volunteers is across the street.

Since then, volunteers who have passed through the Gray Hut have managed to finish projects requested by local residents at 114 sites in the Pass. But now, Hardee said, the really hard work begins.

“Now we're reaching the point where all those little jobs are done,” she said — and by “little jobs,” she means everything from lot-clearing to gutting flooded houses. “Now we're trying to figure out how to get plumbers paid for, how to get electricians paid for.”

Hardee said the town desperately needs skilled volunteers. While hundreds of workers from church youth groups and civic organizations have come through this summer, she said, professionals and artisans who can begin reconstruction work in earnest are needed.

“So, the volunteers who came and were greatly appreciated — but we're in need of skilled labor now,” she said.

She also needs a long-term recovery plan and a group to implement it. Now that federal dollars for reconstruction are finally beginning to trickle down, she said, Pass Christian officials and others on the Mississippi Coast need to spend them wisely.

Hardee is working with government and Red Cross officials to get a long-term recovery committee up and running in the Pass. That group can help deal with many other post-Katrina problems she's run across.

For instance, “People hadn't transferred deeds to their houses,” she said. As homes in this tight-knit community have passed down from one generation to the next, many owners haven't been getting the titles transferred to the newest owner's name. This means that someone who owned a destroyed house and lost all their legal papers in the storm surge may not have any proof that they are actually the owners of the property because the deed filed at the Hancock County Courthouse names a long-dead relative as the owner.

There are other issues as well. Nearly a year after the storm, only about 1,500 of the town's pre-Katrina population of about 7,000 have returned, and many of those are still in temporary housing. Only a handful of businesses are operating, and many of those are still in temporary buildings.

Like all communities on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, Pass Christian voters have long faced pressure from the gambling industry to accept the casinos that have helped the economies of nearby Gulfport and Biloxi bounce back.

Pass residents “have chosen, every election, not to let the casinos come in,” Hardee said. “They have chosen every time to stay family-oriented and church-based. But with three-quarters of the population gone, they don't know if they can sway elections any more,” she lamented.

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