Category: Homelessness

REBUILDING PEARLAND: A Day in the Life of a Samaritan’s Purse Volunteer

REBUILDING PEARLAND: A Day in the Life of a Samaritan’s Purse Volunteer

$125 Billion dollars. It’s hard to wrap your head around that number, especially when the city you are in seems to be functioning normally. But that’s the what Hurricane Harvey cost Houston, Texas when it dumped sixty-plus inches of rain on the utterly flat city over four days in August of 2017. That ties it with Hurricane Katrina as the costliest tropical cyclone on record.

Houston metro has about 6.6 million residents and Harvey damaged roughly 204,000 homes, seventy-five percent of which were outside of the 100-year flood plain.[1] Most were not covered by flood insurance. Only when you drive through the neighborhoods and see some new looking houses next to obvious rebuild sites with FEMA trailers in the driveways, others with swollen siding and water stains half way up the walls, and empty lots with camper trailers, do you begin to comprehend the scope of the damage. It’s everywhere.

That’s why Samaritan’s Purse has made a two-year, twenty-five-million-dollar commitment to the Houston area: to help homeowners rebuild. Our team of thirteen joined eleven others from Idaho, Oregon, Texas, and Georgia at SP’s Pearland, Texas base. From there we split up into four teams and traveled from ten to twenty miles to help rebuild flood-damaged homes. The base can host a total of about thirty volunteers per week and SP schedules crews at least two months out. Another indicator of the size of the disaster: SP has a similar base in Rockport, Texas three hours west of Pearland.

The day begins with lights on at 6:30 AM. Pack your lunch in the kitchen between 6:45 and 7:00, followed by a big breakfast—the food was great!— and devotions at 7:30 usually led by one of the volunteers. Crew assignments are issued at 8:00 and teams work together to load up the specially equipped construction trailers with supplies. The trailers, essentially customized fifth-wheel horse haulers, were a marvel of efficiency. SP engineers designed them one winter when work was slow and each one has a slot or shelf equipped with every tool a builder would need.

By 9:00 AM crews are on site and ready—after a brief prayer—to work. Local building codes do not allow unlicensed workers to do the technical stuff like plumbing and electrical installation, but there is plenty to do. Our crews painted, installed soffit and siding, did light carpentry, and installed flooring. SP has already helped rebuild over forty homes and helped other agencies pay for over 500 in Houston. Permitting has proved difficult with the city, but they expect to be building many new homes in the future.

Crews work until 4:00 PM before beginning clean-up and loading to head back to base. Meeting the homeowners is the highlight for most of the crews. Ours had prayer with Mrs. Williams each day before leaving. Watching the smile grow on her face as fresh paint brightened up her walls and the new flooring went down was a highlight of our trip.

Then it’s back to base for showers, supper—did I mention the food was great?—and sharing time which concludes by 7:00 PM. Crews entertain themselves (ours played a lot of Rook) till quiet time at 9:00 PM and lights out at 10:00.

If you’d like to volunteer, visit https://www.samaritanspurse.org/ and click “get involved” at the top of the page.

[1] https://www.thebalance.com/hurricane-harvey-facts-damage-costs-4150087

OUTGROWING POVERTY

My heart went out to the young man on the phone and the woman who had taken him in. He had fallen in love with her at work and needed a place to stay and, well, one thing led to another. He had only been out of prison for a few months, still trying to get back on his feet, and his original housing arrangement hadn’t worked out. Her power was about to be cutoff on this damp, cold night.

I had helped in enough of these situations to know that a few bucks weren’t going to keep the heat on, and it was too late in the day to involve the church or other agencies, so I went to the ATM, pulled out $350, and handed it to her in Wal-Mart so she could get the money order and pay her bill.

That’s what Christians are supposed to do right, help the poor? Then why did I feel robbed when she unceremoniously kicked him out before the next billing cycle? Well, frankly, because I had been. I was a voluntary victim of my own hyperactive empathy, unbiblical anthropology, and upside-down economic theory. The only reason I’m sharing this is so that you won’t think me a cold-hearted capitalist if you keep reading.

Nobody likes poverty. No one enjoys seeing other people suffer with only thin blankets between them and a frigid night. Everyone with a conscience informed by Jesus’s Good Samaritan wants to, and should, help in an emergency. But the only way to help people get out, and stay out, of chronic poverty is to help them outgrow it. That’s a lot harder than pulling a few hundred bucks out of an ATM on a cold November night.

Prevailing models of aid view economic resources as limited. There are the haves and the have-nots, and the only way to help the have-nots is for the haves to hand it over. That’s called wealth redistribution, which is completely different from wealth creation. If we’re going to help people get out and stay out of chronic poverty, we need to believe in the expandable economic pie. World Magazine’s Joel Belz reminds us of this in his tribute to American Catholic philosopher (and lifelong Democrat) Michael Novak, who died last month.[1]

Novak often referenced eighteenth-century economist Adam Smith, saying, “The really unusual insight of Adam Smith is in effect a theological insight—that the world is not a finished system. If it were finished, then the urgent need would be for a distributive system. But God made the world differently, with the potential for constantly creating new wealth.” Finding the causes of poverty is not difficult, but we need to find ways to help the poor create wealth.

The first way to help people outgrow poverty is to help them believe that God has given them the power to create wealth, to provide for themselves. Doing this restores their dignity as creatures made in his image who have power, some ability to determine their own destiny.

Another Novak quote corrects the unbiblical anthropology undermining our attitudes toward the poor as well as our ideas about helping them: “Socialism is a system for saints. Democratic capitalism works because it’s a system for sinners.” If we’re going to help each other, we have to be truthful about human nature–that we are prone to oppression and greed, as well as fraud, and indolence. Socialism is brilliant, if we can count on rich and poor alike to ignore economic incentives, but we cannot.

Pure, unregulated, free-market capitalism will almost always favor the strong over the weak, or uninformed. That’s why we needed, for example, some of the credit agency and loan industry reforms passed by the last administration, the “democratic” in Novak’s capitalism.

But the “sinners” part of the equation covers the poor as well as the rich. Behavior that gets rewarded gets repeated. Many single young women now see having babies in order to collect more government assistance as a de facto career path. Marrying the father is out of the question because he would be expected to provide for his own, thus reducing the monthly stipend. The result is that more children are born to more unwed mothers. Perverse economic incentives reap a cycle of increasing dependence as well as the social pathologies that arise from families without fathers.

The biblical view of human nature takes these things into account. That’s why in the Bible, help for the poor recognizes the difference between a crisis and a chronic need. Ongoing, versus emergency assistance, was always predicated on the idea that the receiver performed some kind of work (Deut. 24:17-22).

The bedraggled man at the end of the off-ramp held a crude sign: “I have a wife and child and another on the way. Will work today.” Reliable reporting tells us that these guys often pull in hundreds of untaxed dollars a day. Even so, avoiding his pleading gaze as he made his way along the line of cars was almost more than I could take. Everything in me wanted to pull out a twenty and hand it over. But he kept a respectful distance and I, feeling like an absolute shmuck, kept my wallet in my pocket.

Perhaps the hardest part of helping people outgrow poverty is overcoming our hyperactive empathy. And I don’t believe that God will ever judge us for handing a few bucks to a beggar. But I am utterly convinced that he will ask us one day, “Why did you, in the most prosperous economic system ever developed by man, allow poverty to perpetuate itself, when you knew how to help people outgrow it?”

[1] https://world.wng.org/2017/03/system_for_sinners

TO MAKE A GROWN MAN CRY

Bob Hughes stood on the porch on a sunlit November Saturday morning, looking out over the gathering of about fifty people who had come to celebrate, and choked up as he tried to finish the ceremony. The longtime director, and sole (part-time) employee of Tri-River Habitat for Humanity was reading off the names and organizations that helped build Tri-River’s fifteenth home in twenty years.

It wasn’t the names that brought the tears, just the gratitude. Bob knows better than most what a struggle, what a team effort it takes, and how many hurdles have to be crossed every time our small local chapter of this global ministry cuts the ribbon and hands over the keys to another harassed family. Permits, weather, coordinating volunteers, smoothing over misunderstandings, securing materials donations, following up endless details, and making sure that everyone gets properly recognized in the end is a process programmed to stretch the patience of Job. And though he will no doubt deflect this praise, Ole Bob, as he often calls himself, is better at it than most.

Bob’s aw-shucks, self-deprecating style and twinkle-eyed grin, combined with his white goatee, and somewhat Santa-Clause shape, make him easy to like. But underneath that cheerful, ever-encouraging demeanor is a truckload of smarts and quiet determination. The only thing Bob loves more than fishing the Outer Banks is seeing the words of Jesus fulfilled: “When you’ve done it unto the least of these, you’ve done it unto me.”  When it all comes together and a family of six can move in before Thanksgiving, well, that’s better than the icing on the celebratory sheet-cake. It’s enough to make a grown man cry.

I served with Bob and a half-dozen others of Halifax’s finest in his first few years with Habitat. We are blessed to have citizens like him and all the others who serve the boards of our volunteer organizations. As we enter the Thanksgiving season, let’s take a few moments not only to give thanks for their leadership, but to consider how we might follow in their footsteps.