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Neodesha couple returns to offer help to Gulf Coast

By Melodie Woerman
Editor, The Harvest

Margaret and Emmett Hedges of Ascension, Neodesha, hadn’t planned to make trips to the Gulf Coast a habit, but after one journey earlier this year they knew they had to go back again.

The retired couple visited New Orleans in February to deliver vestments, altar appointments and books they had collected from parishes in the Southeast Convocation.

The needs they saw there sealed their determination to go back. They spent two weeks in the region in October, one in New Orleans and another in Mississippi.

In New Orleans they worked under the auspices of the Diocese of Louisiana’s Office of Disaster Response (ODR), which coordinates volunteer efforts and relief measures for the city still reeling from the ravages of Hurricane Katrina.

They returned to an area they had served earlier — the infamous Lower Ninth Ward, where they staffed ODR tables that distributed necessities to residents.

Margaret said they handed out canned food, paper products, snack bars and bottled water, running out every day by 1 p.m. They served more people than expected, she said, because the neighborhood’s water service had just been restored, and residents were beginning to return.

The Hedges’ took fresh fruit with them from Kansas, and boxes of books, and both items flew off the tables. Margaret bought boxes of laundry detergent and put enough powder for a load or two into zip-lock bags. One day they handed out 80 of them.

“There were hundreds of people coming in,” she said.

She said the needs remain critical in New Orleans. ODR needs volunteers to gut 500 houses in the Lower Ninth Ward alone, a process that keeps houses from being demolished and gives residents options for rebuilding.

In Mississippi the two volunteered at Camp Coast Care, a joint Episcopal-Lutheran ministry in Long Beach. Margaret worked in the kitchen, preparing meals for the other volunteers housed in the gymnasium of the Episcopal school there. Emmett spent time constructing office buildings on the grounds. He was a handy addition to the work crew; he had packed his own sheetrock tape and nails.

They also traveled along the coast, stopping to photograph the church buildings that had been decimated by Katrina’s storm surge.

‘Go, just go’
Margaret said she hoped others would consider making a trip to the Gulf Coast to offer help. “Go, just go,” she said. “You would enjoy it, and it would be a big benefit to everyone who could go.”

The desire to serve runs deep in the Hedges’ family. Their granddaughter, Anna Archibald, is a diocesan youth peer minister and will go on the Gulf Coast mission trip with other youth from the diocese during spring break.