HELPING OTHERS — PEF retiree Phil Bonner and AFT member Rindy Walton,
right, carry a bookcase for a temporary library.
Retiree finds it’s never too late to repay the kindness of strangers
By SHERRY HALBROOK
When Phil Bonner was 16, his family’s home in Natural Bridge burned down.
“People just started coming out of the woodwork to help us. They donated food and clothing and even a place to live,” Bonner said.
Decades later, the PEF retiree has not forgotten the unexpected kindness of those strangers and how much it meant to him and his family.
“Ever since then, I’ve had a soft spot for people in that kind of situation. When I hear about something like that, I usually call up and make a donation. But I’ve always wanted to roll up my sleeves and do more,” Bonner said.
Less than a month after Bonner retired from his job at the West Seneca Developmental Disabilities Services Office, he got his chance to do just that. And on November 19, a Saturday, he joined 27 other volunteers from the Genesee, Keystone, Susquehanna Conference of the Free Methodist Church and headed south to hurricane-ravaged Gulfport, Miss.
It was a two-day drive each way, with everyone packed into five vehicles — one pulling a big trailer filled with their baggage. But it was the five days and nights they spent in Gulfport that mattered.
The city of nearly 72,000 people was hit very hard when Hurricane Katrina — possibly the most powerful and certainly the most destructive hurricane ever to hit the U.S. — came ashore near there on August 29.
“It was nearly three months later when we went down,” Bonner said, “but the devastation was still massive. I’d say about 60 percent of the houses that are still standing have big blue tarps for roofs. Many buildings are totally gone. There’s nothing left but the concrete slabs where they used to be. A lot of groups are diving into this, but there’s still another three years of work to do.”
During their time in Gulfport, Bonner’s group stayed with hundreds of other volunteers from throughout the country in a temporarily converted warehouse for the Naval Construction Battalion 1, the “Seabees.”
At right, is a Gulfport, Miss. family whose home was
restored by volunteers.
“It was wall-to-wall cots in there. We estimated about 2,700. About half of them were in use,” Bonner said. “They fed us really well. And they had changing rooms and showers, but the showers were always jammed by 6:30 p.m., so we tried to get back by 6.”
Their work days began at 8 a.m. and Bonner said their time was spent on a variety of tasks helping to get three homes, a public library, a school Head Start program and a Catholic Church in nearby Biloxi up and running again.
Bonner cleaned debris from water soaked areas where even the walls and wood framing had to be replaced. He sanded and primed drywall for painting, and he cut lumber for bookshelves to hold donated books in the double-wide modular home that’s replacing Gulfport’s library.
The work was hard, small biting or stinging insects were pesky and the days felt long, but the weather was in the 70s, Bonner said, so it wasn’t too bad.
The hardest part, he said, was seeing how terribly the community had suffered and was still suffering. The best part was seeing the response of people they helped.
“There was a house we finished painting that belonged to an African American couple in their seventies. They were so happy, they were crying. If we had put up the drywall sideways, they wouldn’t have complained. They were that grateful for our help.
“We had been warned we might find dead bodies or body parts,” Bonner said. “The worst thing we actually came across was the body of a dog that drowned when the owner had to evacuate and couldn’t take it along. It had been chained up, and the water got deeper than the chain was long, I guess. Some members of our group had to bury it and that was pretty sad.
“One of the people in our group is a clinical psychologist, and she went door-to-door asking people if they wanted to talk about their experiences. Some of their stories were terrible. The word had got out that the WalMart building would be a safe shelter during the storm, but it wasn’t. The people who went there didn’t make it.
“While you’re there working, you’re so busy you don’t think about it. But It took me a long time after I got home, to get my smile back,” Bonner said.
But he also said, “It was great. I want to go back again as soon as I can and I want my wife to come too.”
The
Communicator February 2006
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