Katrina 'voluntourists' make labor a vacation
By Larry Copeland
Scott Shattuck, a pharmacy manager from Vancouver, Wash., is in Mississippi on vacation. But by day, he's more likely to be found "mucking out" a house damaged by Hurricane Katrina or painting a children's clinic than hitting the casinos or walking the beach.
"This is not a vacation in the sense of doing all the touristy stuff," says Shattuck, 33, here with a group of 30 volunteers from Kaiser Permanente. "You're here to do work for the community, and when you're done, you can have your free time."
Shattuck is among the massive wave of volunteers — half a million, by one estimate — who have come here from across the nation in the nearly 18 months since Katrina struck.
Their impact on the storm-ravaged state has been immeasurable. From Pascagoula in the east to Bay St. Louis in the west, these volunteers have been the one positive constant for residents who have battled through lengthy power outages, mosquito infestations, stuffy FEMA trailers, recalcitrant insurers and an often molasses-slow government bureaucracy.
"They built our community back," D'Iberville Mayor Rusty Quave says. "Without those volunteer groups, we would be just starting. Our houses would be like some of the parishes in Louisiana where there are 10,000 houses that have not been mucked out."
That might seem strong praise in a state where the Federal Emergency Management Agency had spent $857 million through Feb. 5 — just over $50.4 million a month since Katrina — and where the Small Business Administration had issued $2.06 billion in low-interest loans for people to rebuild their homes. But about 80,000 people still live in FEMA trailers.
Almost to a person, Mississippians agree that the volunteers, many of them from religious organizations, have been the spur for their recovery. "We wouldn't even have a coast if it wasn't for them," Pass Christian Mayor Chipper McDermott says.
With their purchases of food and T-shirts, sneakers and blue jeans at restaurants and stores throughout the Gulf Coast region, the volunteers helped keep the local economy afloat in the weeks and months after the storm. They helped revive the region's vital tourism industry by blowing off steam at night in the bars, casinos and restaurants after spending the day laboring in the Mississippi sun.
Volunteers have been so critical to the Magnolia State's ongoing recovery that a term has been coined to capture their duality. "Voluntourists," they're calling them here.
"They've had a tremendous impact," says Stephen Richer, executive director of the Mississippi Gulf Coast Convention and Visitors Bureau, who estimates that 500,000 volunteers have come here since Katrina flattened the coast on Aug. 29, 2005. "When I look at the people all of us have been dealing with on a day-to-day basis, they are the one group that has brought nothing but hope."
Spartan living arrangements
Shattuck, who also manages a pediatric department in Vancouver, is clearly a newcomer to Mississippi: He rhymes the middle syllable of Biloxi with "box" instead of with "lux" as the locals do.
He was drawn to the Gulf Coast by the need he sensed here.
"It seemed like after the immediate coverage, it kind of faded away," he says. "Seeing Spike Lee's documentary (on New Orleans), When the Levees Broke, and media images here and there … made my heart hurt for the people here. There was a tremendous urgency to come down here to do a job for the people that need help."
Shattuck says his wife, Melissa, was fully supportive when he told her he was taking a week of vacation to come here. She would have come, too, but stayed behind to care for their 3-year-old son and 8-month-old daughter.
His Mississippi vacation is far from posh. He lives with about 100 other volunteers in a big room at Beauvoir Methodist Church, Mississippi headquarters for Hands On Gulf Coast, an Atlanta-based volunteer organization that also has a New Orleans branch.
Short-term volunteers such as Shattuck sleep on cramped bunk beds in a barracks-like setting or in big Army tents out back. They shower outdoors. Hands On serves them breakfast, usually oatmeal, pancakes, eggs, fruit salad and cereal. Dinner might be jambalaya, fajitas or spaghetti: "Something with a lot of carbs, real easy to make and can feed a lot of people," says Chris deVeer, director of Hands On Gulf Coast.
He says it's not unusual "for people to come for a week or two and still be here three or four months later. It's a life-changing experience. We connect people with people who need help, but it changes both sets of lives."
Along with religious organizations, college students have been the backbone of the state's volunteer effort, and officials on the coast expect thousands of them during the upcoming spring break.
"We have a surge already booked up," says Betty Robinson, spokeswoman for the city of Waveland. "In March, April and the first of May, and again in the summer, we'll see a lot of college students."
'What's the value of hope?'
The Beau Rivage Resort and Casino here, which recently completed a $550 million, post-Katrina renovation, is a world removed from the storm-blighted reality outside.
To anyone strolling among the resort's 11 restaurants, extensive shopping and bustling casino floor, the storm's devastation seems far away. It's easy to see why a volunteer might want to escape here for a few hours after a long day of cleaning muck out of a house.
"We absolutely have people staying with us that are here helping," says Mary Cracchiolo, a spokeswoman for the resort. "People are coming to help, and taking time to enjoy the area attractions."
It's probably impossible to measure the economic impact of "voluntourism" on Mississippi, says Richer, who tracks such things.
"What they spend is small," he says. "As to what they bring, what's the value of hope? What's the value of this house they left behind? The dollar value is probably a small part of what they brought. The overall impact is in the multiple millions. Say their labor is worth $10 an hour, and assuming they all work at least 40 hours a week, you're talking multiple millions of dollars."
Much of the evidence is anecdotal, says Beth Carriere, executive director of Mississippi's West Coast-Hancock County Tourism Development Bureau.
"In the beginning, the volunteers were the only customers here for whatever business was open," she says. "Whatever was open, they utilized it. Lord, I don't know what we would have done without them. Now that the hotels are open, they're flying in, staying in hotels and doing volunteer work."
Bruce Frallic, executive director of Gulfport-Biloxi International Airport, says voluntourists make up 15%-20% of the airport's passenger traffic. "The voluntourism really took off sometime around November 2005 and was just intense for the following year," Frallic says. "They were probably 30% of our passenger traffic" then.
Pam Meinzinger, general manager of Prime Outlets at Gulfport, a 65-store mall, says the voluntourists helped the stores there remain open during the leanest period and are still important customers.
"They're just kind of becoming a part of the community," she says. "They're a big part of our customer base. The northern volunteers usually need some summer clothes. They really do shop us quite a bit, at night. … They buy a lot of blue jeans and tennis shoes."
Now Mississippi is saying thanks. In January, during a brief appearance on NBC's Today show, Richer expressed the state's appreciation to the volunteers — and urged them to keep coming.
The city of D'Iberville will build a 26-acre park, tentatively called Good Samaritan Park. It will feature the flags of all 50 states, the state highway patrol, the National Guard and others. "We're planning it right now," Mayor Quave says.
Going 'beyond vacation'
Bruce Beckham is executive director of Tourism Cares for America, a non-profit group that brought 330 tourism industry volunteers to Mississippi last year. He says that since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, many Americans have felt compelled to "go beyond their vacation" by volunteering.
"They're not doing it out of guilt," he says. "They feel that's what their responsibility as a human being is."
John Edmiston, Kaiser Permanente's national community relations manager, says the company had nearly 300 applicants for the 30 slots on the week-long Gulf Coast trip, all of them willing to give up a week's vacation.
Sometimes volunteers come for a week and find themselves pulled back. "They come here and build something," Frallic says. "They've contributed their blood, sweat and tears to this community, and as a result, they want to come back and see how things are going."
Maureen Gatto, 53, a lawyer from Bucks County, Pa., near Philadelphia, came to Hancock County for a week in April 2006 with about 25 other lawyers and friends.
"It was a typical group," she says. "We were gutting houses, helping out. When I got back home, I felt a very strong pull back to Mississippi, and I couldn't shake it. I gave it a month, thinking that do-gooder feeling would wash off. When it didn't, I said, 'Whatever it takes, I'm going to go down.' "
Gatto returned to Bay St. Louis last August for a two-year stay. She is now the Mississippi coordinator of the Bucks-Mont Katrina Project, which has built a day care center in Bay St. Louis and breaks ground next month on an animal shelter. "I don't think I'll be here permanently," she says. "My whole family is in the northeastern United States."
Sometimes, volunteers come back. Sometimes, they fall in love.
Randy May, 58, says he drove from Austin to Pass Christian within a few days of Katrina. He's been there ever since, working as a coordinator of volunteers for a Baptist group from Indiana and Kentucky.
"I had a good life in Texas," he says. "I'm a horse-shoer and golf instructor. But I had to come here."
Two weeks after he got to Mississippi, May met Deborah Yawn, 56, of Jackson. She had been volunteering in Long Beach.
"She came to the Pass looking for (volunteer) work," May says, "and two weeks later, I married her."
Source: USA TODAY