“I see lots of evidence that New Orleans is coming back,” said Terry Raines. This Virginia Baptist leader was addressing our annual associational meeting on Monday, October 30, along with other leaders from across the country. Terry has been here several times and says he can see signs of significant progress.
I thought of that today–Wednesday, October 8–while driving through various sections of town. On West Esplanade in Kenner, a huge low-income apartment complex is now an open plowed field, the result of demolition which was made necessary by the hurricane damage. The boarded up complex–occupying at least six full blocks–had been an eyesore for the last year.
Down other streets, new homes are going up, some of them costing huge amounts of money. On Elysian Fields Avenue, our connector between Lake Pontchartrain and Interstate 610, dead trees are spray-painted and marked for the chain saws. In all, there must be 500 such trees, at least a dozen per block, trees that were poisoned and choked to death by Katrina’s floodwaters. At Robert E. Lee Boulevard and Canal Boulevard, the strip mall is up and running. Signs of progress abound.
Plenty of the other kinds of signs, too–untouched homes, potholes, dead trees, weeds up to the rooftops, FEMA trailers, vacant lots, boarded up stores. But we’re learning to look past all that and enjoy the positive signs.
Youth on Mission is a 16-year-old organization, the brainchild of Harry Fowler, which involves teenagers in mission projects from one end of this country to the other. Harry has been to New Orleans on several occasions and, with assistant Bob Adams, has put hundreds of youngsters to work in rebuilding our city. The new brochure from YOM announces projects for 2007 in Atlanta, Chicago, Washington, Pittsburgh, Toronto, and New Orleans. In fact, the front of the lovely brochure shows the youth working at our Baptist Crossroads in the Ninth Ward. You can’t miss all those colorful houses. Thank you, Harry, and YOM. Check out their website at www.yom.org.
Meanwhile, the young people of Mount Vernon Baptist Church in Jasper, Alabama–just up the road from my home–are not plugging into someone else’s program; they’re creating their own. “Impact New Orleans,” they call their June 9-16, 2007, project. Their full-color leaflet which arrived in our office today shows the same colorful Habitat houses as the Youth on Mission brochure. (I’d give a dollar to know how many groups worked on these 40 houses. The other day I met some Junior League ladies from Toronto hammering and sweating!) Minister of Students Shawn Doss left New Orleans this summer with a burning desire to create a low cost/high impact mission experience for his Jasper kids. They’re partnering with Operation NOAH Rebuild and our association. The brochure says the group will be staying at Oak Park Baptist Church, and they’re doing the entire week for $150 per student. Shawn invites his people to check out Oak Park’s website: www.oakparkvision.com.
Readers who want to pursue such a trip for their group are invited to go to www.joemckeever.com and click on the house on the right side of the page, with the title, “If you are coming to help us.” You should find everything you need to know there, but if you still have questions, email us at joe@joemckeever.com.
In the statewide election Tuesday, yesterday, voters overwhelmingly adopted the amendment which put the seven New Orleans tax assessors out of business and combined their offices into one. We are the only parish in the state with SEVEN!assessors. It goes into effect in 2010, but everyone felt it was important to show the world we’re serious about getting our house in order. After the amendment passed, Mayor Nagin was heard applauding the measure. Everyone wonders, however, why he was entirely silent during the campaign over this issue.
Earlier this year, we combined the multiplicity of levee boards in this part of the world into two, one for each bank of the Mississippi River. That was a big step.
It took a Katrina to force us to do what should have been done a century ago.
We’ve left comments here and there on this website about New Orleans’ Congressman William Jefferson, the one stripped of key committee memberships by Democratic House leadership over allegations of corruption. He’s the one with the $90,000 hidden in his home freezer, money which was marked by the FBI and supposedly given him to bribe Nigerian officials. Since the FBI still has not charged him with anything–although some of Jefferson’s aides have pleaded guilty and fingered him as the mastermind–Jefferson ran for re-election and is using God’s name and Holy Scriptures to bolster his positions. Karen Carter received the recommendation of the Times-Picayune and made the runoff against Jefferson. The congressman pulled in only 30 percent of the total vote. Anyone will tell you that if an incumbent gets that little, it means 70 percent voted against him, and he’s in lots of trouble.
I will hazard a guess that Mr. Jefferson’s real troubles have less to do with whether he wins the runoff and more to do with whether he avoids a long prison term. I don’t know the man personally and he’s not my congressman. I live in River Ridge and Bobby Jindal, a popular Republican, is our U.S. Representative. But I find myself resenting Mr. Jefferson’s liberal quoting of Scripture and attempts to paint himself as some kind of martyr. I’d like to hear some kind of explanation from him, but he seems to want everyone to take him by faith and to ignore all the evidence that he is a crook. Hard to do.
Prayer Request. Lionel Roberts, pastor of our St. Bernard Baptist Mission–across the street from the locked-down St. Bernard Housing Project, called me the other day. I knew he was teaching school this year, but not precisely what he was doing. “I’m the disciplinarian at John McDonough High School,” he said. Wow. Talk about a tough assignment. That’s the school that has been in the news far too much recently, with students assaulting teachers and even attacking security guards. I said, “What else do you do?” “That’s all I do,” he said. “It’s a full time job!”
McDonough’s principal spoke up a couple of weeks ago and called for the community to quit standing aside and shaking their fingers at the school. “Come help us,” he pleaded, and the next Saturday a couple of hundred volunteers showed up to paint the buildings and clean up the campus. Lionel praises his principal.
We could use some prayer support for these men and this school.