The following reflection was written by CSC member and Wash U student Ellie Kincaid:
A
Week in Joplin
Ellie
Kincaid
You
know this story. As soon as you read the
words “Joplin, Missouri,” you know what’s coming. EF5 tornado.
Most costly tornado in American history.
A quarter of the city of Joplin destroyed, by some reports. That’s what we’ve all heard, what I and other
students from the Catholic Student Center at Washington University knew when we
headed to Joplin to spend our 2012 spring break serving those affected by the
tornado that struck nearly a year earlier.
As
soon as we arrived in Joplin after our four hour car ride from St. Louis, we
went to orientation with the local chapter of Catholic Charities. In the basement of a church, we watched a storm
chaser video of the Joplin tornado. We
saw before and after videos of the area hit the hardest, the disaster
area. Little by little, I began to grasp
what the phrase “EF5 tornado” really means.
It means a fat column of dark cloud spinning, wheeling haphazardly. It means piles of lumber where houses used to
be. It means the concrete walls of Home
Depot collapsing on a father with his little girls. It means devastation.
At
this point, we thought we were shocked.
But then we drove to the federal disaster area. We drove from a normal-looking town onto a
street with emptiness on both sides. We
stopped at what used to be St. Mary’s Catholic church. All that remained was a large hole in the red
ground and a freestanding metal cross about 25 feet tall that marked what had
been the front entrance. Not far away
was what remained of St. John’s Mercy Hospital.
The tornado had plucked it off its foundation, rotated it, and set it
back down. Besides a few landmarks such
as these and some newly built homes, the disaster area was desolate.
On
our first full day in Joplin, we reported to Americorps for a work
assignment. We ended up in a cow pasture
outside of the city, picking up debris from the tornado with hundreds of other
students also on spring break. The tornado
winds had blown pieces of houses all over the land, and cows, being cows, were
injuring themselves on bits of insulation and shingle. We dragged trash bags through fields all day,
cleaning up the fragments of a home that had once borne dark grey shingles. We also found bent and faded photos that we
set aside and pieces of toys. I picked
up a tan piece of plastic shaped like a square with an equilateral triangle
connected to it. One side had ridges on
it, like siding, and there were little windows cut into the plastic. It must’ve been part of a doll house once.
The next day, we
met a homeowner. We were assigned to
replace the roof on her garage. At the
time of the tornado, she and her family had been renting a house in what became
the disaster area. She described the
location to us as between the ruined high school and a free-standing bank
vault.
The homeowner told
us her story when we took water and lunch breaks. During the tornado, she and her family
huddled in an interior hallway of the house.
A wall fell on top of them, but came to rest on a bookshelf above them
and ended up sheltering them for the rest of the storm. It hit the woman’s boyfriend in the back,
bruising his kidneys, but may have saved their lives.
After the tornado,
all that remained of the house was one corner. The family had nowhere to go when their
landlord decided not to rebuild. They
used money from FEMA to buy a house that had been abandoned for ten years. The house was so overgrown with brush and
plants it wasn’t visible from the street.
It didn’t have central heat or air conditioning, but it was what they
could afford in a post-disaster Joplin where so many were looking for a new
place to live. Little by little, they
worked on the house to make it livable.
We got to be a part of that process when we replaced their leaky garage
roof.
Most of us hadn’t
even been on a roof before spring break, but there we were in Joplin, stripping
two layers of shingles off a roof and nailing down a new one. The work was unlike any work I’d ever done
before. At WashU, when I say I “worked”
all day, I usually mean that I did homework and studied. That type of work is hard and can be
satisfying in its way. But roofing is
completely different than studying organic chemistry or reading Shakespeare
analytically, even when you’re only on the ground picking up old shingle pieces
and carting them to a dumpster. I can
look at the stack of chemistry study problems I did or the essay I wrote and
feel proud of my work. But then I’ll
flip the page of my planner and realize that I have even more still do to
tomorrow.
When I worked with
my fellow students on that spring break, we built
a roof. We made a family’s situation
a bit more livable. We were a part of
building their new life, their rising from the destruction of the tornado. Together, we did something none of us could
do on our own. I wouldn’t count physical
strength as one of my talents, and neither would any other student on the
trip. But our collective physical
ability, the sum of our meager muscles, accomplished something amazing. The day we finished that roof, we could even
be proud of our unimpressive physical bodies.
Our weakest qualities became useful and valuable. That’s satisfaction.
During one of our
lunch breaks while working on the roof, we listened to an army veteran and
employee of Catholic Charities describe his experience of the tornado. He’d been out riding his motorcycle, but when
he saw airborne debris he found a ditch to lay down in. He tied himself down with his belt to keep
from blowing away. He compared walking
through the ruined streets in the aftermath to his experiences in combat. The difference, he said, is “you can’t fight
an F5.”
His words revealed
the utter helplessness many felt after the tornado, yet here he was, working in
opposition to the hopeless chaos that surely seemed absolute in Joplin on May
22, 2011. Natural disasters such as the
tornado that ravaged Joplin are often called “Acts of God,” but the real place
I see God’s action is afterwards, in the rebuilding. People reprioritize their lives and start
anew. WashU students leave behind their
books to raise a roof. Joplin moves
forward. Here comes new life.
Early in the
morning on our last day in Joplin, we were back in the disaster area. We came to remove wiring and a few walls from
a house. Most of the lots still only had
sidewalks and maybe a few steps up to emptiness that used to be a front
door. But one had something else that
had survived the tornado. Along the
sidewalk, a few daffodils poked out of the ground. I guess the bulbs had been safe underground,
even when trees were uprooted. I hope
whoever planted them came back to see how all was not lost that day in
May. I hope they come back and rebuild
their home next to the daffodils.
