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Hurricane Katrina Relief
First Presbyterian Church, Nashville, is receiving numerous inquiries from members of the congregation and the community concerning how to assist in relief efforts in the Gulf Coast. For those interested in providing financial support, you may send a check to First Presbyterian Church and designate the check "Hurricane Relief." Additionally, you may find information and opportunity to help at the Presbyterian Church (USA) website: Presbyterian Disaster Assistance.
We have work teams scheduled for long weekend trips thru December 4th and are exploring dates for January and February trips. To recieve regular e-mail updates about our hurricane relief efforts, please send an e-mail to katrina@fpcnashville.org along with your name(s) and telephone number(s). Please indicate in the e-mail if you are interested in going to southern MS as part of a volunteer work crew and the long weekend (Thur - Sun) dates you are interested in working.
For the time being, we are suspending our collection of supplies and focusing our efforts on assembling teams of volunteers to provide physical assistance in the area. We will continue to distribute financial donations to the area as they are received by FPC-Nashville.
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Mid-October Mission Trip to Mississippi
Seven members of our congregation left on Thursday, October 13, to spend the weekend on the Mississippi Gulf Coast to help with cleaning up after hurricane Katrina devastated the area at the end of August. Our group stayed at the Bay St. Louis Presbyterian Church, which is a tiny, quaint church within view of the gulf. The church was surrounded by about four feet of water during the storm but miraculously had only about one inch get inside the building. The weekend we were there we had over 100 people staying inside and around the building in tents, which had been donated by our church. On behalf of our Presbytery, we had been asked to adopt Long Beach Presbyterian Church located in one of the few areas that have not yet been touched by relief work.
As we came into Long Beach there were two rolls of razor wire along the railroad tracks and military checkpoints only allowing those with credentials within the restricted area. Because of the almost complete destruction to the area, we had a hard time locating the church, even with the street address. We were excited to find the building intact and with relatively minor damage. It too had a water mark of about four to five feet on the outside but inside the water mark was about four inches. Since no one had been in the church since the storm, the wet carpet had allowed mold and mildew to spread over the walls, floors and furniture. With the help of other volunteer church groups that joined us throughout the day, we were able to remove trash, limbs and debris from the church yard, and start cleaning the inside. We removed all the pews to the outdoors, ripped up the majority of the carpet, and brought out most of the other furniture. We used spray bottles of bleach and water to spray all the mildewed and moldy walls and floors as well as to spray all the furniture and wipe it down. As we worked on the church, the group decided that this building lent itself quite well to be another home base for churches wanting to come in to help individuals. We took measurements, figured out what it would take to get it up and running in a couple of weeks.
On Thursday, October 27, additional members of our church are teamed with Westminster and other churches in our Presbytery to complete the clean up at Long Beach and prepare the location to be used as an outreach center to the low- to middle-income neighborhood where it is located. We are transporting most of the remaining donations in our P.O.D. along with two refrigerators, a washing machine, an 80-gallon water heater, a microwave and other supplies. We are hopeful that the next FPC group will be able to stay at the Long Beach Church and start helping neighbors clean up and rebuild.
If you are interested in joining a work team, please let us know at: Katrina@fpcnashville.org.
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