Meet our AmeriCorps Team Our AmeriCorps Program Join our Program AmeriCorps Members Speak Out Home Peninsula Habitat Team Helps Mississippi Rebuild Twenty months after one of the worst natural disasters in the history of the United States, 11 members of Peninsula Habitat's AmeriCorps and VISTA team packed their bags and headed to the Mississippi Gulf Coast, where nearly 70,000 homes were left "uninhabitable" after Hurricane Katrina and 25,000 temporary housing units are still in use today. Part of a massive "Build-A-Thon" event, the team joined more than 500 people from across the country who descended on Gulfport, Mississippi, in a week-long 20-home "blitz" build, May 19-26. In all, Habitat for Humanity has built more than 110 homes in the Harrison and Jackson counties of Mississippi and more than 1000 homes total throughout the Gulf Coast region, including Louisiana and Alabama, since the storm hit in 2005. With varying levels of experience in home construction, ranging from full-time construction crew members to office staff, participants were distributed among a number of "camps" around Biloxi, where they were housed and spent most of their time during the off-hours of the week. One such camp, known as the D'Iberville Volunteer Village, or Camp D'Iberville, was located on the grounds of three contiguous baseball fields and originally used to house displaced and evacuated storm victims. The village looks like a cross between a military installation and a summer camp, including tents, refrigerated food trucks, storage sheds, striped carnival-like tents, FEMA trailers, and military tents - providing volunteers with access to a kitchen, showers, portable toilets, laundry facilities, a dining area and other "comforts" of home. Arriving on the first day of the build to a concrete slab on the ground for each home's foundation was an intense experience, said Sabrina Pourmand, staff member at Peninsula Habitat. "Knowing you have to get it done in a week was very powerful. " Participants, even those like Pourmand and Andrew Slaton, who is also a staff member at Peninsula Habitat and has limited construction experience, were involved in all stages of the home construction process. From building the frame and raising the walls, to trussing the roof and installing windows, the AmeriCorps teams provided a critical mass of labor needed to meet the enormous challenge of building 20 homes in five days. Crew leaders and experienced construction site workers were also available at all times to provide training and supervision along the way. So how does Mississippi look today? It is no longer a 'war zone' of destruction, but signs of what the people have endured there are everywhere still. Riding on a bus to and from the construction site everyday, Pourmand and Slaton were struck by so many visual extremes: Beautiful rebuilt resorts and casinos, followed by schools that were heavily damaged by the floodwaters; Writings on the side of an abandoned house bringing flashbacks to the chaos that ensued immediately following the disaster: "We are home. We will shoot;" Boarded up businesses; villages of FEMA trailers (known as "crampers" by the locals); and the polluted waters of the Gulf Coast where swimming is strictly forbidden. Shells can even be found on the ground miles away from the beach, a chilling reminder of the storm surge that killed 230 people in Mississippi alone. Emotions are also running high. The frustration levels of people who are still struggling to get by is palpable. "Bitterness is in the air there," said Pourmand, as the area experiences a second wave of people leaving due to the slow rebuilding effort. Some people are packing up; others are moving forward. But for 20 families on the 44th and 45th Avenues in Gulfport, where the Build-A-Thon was held, and many other families like them, these new Habitat homes are symbols of the reemergence of the area out of total destruction and the promise of a better life to come. "So many people are holding on to hope," Pourmand said. This Build-A-Thon marks 13 years of AmeriCorps and Habitat for Humanity working together to build affordable houses and eliminate substandard housing. Since 1994, Habitat for Humanity AmeriCorps members have performed more than 5 million hours of service and engaged hundreds of thousands of community volunteers to build more than 6,500 houses. Many of the Gulf Coast homes were built with significant financial support from the Charles Schwab Foundation, the government of Qatar, the Lowe's Charitable and Educational Foundation and many other sponsors. Peninsula Habitat's AmeriCorps and AmeriCorps VISTA (Volunteers In Service To America) members include: Jose Alvarez, Eric Anderson, Joseph Byrum, Dana Logsden, Julie Newton, Marshall Poland, Jessica Smith, Abby Tiedemann, Joy Young, Andrew Slaton and Sabrina Pourmand. Back to top