Reporter’s Blog Part III: “We do things differently”

It takes 3,000 volunteers from seventeen states about seven months to help put twenty two families in new homes.

That’s the formula for success here in Gulfport, MS, put together by the Presbytery of Mississippi.

“We do things differently around here,” says Lynn Lanier, one of the construction coordinators.

Lanier lost his house to Hurricane Katrina.

Volunteers built him a new one.

Now he works full time building homes for other families.

A native of Gulfport, Lanier says he saw the place destroyed by the storm and he’s watching it come back too.

He estimates that ninety percent of what has been rebuilt in Gulfport was the work of volunteers.

And while official estimates suggest it will take thirty three years to rebuild the Gulf Coast, Lanier says not on his watch.

The volunteers keep coming, and coming back.

Lanier leads about a hundred and fifty of them through construction work every week, including the thirteen of us this week.

And he says as long as that keeps up, he can keep cutting that “official estimate” down.

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