Fixing the World, One House At A Time

by Joanne Palmer

May 2008 – Lagniappe is defined as something special, a little extra something thrown in for good measure, a little treat, a way of saying thank you.

When United Synagogue’s USY group in our Midwest region, CHUSY, went to work to help clean up Hurricane Katrina damage in the Gulf Coast last year, it made arrangements with the Lagniappe Presbyterian Church. Twenty high-school students from across the Midwest region went down to Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, and worked there and in Waveland, a neighboring town. Both towns are working-class and both were devastated by the storm, whose eye hit there; neither was poor enough to draw much attention or rich enough not to need it.

The teens framed and dry-walled a house, painted another, and dug holes for foundations. It was an extraordinary experience, according to regional associate director Lisa Alter Krule, who had been youth director as well last year. The group came back unified and with the firm understanding that it is possible at times to make a difference.

This year, members of United Synagogue’s Midwest region went back to Bay St. Louis and again they stayed at Lagniappe, but this time the teenagers didn’t go alone; 25 USYers were joined by 20 adults. The accommodations weren’t palatial (not five-star, Ms. Alter Krule said) – there was a bunkhouse for women and girls and another for men and boys. Church members helped their visitors arrange to get kosher food.

The group’s ages ranged from 15 to 70, and the differences between the teenagers and the adults were telling, according to Ms. Alter Krule. “Davening as frequently as we ended up doing it was foreign to the adults. The USYers said ‘Why aren’t we doing mincha?’ so we did. They really pushed the adults. And we had a 70-year-old woman on a scaffolding about 30 feet in the air, painting meticulously.”

The tasks were slightly different than they had been last spring.

“This year we roofed an entire house,” Ms. Alter Krule said. “We painted the entire exterior of a house, and we dug trenches for the foundation of a new house – we’re talking major trenches – and we installed insulation.

“We had all sorts of challenges thrown our way,” she continued – and this is where the lagniappe comes in. “One of the teams spent two days digging holes for a foundation. One the third day, just as they were about to finish the job, they were told that they’d have to stop; it would be dangerous to continue. This still is a marsh, after all, and you sink in it. So the team was sent to a home and told to put in insulation. There was a huge pile of insulation there – but right away they realized that the crevasses that the insulation had to go into were so small that no adult could possibly fit into them. If the job weren’t done then it would have to wait for the next group of volunteers, and that could take a very long time. If the house were to be habitable soon, that insulation would have to go in right then.

“So they figured out that they needed the teens, with their mental and physical flexibility, and their willingness to do whatever had to be done. And they also needed the adults’ insight and intellect and life experience. Without the adults to instruct and teach them, the teens wouldn’t have been able to do it, and without the teens the adults couldn’t have done it.

“It was a real dor l’dor moment. They all figured out that we had to partner, to do it together, or it couldn’t be done. It wouldn’t have been successful without all of us.”

So teenagers and adults went to the Gulf Coast and helped prepare houses for people whose lives had been devastated by acts of nature to return to their homes and their lives. That act of tikkun olam certainly would have been enough – in the words of the holiday just ended, the group could have said Dayenu. It would have been enough for them.

That they also learned how to work together as they did, and how each depended on the other – pure lagniappe.