Dr. Bob, part I

Volunteers are Miracle Workers

This is from a fairly long email from Dr. Bob (I will post a bit more later):

"Consider this: 65,000 homes destroyed, over 200,000 people displaced, stunned, and discouraged; the entire infrastructure and supports for whole communities, seriously impaired; promises of financial help, repairs, and reconstruction made, then broken; make-shift this, and make-shift that; unsympathetic government beurocracy and faceless, remote and uncaring political figures with their hands on the national purse; day after day of having to look at debris and wreckage; having to beg for assistance and be humiliated before petty officials. Now, THAT is no trifle. By late week I was weary and discouragement was moving in like a silent, but pervasive morning fog. I was looking only in front of me at ALL the massive amount of work still needing to be done to restore normalacy to this wretched and forelorn place, while pouting over the loss of use of a junker, aged automobile. Pitiful, wouldn't you say?

When what appears ahead, in front of you, looms large, daunting and uncertain, turn your minds eye around and look back; see where you have been, what you have accomplished, and even more rejoice in what you, working with thousands of others in your family, community, state or nation, have accomplished - how far we have come in repairing our damaged lives. Do this every day, several times each day, and see that therein lies the strength , the energy, the endurance and, most important, the HOPE that leads us to walk on. We become the " angels of mercy" , the WALKING MIRACLES, that the good people, survivors of Katrina, tell us over and over that we are.

So implausible did it appear to be that handfuls of volunteers, committees from local churches, individual families and societies of friends or neighborhood acquaintences, could "walk and work" and accomplish so much. That they have done so, is nothing short of a MIRACLE, and persons who did this, one person at a time, are the "WALKING MIRACLES who have been WORKING THE MIRACLES we are witness to."