Coming Home from Texas

We've spent the last week-and-a-half in Texas and are glad to be heading home today. This past week we gave our CRWRC Needs Assessment presentation 8 times in 5 days--we're a little tired of it ourselves :-). But we now have 8 long term recovery organizations covering 10 counties who want to have a Needs Assessment team help them.
On Friday we drove across the Bolivar Peninsula over to Galveston--the devastation was incredible. Whole communities were totally wiped out. You can see it in the first photo, every concrete slab, every set of pilings used to be someone's home. And these were not for the most part resort communities. One of the saddest things is that donations for Ike are not even 1% of what they were for Katrina. The United Methodists, for example, collected something like $60 million for Katrina and only about $100,000 for Ike.





This is all that's left of most homes. Piles of trash like this line the highway.