Before and after

I left here (here being north Gulfport and Turkey Creek) about ten days ago to go out to San Antonio and be a "sponsor" for the youth group. At that point we had assembled a list of ten houses in Turkey Creek in need of help. That is misleading, since if suggests that the rest of the houses are okay, which is far from the truth. These ten are the ones most in need of help. Five had been "red tagged" by the city to be demolished within thirty days, and the others were just about as bad. Many were missing parts of their roofs, so they had been sitting in the rain for eighteen months; others had major collapses of one side of the building or a porch; several still had belongings inside--a piano in one, sofas, beds, chairs, dressers, pictures on the walls, etc. You have the sense of people who have just been overwhelmed and have walked away. But now I return to find that the seventy teens who were here last week, while I was in San Antonio, have done a major clearing out of nine of the properties. I've got to bring this to a close now, since they are holding a movie about this area for me to get down there. So more later.

Lanier