Brenda Plonis

When Dorothy Harness returned to her home in East Biloxi after the eight-hour Hurricane had pummeled her community, her deep freeze was bottom side up.

“I opened the door to the house and couldn’t believe it. I was totally speechless. I wanted to cry, but couldn’t,” Dorothy recalls.

“I wasn’t here during Hurricane Camille, but this was the worst in history. Camille couldn’t touch this one…Nobody could believe it.”

Dorothy decided to evacuate for Katrina. “I left before this one started – if I hadn’t, my children would have drug me out.”

She rode out the storm with about 15 other people – many of them children. “We thought we were going to have to go to the roof at one point. The water started coming up to the third story, so people got in a line and started pouring the water into the tub and the toilet to try to drain it out of the house.”

When she returned to her home and discovered it uninhabitable, she and a neighbor set up lawn chairs and slept in the driveway.

Her physical state didn’t lend itself to compassionate response for everyone though. Swindlers managed to take advantage of those in need like Dorothy. In October, Dorothy hired a man who advertised in the newspaper, to rebuild her house.

The hired help brought in a group of people to camp in her backyard, and to do the work. But as each week passed, Dorothy saw little to no progression, except that the group had now moved into her house, started using the supplies she was gradually collecting in her back shed, and it seemed that she was constantly doling out money for supplies that ended up at other homes down the street.

After a while, a friend helped Dorothy calculate what she had spent on workers and material – the total came to a shocking $26,000.

Her home destroyed; her bank account draining rapidly – Dorothy still had to cope with the loss of many personal friends and neighbors from the storm, who stayed in their houses and either drowned, or had their homes collapse on them.

She eventually went to St Johns church – the temporary office of the East Biloxi Coordination Center. The office sent Craig Snow, Hope Force Project Coordinator, to look at the house. His team of volunteers had to clean the entire house out and start over. The swindlers, who by this time had been told to leave, were nowhere to be found, but they left enough of a mess that Craig had to do another cleaning job before they even started on the rebuild.

“What a mess,” Dorothy sighs and shakes her head.
At one point, Dorothy felt like she was having a nervous breakdown from the stress. Now, she is getting more relaxed every day.

The house today looks so very different from the one she opened her door to at the end of August 2005. She recently moved back in, and save for one dining room chair on backorder, Dorothy’s house is now full furnished and functioning. She even boasts of a brand new hand-made quilt from Amish ladies in Pennsylvania. “The Lord blessed me with more now than I had before. Everything was falling apart –the AC broke, the house needed renovations,” Dorothy explains. She smiles as she talks about all of the work the volunteers with Project Rebuild have done for her. “I never would have thought I would live in a new house with new furniture!” And for that, Dorothy is extremely grateful.