Reason for giving not important

By Dave Churchill (Contact) | The Daily Journal

Published Friday, January 19, 2007

“There is no altruism,” an acquaintance told me a few weeks ago over coffee. We had been talking about international humanitarian aid projects, about which my coffee companion had much personal knowledge.

“You surprise me,” I told him. “After all, isn’t altruism the reason people get involved in helping others?”

“Not at all,” he said, adding that even those who give months or years of their life to help tsunami victims, ease health crises and help stop starvation are doing so for very personal reasons. They are helping others, but they are also somehow helping themselves, he said.

I have thought often of that conversation this week, the first of two I am spending in Biloxi, Miss., helping rebuild houses devastated by Hurricane Katrina in August of 2005. It is said here that not a single house was left undamaged by the storm’s power; and recent estimates are that only 10 percent have been fully repaired.

That is an easy statistic to believe. Located on a Gulf Coast peninsula about 75 miles northeast of New Orleans, Biloxi is one of those places that suffered horribly during the hurricane but about which you never hear. When national news outlets want to report on hurricane recovery, they send their reporters to New Orleans — not to Biloxi or Gulfport or the other Gulf Coast towns that lack the Big Easy’s glamour.

Yet Biloxi has drawn thousands of volunteer builders during the months since Katrina. The group of United Methodist Volunteers in Mission whom I am accompanying includes several members who are on their second or third trip here, and they are not unusual. Nearly every major denomination has a recovery effort under way in Biloxi, as do many secular organizations such as Habitat for Humanity.

Help our Methodist mission this week is a group of contractors from West Virginia who arrived in town, 13 strong, with hammers, saws and donated cash in hand, ready to do whatever they could to help rebuild.

One member of the Methodist mission told me that he had spent some time chatting with a Biloxi building inspector who was monitoring a house the team is building. “If it weren’t for volunteers, very little rebuilding would be going on in here,” is how the mission volunteer quoted the building inspector.

Much of the obvious hurricane damage has been cleared away and, in what can only be read as a sad commentary on our times, the casinos which are Biloxi’s lifeblood have been speedily repaired and rebuilt. They dominate the city’s beachfront with all-night lights and glitz, even as many homeowners — those that did not leave town — live in government-issued house trailers while they struggle to put their homes and lives back in order.

What draws volunteer builders from across the country to Biloxi is as varied as the people themselves. For some it is a vacation of sorts or a reason to travel.

Others find satisfaction in doing something outside their daily routine. They are all bound, however, by a common desire to do good.

Pondering my own motivations in joining this trip, I have wondered about the relief worker who told me there is no altruism. Does it make a gift less worthy if the giver receives something in return?

I think not. The essence of giving is to do something for others, and feeling good about that is an inherent part of the act. Certainly there can be no question that the gifts of thousands of volunteers are making a difference for people who live in this coastal community.

A decade will not be long enough to repair all the damage that Katrina caused here. But some of the pieces are being put back together every day.

Journal publisher Dave Churchill’s column runs on Fridays.