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Taking care of those in need: Waters recede, renovation begins

Story by LIZ QUIRIN
Messenger editor

(Editor's note: If you click on the photo, a slide show of photos from the parish will come up. Mark Thompson shared these photos with The Messenger. Photos from Daystar and The Kitchen Table in Cairo are also included.)

It was a wet and anxious May for many in the Belleville diocese as waters rose and storms battered folks already hit by high waters.

Father Christopher Mujule, from the diocese of Hoima in Uganda, had never witnessed flood waters like those he saw at St. Rose of Lima Parish in Metropolis.

As waters rose in the basements of the rectory and the parish center, the area was
also hit by severe storms. He said he wasn’t sure what to do at some
point when people told him to go to the basement if a tornado came.

“I couldn’t go to the basement,” he said, because it had about seven feet of water in it. With help from many people, the parish survived the flooding.

High school graduate Darby Pullen said Massac County High School closed for a week and a half so that students could help with sandbagging in the town.

Mark Thompson, parish council president, said many people tried to
hold the water back, but it proved to be impossible at some point. Both the rectory and the parish center took on water, but the church,
several blocks from the Ohio River, stayed dry.

Both of the other buildings have low places at the back and the water came in that way, Thompson said.
Jean Wills, pastoral associate at the Gallatin County community of Catholic churches — St. Joseph in Equality and Ridgway, St. Patrick in Pond Settlement and St. Mary in Shawneeneetown — said the churches withstood the water pretty well although it was close to disaster in Equality where water came within about three inches of the front door.

Pastor of the four churches, Father Steven Beatty, and some of the men from the parish, worked all night to keep the pumps going in the basement at St. Joseph in Equality to hold damage to a minimum, Wills said.

At St. Patrick’s in Pond Settlement, it looked as though the church was on an island in a sea of water, Wills said. No water went into the building because it sits on top of a small hill.

Back at St. Rose, the damage was extensive in the basements, but the people were relieved it didn’t go into the church.

“The pressure of the water blew out the windows,” Thompson said. “Anything that was in the basement where the water touched it is gone.”

At Daystar in Cairo, Sherry Miller is accepting donations for people who continue to live in shelters or who have moved back home to find everything ruined, she said.

While the town was saved when the Army Corps of Engineers blew up the Bird’s Point Levee May 2, sand boils (springs of water coming from the ground) had erupted in the town, and concerns continued until people evacuated.
Miller said one woman in Olive Branch, near Cairo, was unaware of a problem at her home because the family had built a levee around the house.

They knew it was time to leave, Miller said, when the woman woke up with water rushing over her. It was then she discovered their family levee had broken.

During the time away from Cairo, Miller said she volunteered at shelters in the area. Her home was on higher ground and was not flooded.

When she met some of Daystar’s clients in a shelter, they told her “we knew you’d find us.”

At the Kitchen Table, across the street from the Daystar office, where Poor Handmaids Sisters Jeannette Schutte and Mary Carolyn Welhoelter feed the hungry most days, the sisters had also reopened.

The sisters were gone for 15 days and didn’t stay in any one place for more than a few days at a time. Their home is two blocks from the levee, so leaving was not an option for them.

People soon heard the Kitchen Table had reopened and their customers were back, glad to see the sisters were all right, many of them said.

Friends from Edwardsville, Ill., came to Cairo and removed freezers so the sisters wouldn’t lose all of their frozen food, they said.

A group of Christian missionaries living in Cairo asked the sisters what they needed, made lists and made copies of that list. They invited people going into stores in nearby Padukah, Ky., to take the list with them.

“They brought us 2,000 items,” Sister Jeannette said.

While they are happy to be “back in business,” Sister Mary Carolyn said she “feels sorry for the farmers” whose land was flooded when the levee was blown up.