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Building faith

Christian Contractors Association of Brooksville relays Christ's message in the wake of disaster with tape measures, tarps, hammers and saws.

LAKE WALES - Recovering from Hurricane Charley has been as discouraging as Altamese Brown expected and uplifting in ways she never imagined.

The limb from an old oak felled by the hurricane came through her roof like a battering ram. It hit her 55-year-old son in the head and rendered her house unlivable, at least until the Christian Contractors Association of Brooksville arrived a couple of days after the storm.

The contractors cut up the limb and pulled it to the curb. They patched her roof with a sheet of plastic that allows a column of blue light into her living room but keeps out the rain. Their repairs on Brown's home and hundreds of others in Lake Wales were performed for free.

"I have never seen such sweet people. When they were done, I was sweating, and they were sweating, and I said, "Come on, let me give you a hug anyway,' " said Brown, 69.

"I hated that this happened, but God has got all kinds of ways of mingling his children."

That sums up the idea behind the Christian Contractors: There is no better way to spread the spirit of Christ than by fixing houses.

"We're trying to show God's love in action," said Scott Jager, 42, the association's founder and president. "We're trying to be God's hands and feet."

Storm recovery is not the organization's only mission, but it seems to be the one it does best.

Its 10 full-time contractors arrived in Lake Wales, a city of 12,400 in eastern Polk County, the day after Charley hit. They have remained there since, sleeping first on the floor of the fire department's weight room, then in an old gymnasium serving as the group's temporary headquarters.

The contractors have managed a team of as many as 150 volunteers. Those workers have knocked on the doors of nearly every home in town - 3,619 of them - asking if help was needed. They have repaired hundreds of roofs and removed countless fallen trees.

By the middle of last week they had nearly completed the first part of their job in Lake Wales.

"Our goal is to walk back in (to city offices) with a grid map of town and say, "To to the best of our knowledge, everyone here is out of danger,' " Jager said.

City officials have nothing but praise for the contractors.

"They came in and really jumped on the problem and have been hard at it ever since," said Tom Tucker, Lake Wales' fire chief and emergency management director.

"They have really saved a lot of people a lot of grief."

In a neighborhood of rental houses and duplexes hit hard by the storm, a crew of AmeriCorps volunteers, supervised by one Christian Contractors staffer, performed the association's most common type of repair, a "dry-in."

Volunteers covered the damaged area of a shingled roof with a sheet of blue plastic and secured it with strips of pressure-treated wood, which they tacked to the roof. They then sealed the seams around vents with duct tape.

Andrew Judd was one of 40 AmeriCorps volunteers called in from Colorado and Maryland to help with storm recovery. The Christian Contractors put them to work immediately, canvassing neighborhoods to look for houses that needed repairs and performing dry-ins, a skill the contractors taught Judd so well that he supervised his own team.

"You get very tangible, direct results," said Judd, 25. "Most of the people are very thankful we're here."

Mary Sewell, for example.

Sewell, who lives in a duplex near where Judd worked, said her landlord tried to fix her roof after the storm - while warning her he didn't know what he was doing.

"He was right," said Sewell, 55, who is disabled. "At one time it was raining harder in here than it was outside."

The moisture destroyed one of her rugs, and would have done more damage had her home not been sealed with one of the blue tarps - distributed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency - that the Christian Contractors seem to have draped over every other roof in town.

"They came and asked me if I needed help, and I said I would appreciate it because I couldn't see my stuff going bad," Sewell said.

"Thank you, Jesus. They were a blessing."

To Jager, every insight is divine inspiration. The one that led him to form the Christian Contractors Association could be seen at work in Lake Wales: A few experienced contractors could transform unskilled volunteers into an effective workforce.

"We've tried to create a team of leaders," Jager said.

The inspiration for the association came to him when he was a builder from Vermont who flew to North Carolina to help rebuild after Hurricane Hugo in 1989.

As he stood in the chow lines with other volunteers, he said, "they were saying, "I really want to help, but I don't feel this is organized, and I'm wasting my time and effort.' People who had been on the ground three days still felt like they hadn't done anything and were saying they would never do it again."

Jager formed the Christian Contractors on that principle after he returned to Vermont. It worked so well in the aftermath of several major storms, including Hurricane Andrew in South Florida, that Jager sold his building company and lumber yard in 1997 to run the charity full time.

He chose Brooksville for its headquarters, partly because members of his church who wintered in Highpoint convinced him that Central Florida desperately needed his services.

"It's the widow capital of the world, and that's what our ministry is about, helping the widowed, elderly and severely disabled," he said.

He also had a feeling the state received more than its share of natural disasters, which was confirmed shortly after Jager arrived, when Kissimmee was hit with severe tornadoes and much of eastern Hernando County was flooded by the torrential El Nino rains of 1997 and 1998.

"I knew without a shadow of a doubt that was what God wanted me to do," Jager said.

The association as grown steadily since, recently moving into a 168,000-square-foot office and warehouse at the Hernando County Airport; its annual budget, supported by donations, is about $1.4-million, he said.

Between storms, it works on the homes of the needy and elderly - and prepares for disasters by stockpiling materials.

So, as soon as it was clear that Charley would bypass Hernando County, Christian Contractors was ready to move.

The group started loading trucks with heavy equipment, chain saws and rolls of plastic sheeting at 3 a.m. Aug. 14, the day after the storm hit. The organization, which is on a state list of agencies that assist with storm recovery, was called by several counties. The contractors chose Polk, because it was relatively close to Hernando and because it had been bypassed in the rush to help counties farther south.

"It was our understanding that no (aid organizations) were in Lake Wales, and that's where we like to go," Jager said.

Charley's winds still raged at 100 mph when it hit Lake Wales, 80 miles northeast of where the storm made landfall. It damaged nearly every neighborhood. Some, such as Simon Roberson's, were devastated.

His street, which is cut off from downtown by U.S. 27, is lined with piles of debris, waiting to be collected by the city. Almost all of it was dragged there by the Christian Contractors, Roberson said.

"Every one of these houses with the tarps on them, they put those up there for no charge," he said.

Though their homes were still without electricity days after the storm, Roberson and his neighbors cooked a feast for the contractors, grilling the meat they had stored in coolers over wood fires and charcoal grills.

Every homeowner had thanked the contractors, Roberson said, but that just didn't seem like enough.

"We really wanted to let them know how much they were appreciated," he said.

The houses on Roberson's street, with their tarped roofs and yards full of tree limbs, are a testament to how much work remains. Jager said his organization has already met with other charities to discuss the next phase of recovery: making substantial repairs to the homes of people who need it most.

The organization also plans to move dry-in crews to Wauchula and other towns that need them. Repairing Charley's damage will occupy the contractors for at least another four weeks, and longer if the association receives more donations.

As always, Jager said, the work is a tool to spread the Christian faith - or restoring it among victims whose belief has been tested by the storm.

That was never an issue with Brown, who muttered, "God is so good," even while surveying the uprooted oak in her back yard and the lemons stripped from their tree.

Her faith in humans, though, was another matter.

"To me, this was a lesson. People don't love any more," Brown said.

Repairing her faith in people, she said, may have been the Christian Contractors' biggest fix-up.

"They are so beautiful," she said. "This is what we've got to have, people helping each other."

Dan DeWitt can be reached at 352 754-6116. Send e-mail to dewitt@sptimes.com

Anyone wanting to contact or make a donation to the Christian Contractors Association may write to the group at P.O. Box 15615, Brooksville, FL 34604, or call the organization at (352) 799-7856 or toll-free 1-800-278-7703.