Rotarians send money, muscle to Gulfport, Miss.

Financially speaking, the project won't rank highly among the good deeds of the Carson City Rotary Club. The Carson Tahoe Cancer Center wins that distinction hands down, for which the club is donating $200,000.

But earlier this year, club members found they had $6,700 sitting in an account designated for Hurricane Katrina relief. They'd collected it by passing the hat at their meetings after the hurricane in August 2005, but had never decided the best way to spend it. They didn't want to send it arbitrarily to the Gulf Coast. They wanted to make sure it had a real effect.

Then board member Scott Dockery, who grew up in Ocean Springs, Miss., on the Gulf Coast, began looking for a Rotary club on the Gulf that could use help on one of its projects. What he found is that many Rotarians were still busy rebuilding their own lives, homes and businesses.

Then he heard about a Rotary Club in Gulfport, Miss., which had been trying to raise money to rebuild a playground at the Harrison County Child Development program, and he called its president, Sandi Pickard.

Pickard describes that call this way: "It was just like an angel to us."

The club needed about $25,000 for the project at the school, but had only managed to raise $17,000. The school serves children with autism, physical disabilities and other problems that keep them out of regular classrooms.

The Carson City club quickly approved the project, but rather than mailing a check, Dockery and others in the club decided to deliver it personally, along with their own labor to install the equipment. But first Dockery successfully applied for a Rotary grant, which brought another $3,000 to the pot.

Dockery, Bret Andreas, the club's president, John Copoulos, a past president, and board member Michele Lambert bought their own plane tickets for the trip and flew to New Orleans two weeks ago. They then drove to Gulfport and worked there on Friday and Saturday before driving back to New Orleans. They sweated for two days in the high heat and humidity installing the playground equipment, landscaping the playground, and finishing a variety of other tasks.

"They were hands-on helping us," Pickard said. "We couldn't have done it without their expertise."

The hurricane is old news and rarely warrants a mention on the news programs. But that doesn't mean the region is back to normal. That's what the four discovered on their trip.

Most of the debris had been cleaned up, but in its place was emptiness. Especially in the blocks closest to the coast, where there had been homes and businesses, there was nothing.

Dockery had a hard time figuring out where he was. The landmarks he'd remembered were all gone. Motels, streetlights, even the final home of Jefferson Davis. All gone.

It hit home for him when they drove past the church where his family had held services for his grandmother four months before Katrina struck. It was gone, except for an I-beam and a makeshift cross.

New Orleans is also nowhere near what it once was. There were no crowds there in the French Quarter and they never had any problem with traffic anywhere during their trip. Progress is slow, but tangible. A Rotary Club members had them over for dinner during their trip, and they ate in a home that had filled with 5 feet of water following the hurricane. All evidence of the disaster in that home had been cleaned away, but outside was a different story.

"It's still a long ways from being squared away," said Andreas.

"We are recovering day by day, but we're still a long way," said Pickard, who sustained $25,000 in damage to her home. Her three children lost their homes and moved back in with her. "It was just such a tremendous loss of homes and businesses and structures."

She said she still gets cold chills thinking of all the help that came, and is still coming.

The Rotary project was another small step in a long journey of recovery for the Gulf, but it represented progress. For that reason, and for the appreciation shown by the school and the Mississippi Rotary members, the four Carson City Rotarians won't forget the project.

"Outside of my family, this is the coolest thing I've ever done," Dockery said.

• Barry Ginter is editor of the Appeal. You can reach him at 881-1221 or via e-mail at bginter@nevadaappeal.com.