"Do unto others" rings true for Seattle gospel choir

Columnist Nicole Brodeur and staff photographer Steve Ringman are traveling with Seattle's Total Experience Gospel Choir as it performs a series of fundraisers for victims of Hurricane Katrina.

GULFPORT, Miss. — Every hotel room smelled musty, and the carpets felt damp in a few, but no one from the Total Experience Gospel Choir dared complain.

They had just visited a FEMA "village" in Lake Charles, La., where 192 travel trailers and 304 mobile homes sit in stark rows. "Prison camp," muttered Pastor Patrinell Wright, 62, who brought the choir to the region last week to do Hurricane Katrina relief work by day and perform free concerts at night.

As the days unfolded, in a heat that cooked like a brick oven, the choir members were learning about themselves amid the suffering that continued to haunt the Gulf states a year after Katrina slashed ashore."Do unto others is what this trip is about for me," said choir member Sally Reavis, 46. Lulu Strange, 29, has been a Total Experience member since she was 7. ("My mom thought I needed an outlet.")

She has traveled far and wide with the choir, crossing international borders, but this trip has meant so much more.

The federal government is "so willing to help everybody else," Strange said, "but it doesn't have the same priority of helping its own people."

Straight gospel

On Wednesday night, the choir performed at the Belle Fountain Baptist Church in Ocean Springs.

"This will be easy here," Wright said as they entered the church, a white, aluminum-sided building on a country road. "This is straight gospel."

On any given performance, Wright can select from some 500 songs, depending on what she senses about the audience.

"She decides. She knows what she needs and when to pull it out and use it," said Louis Magor, 61, Wright's accompanist and the music teacher at Tilden School in West Seattle.

"Pat's aim is to give people hope."

The 80 people who came seemed to hold back a bit, but none of them missed the significance of choir member Camila Recchi singing "His Eye Is on the Sparrow" while her grandmother, Anna Landrum, who lives in neighboring Laurel, watched.

Recchi was visiting her grandmother when Katrina hit, and this was her first trip back.

She sang beautifully for a while, then faltered, then fell apart.

After a few moments, Recchi resumed, then finished, smiling for the crowd that had done its share of crying, too.

"I was thrilled to my soul," Landrum said.

After they had packed up and hit the road, the choir pulled off Highway 90 for dinner at Applebee's. The diner's TV was tuned to the local ABC affiliate that had filmed the choir at work earlier that day. Diners cheered along with the choir when the piece ended.

Then Ann Marie and Dwain Simpson approached Wright's table.

Ann Marie spoke, said she grew up in Connecticut and retired down here with her husband, who is a native.

"Thank you for what you're doing here," she told Wright. "I don't think there are words to express. ... "

And then another kind of levee broke.

Katrina only put two trees on their house, she said. They're staying. But a lot of good people left.

"They just couldn't deal with it," she said. "I don't know why we're still here. ... "

Then she looked at her husband: "We want to be part of the recovery."

Ann Marie volunteers at the food pantry in Waveland, where lines are getting longer. So they have to ration things like coffee, and can only offer staples

"There's no lagniappe," she said, a New Orleans expression meaning "a little something extra."

"We can't even give them a doughnut," she said. "There's just no comfort food."

Wright put her head in her hand and quietly wept, then gathered herself, stood and gathered the choir around her. Magor, the accompanist, stood and put his arm around Ann Marie Simpson.

"We want to thank you," they sang. "For who you are and all that you've done."

They sang it to Simpson, who cried and took her husband's hand, to the tough-guy waiter who wiped away tears, to the bookkeeper who rushed up from the back of the restaurant. To anyone who was still there at Applebee's.

"It just gets better and better each minute, doesn't it?" choir member Joseph Connor said to Wright as they walked to the choir's rented vans.

Tired as she was, as cried-out as she was, Wright couldn't disagree.

She could only go back to the hotel, to her musty fourth-floor "suite," a queen in a land that needed all she could offer.

This trip is different

Thursday dawned hot. Wright spotted a couple asleep on the beach and walked over to hear their story. Before long, she had dispatched Magor for a knapsack of toiletries and then paid for the couple to stay in her hotel for the night. Wright and 10 choir members headed over to a ballfield converted into a volunteer camp run by CityTeam Ministries, of San Jose, Calif., whose members were busy cooking for 20 construction workers.

The choir already had bought $700 worth of groceries. The members set to work peeling and cutting potatoes, browning meat, boiling pasta, cooking bacon and baking cupcakes in what used to be the dugout and concession stand.

The heat was relentless.

But none of the choir members, including Sherri Charleton, 47, Gina Brooks, 34, and her sister Tanisha Brooks, 39, complained.

This trip is different. They had visited places such as Russia and Nicaragua, but here they are ministering to their own people.

"Our problems are nothing, compared to this," Tanisha Brooks told me.

Shirley Miller lives across the street from the camp but has opened her door to those in need. Sitting in her kitchen, Miller tells the stories of this place: The woman who got $39,000 and a new trailer from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and didn't even live here. The deaths. The day the water surged from the sea. "I live 13 miles from the Gulf of Mexico and had 29 feet and 4 inches of water, right up to the third floor."

As she talked, a woman with five children under 8 years old appeared at the door, looking for CityTeam Ministries' help.

Other agencies she had approached for help "treat me like a dog," she told Wright, who took two of the kids across the street for food and hugs from the kitchen crew.

Martell Brooks, Gina's 10-year-old son, took it all in.

"Younger kids need to see that this goes on," Gina Brooks said. "Even if they never do it again, they can say, 'I helped somebody in my life.' "

It was just that way for Jenna Caluza, 18, Victoria Fuangaromya, 14, and Élan Bailey, 14, three choir members who were dispatched to Ola Wilson's Gulfport home to help her gut the place.

"I was worried that we would come down and see it and just be singing. I just really wanted to get my hands dirty," Bailey said.

The girls worked and sweated for a couple of hours, while the rain fell steady and strong outside the open windows. After they finished, they ran into the street and showered off.

Wilson watched from her front door, allowing at least one memory to rise.

"We used to do that when I was a kid," she said, and then smiled.

A message not lost

Before the choir left town, Bonnie Ringdahl, 44, co-leader of the CityTeam camp, asked me to pass along a message.

"Make sure everyone knows how much hope they're bringing," she said. "When Katrina goes down in the history books, it will be all about the volunteers; it will be about groups like this, because they're helping people make new memories."

The message was not lost on Wright.

"I'm not going to stop now," Wright said. "This is going to be part of my ministry for the rest of my life."

Nicole Brodeur's column appears Wednesday and Sunday. Reach her at 206-464-2334 or nbrodeur@seattletimes.com.