"We went to the ninth ward, and it was like Dresden after World War II. Trees in the street, homes ripped off their foundations. You could have dropped a thousand bombs and it wouldn't have been as bad," Dave Scheffel, one of 15 members of Lutheran Church of the Resurrection, Garden City, who traveled to New Orleans in May for a week of volunteer service, remembers.

New Orleans continues to recover from the effects of Hurricane Katrina, which caused major flooding and catastrophic damage to the city last August. "I think you expect things to be bad," Pastor Jeff Browning, who also volunteered, said. "But until you see it, drive through it, hear the silence, see the houses torn down like they melted in the middle of the road, you can't be prepared."

The group's main objective was "gutting" water-damaged houses in other neighborhoods, salvageable neighborhoods damaged not as badly as the ninth ward. This consisted of removing everything inside the house, including furniture, remaining possessions, walls and ceilings, and placing it on the curb for later removal. "We ripped out sheetrock, nails, molding," Scheffel said. The houses were left with little more than foundation and studs. Browning says the task was essentially like "making a mountain of garbage out of people's former lives."

Four of these mountains were made by week's end, one house per day of work. Residents of each house were there, providing lunch for the hungry workers. However, the week wasn't all work. Says Browning, "We would make a concerted effort to connect with residents and try to minister with them as best we could." This connection came in the form of listening. "I'll remember talking with the people, hearing their stories," Nathan Erb, another Resurrection volunteer, added. Erb noted in the residents "a death and rebirth. They see their stuff going, but are optimistic about the future."

One resident, 73-year-old Harold Ramon Doucher, shared his story. On the night the levees broke, Doucher awoke to rising water at his front porch. He went back to bed, only to wake up several hours later to find three feet of standing water in his house. He waded through the flooded house, bumping into his floating refrigerator, and continued in the darkness out into the neck-deep water in the street. Doucher then swam through his neighborhood, past swimming snakes and floating debris, to a cemetery on higher ground. There he waited in a mausoleum with several other flood victims. Fourteen days later, they were rescued. It wasn't until Doucher reached a temporary residence in Atlanta that he was able to contact his family.

"To him," says Erb, "the most important thing was finding his family. He wasn't concerned about his house or possessions, he just wanted to find his family." This prioritization impressed Erb, who said the residents' "outlook on life and their positive hope was inspiring." Browning agreed, remembering the "miracle of their positive attitude in the face of adversity."

It is this attitude the city of New Orleans will need to sustain on the road to recovery that lies ahead. It is a long road. Many sections of the city are not back to normal and won't be for a while. Even the church the group stayed in, St. Paul Lutheran in the Faubourg Marigny section, sustained significant wind damage, losing its sanctuary's roof. Browning describes the feeling one gets when considering the magnitude of work that needs to be done. "You're helping, doing something important, but you wish you could do more." And with help from Resurrection and other groups like it, more will be done.