Christians, hippies bond in Katrina efforts

WAVELAND, Miss. — Days after Hurricane Katrina hit, they began cooking together in a grocery store parking lot : evangelical Christians from Texas and Rainbow Family flower children from all over.

Soon they were serving 1,000 free meals a day at their cafe, housed in a domed tent. Side by side, this improbable alliance worked nonstop, helping the people of what was once a scenic beach town.

Gradually, barriers melted. The evangelicals overlooked the hippies’ unusual attire, outlandish humor and persistent habit of hugging total strangers. The hippies nodded politely when the church people cited Scripture. The bonds formed at Waveland Village have surprised both groups.

“We are Methodists, Episcopalians and Baptists, along with various and sundry other Christian groups,” said Fay Jones, an organizer of the Bastrop (Texas) Ministerial Alliance. “Did we ever think we would have such a wonderful relationship with hippies? No.”

Brad Stone, an emergency medical technician from the Rainbow Family, called the Christian-hippie coalition his new community. He explained: “It has been unbelievable. We are all so close. I am actually dreading leaving.”

But nearly three months after they got here, the Rainbow Family volunteers and the Texas church delegation are preparing to head home. They will serve a grand banquet on Thanksgiving Day — turkey with all the trimmings, which at the Waveland Village Cafe includes steamed seaweed. Over the holiday weekend they will hold a huge parade.

Then the church folks will hop into their pickup trucks and the hippies will climb into their psychedelic school buses. Both sides say they have been forever changed by the experience.

“They are as amazed as we are,” said Pete Jones, who with his wife organized the ministerial group. “We have all learned so much.”

The Christians from about a dozen churches near Austin arrived first, four days after the hurricane, when the roads to Waveland were barely passable. Jones, 67, said they were drawn by God to the asphalt in front of a demolished supermarket.

When the volunteers began cooking, famished storm victims emerged out of nowhere. Some were naked, having lost every stitch of clothing to Katrina. All were so hungry that the Texans began running out of food. They decided to pray.

“We thought we’d better be specific, so we prayed for hot dogs, because they could be cut up to feed a lot of people,” Fay Jones said. “About the time we said ‘Amen,’ a guy drives up with a truck filled with 2,600 hot dogs. That was the beginning of the miracles around here.”

The next wondrous event occurred when the Rainbow Family appeared. The ministerial group was exhausted from nonstop cooking for a crowd that multiplied with every parking-lot meal. Hippies with dreadlocks and body piercings poured out of a bus painted like a Crayola box.

“We set up two 10-by-10 pop-up tents and started cooking,” said 25-year-old Clovis Siemon, an organic farmer and filmmaker from Wisconsin. “We were trying to find someplace to fit in, somewhere to be useful.”

Aaron Funk, an Arthur Murray dance instructor from Berkeley, Calif., also was among the first Rainbow Family volunteers here. Funk, 33, said his group was well-prepared for the effort after decades of Rainbow Family “gatherings” on mountaintops and in national forests.

With tens of thousands of “brothers and sisters” scattered around the world, the Rainbow Family calls itself the largest “non-organization” of “non-members” on the planet. There are no rules, no dues and no officers — just a Web site (strictly non-official, it stresses) that promotes the belief that “Peace and Love are a great thing, and there isn’t enough of that in this world.”

Funk said the Katrina disaster response marked the Rainbow Family’s first major volunteer effort. The call for help went out on cellphones and on the Internet.

“We figured it was a social obligation,” he said. “We already had the working knowledge of feeding large numbers of people. We got here, and the sense of desperation and urgency was off the charts. There was no time to talk about it. It was just service, time to do what we came here to do.”

As the village mushroomed, the health tent Stone launched became a full-scale clinic, featuring massage and herbal remedies along with a well-stocked pharmacy. Nearby, the evangelicals set up a “store” to provide free supplies and clothing for storm victims. Everything was donated — another miracle, the Texas volunteers maintain.

Each day, to keep up the giddy buzz inside the geodesic dome cafe, a Rainbow Family volunteer known as Sister Soup had the whole tent sing “Happy Birthday” to some nonexistent person. Impromptu concerts occurred most evenings, sometimes when someone just felt like singing, Movie nights focused on comedies, or escapist fare like “Star Wars.”

The seaweed made its way to Waveland via Ramona Rubin of the Rainbow Family. When she left Santa Cruz, Calif., a woman at the farmers’ market there handed her a suitcase to take to Mississippi, filled with lustrous green kelp. Rubin, 28, is now known as Sister Seaweed.

“Very nutritious, helps you to detoxify,” she said, spooning a hearty helping of seaweed onto a diner’s plate. She looked up and admitted: “I’m absolutely amazed that people are eating this. There is just this real openness.”

Standing next to her in the lunch service line, Siemon was reminded her of another unlikely encounter at Waveland Village.

“The first week we were here,” he said, “we had a guy from the Pentagon sitting in a circle with us, chanting ‘Om.’ It was pretty cool.”

Still, after nearly three months, the organizers of Waveland Village say it is time to move on. Traditional stores and restaurants are reopening here, and while the landscape remains decimated, a shaky new normalcy is taking hold.

“Our purpose is not to detract from the local economy,” Pete Jones said.

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