original

Posted on Sun, Nov. 20, 2005

Amid ruin, `a beautiful thing'

BY ANDREW MARTIN
Chicago Tribune

WAVELAND, Miss. - The New Waveland Cafe seems like the kind of place one might find near Madison or Berkeley, or perhaps in the parking lot of a Phish concert.

Located inside a cavernous geodesic dome, the cafe offers three meals a day that are served by the Rainbow Family of Living Light, a scruffy assortment of dreadlocked, tattooed and pierced crew members, most of whom are in their 20s. Guitar and drum music wafts from nearby tents, and the Center for Alternative Living Medicine offers condoms and massages.

A few yards away, the scene at the Waveland Market is quite different. An open-air market (a misnomer since everything is free) that offers everything from laundry detergent and clothing to potato chips, it is manned by a neatly groomed staff of evangelical Christians in bright green t-shirts. They are considerably older, and as one might expect, more conservative than the cafe staff.

The New Waveland Cafe and Market is one of the most curious yet inspiring stories to emerge in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Located in a devastated town that took the brunt of the storm's fury, the cafe and marketplace are the combined effort of two groups from radically different backgrounds who have come together to help the residents of the beleaguered Mississippi coastline.

In the process, the Rainbow Family and the church volunteers have found common ground - for one thing, they both like to dance - and mutual respect.
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complete article here

The Rainbow people are great at setting up sanitary campgrounds, serving food and providing entertainment. The Christian volunteers sound like they are doing good work too!
:)
Why don't we just send these folks to disaster areas? They are more organized than FEMA! :)

Check out these quotes from the volunteers:

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Shawn Mikeska, 41, a church volunteer from Texas, said his nine days of working alongside hurricane victims and the Rainbow Family was life changing.

"I was always somebody who was caught up in the differences between people - they are right or they are wrong," he said, adding that now, "I take a different view of what we can accomplish in the world if we just set those ideas aside."

Said Funk, the Rainbow dance instructor, "The thing that we've all learned is that we all want the same thing but the rhetoric and words got in the way. So we took out the words and got to work."

http://www.macon.com/mld/macon/news/nation/13218292.htm?template=contentModules/printstory.jsp