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Folks call Carolina the Southern Part of Heaven.
Wilber Holland would agree.
"You all were like angels."
Holland has been on this earth almost 82 years but has been forced by Hurricane
Floyd to spend this last one without his own home.
A year after the flood hit his hometown of Grifton, he and hundreds of his
neighbors in this East Carolina hamlet still lacked permanent housing. But that
will change for Holland, thanks in large part to remnants of the 2000 Tar Heel
Bus Tour that hit town Sept. 16 and flipped his life a lot closer to the right
side of normal.
More than a dozen bus tour veterans and some of their spouses boarded a 6:30
a.m. bus in the Ramshead parking lot and headed east. The group didn't know its
assignment until arriving in Grifton, where relief workers directed the bus to
an abandoned mobile home that Floyd had left unfit for living.
The group's mission: take apart the home and toss the pieces into piles sorted
by what could be recycled and what had to be discarded. That way the house
could be moved from the site, and Wilber Holland could move into a home.
With his Grifton apartment ruined by four feet of floodwaters, Holland has been
living for the past nine months in his son's and daughter-in-law's backyard in
a tiny trailer on loan from the federal government.
His family bought him a new mobile home that's been ready for more than three
months, but the Hollands didn't have anywhere to put it -- the abandoned
trailer sat on the land they'd rented.
Son Tom wanted to tear down the old trailer but "didn't know where to start."
But Carolina did.
The bus tour veterans donned safety glasses and surgical masks, formed a bucket
brigade and emptied the house of mold-ridden furniture and long-defunct
appliances. Then, with ball-cap-wearing Wilber watching from the shade of a
nearby tree and Tom rolling up his sleeves to help, they tore into the metal
siding and wood frame with crowbars, power saws and sledgehammers.
A few hours and many bottled-water drinks later, the old trailer lay in heaps,
and a new mobile home would soon be on the way.
"You people don't realize how much I appreciate what you're doing," said
Wilber, a World War II veteran who grew up in Grifton and worked construction
until he was 74. "I've been waiting patiently for almost a year."
The Carolina crew's day didn't end then. They loaded their tools back on the
bus and rode to another site and demolished another house that had to come down
before a family could rebuild.
Organizers bill the Tar Heel Bus Tour as a way for new faculty and
administrators to get to know North Carolina and see how the University serves
the state.
For the group that went to Grifton, getting to know North Carolina last May led
to serving it this September. The 2000 tour included a stop in Grifton to see
the ravages of Floyd. As the tour ended a few days later in the Friday Center
parking lot, bus riders decided "to give something back to UNC and the
community," said John Case, director of contracts and grants, who helped
organize the Sept. 16 trip.
He called the group's mission an "inspired thing."
"We really bonded on [the bus tour] and felt this would be a good way to keep
in touch and help someone out," he said.
Case said he was proud to be a part of the effort in Grifton. "I felt really
good about what happened -- it showed that people who make a commitment can
make a difference for someone less fortunate."
2000 bus tour alumni plan to continue their outreach efforts, Case said. Return
trips to Grifton and holiday feasts for the needy are among the ideas on the
table.
The Sept. 16 trip was sponsored by the Carolina Center for Public Service,
which has organized dozens of similar treks down east.
"We worked hard and the day was long, but I think all of us came home with a
greater sense of what it means to be a Tar Heel," said center director Nick
Didow, who lent his sweat and demolition expertise to the cause in Grifton.
"That's the beauty of this trip. We toured in May to learn about North
Carolina, and we returned in September to fix something we saw that needed
fixing."
Didow said it's important that Carolina continue to help in Floyd's wake.
"It's hard for people who have not been in the flood areas to imagine that
people's lives are still so disrupted by this storm of a year ago," he said.
"It's going to take a sustained, Herculean effort to get eastern North Carolina
back to normal, and we believe that we can count on the Carolina family to be a
part of that."
Sign up for Oct. 28 trip
The next Carolina Center for Public Service-sponsored Hurricane Floyd
relief trip will be Oct. 28. Participants will include the Sonja Haynes Stone
Black Cultural Center, the Carolina Association of Black Journalists and Sigma
Alpha Epsilon fraternity.
More volunteers are welcome. Call 3-7568 or see http://www.unc.edu/cps for more
information.
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