Sapp arrived on one of the last flights before the airport was closed. He was assigned to an evacuee center in Houma, La., southwest of New Orleans. The center offered shelter to displaced people from New Orleans, as well as from marshy inland areas called “the Bayou.”
Residents of Bayou communities feel abandoned by and large. “Many of them feel like the rest of America doesn’t care,” Sapp says. “They feel like the church doesn’t care. Well, I don’t think it’s that people don’t care. People don’t know.” As soon as the flood waters receded, Bayou residents went home. “If we were going to help people in the Bayous, we realized we’d have to go to them,” he recalls. “We’d have to meet them on their terms, on their turf.”
When many other temporary workers were leaving Louisiana, Sapp was making plans to return for a longer stay. With support from a Lutheran congregation in Houma, the self-described “rambunctious Baptist” arranged to spend six months serving the primarily Catholic population in the Bayou. Sapp calls the situation “ecumenism at its best.”
Today, Sapp lives in a pop-up camper in a bayou area called Pointe-aux-Chenes. Most residents there are not Cajun but Sabine, which means they are Native American or mixed race. “Sadly, they are among the most forgotten of forgotten people,” says Sapp. “Their communities have been devastated.”
Sapp’s work begins with building relationships of trust: “The people here are habitually suspicious of outsiders — often with good reason. So I try to offer friendship and a listening ear. And people are beginning to trust. My caseload is growing.”
Among the people he’s serving, Sapp encounters many problems he faced as a counselor in Oklahoma. People struggle with depression, anxiety, martial problems, conflict resolution and addictions. But there’s also what he calls “a deep and pervasive despair.” And it stems from the disappearance of the land.
Every day, 50 acres of Louisiana coastline is washed away by coastal erosion. This environmental crisis is creating a mental health crisis: endemic hopelessness among people whose ancestors have lived here for hundreds of years.
Isle de Jean Charles is a small community just up the road from where Sapp parks his camper. “The next time a storm comes though,” Sapp says, “this community and the land that’s belonged to these people for generations will be gone forever. And the people know it. If you drive around with an old-timer, he’ll point to open water and say, ‘When I was a boy, this was a farm. They had dairy cows grazing out there and they kept the pigs in a pen near the house, where the gators wouldn’t get them.’ But it’s gone from farmland to open water in just 55 years.”
What makes the situation more tragic is that it’s largely preventable. “There are solutions,” Sapp insists. “What’s lacking is the will to enact them.”
Sapp calls on his fellow American Baptists to fight for coastal preservation: “Hurricane Katrina cost billions and billions of dollars. For a few hundred million we could preserve the coastline and give these communities a buffer of marshland. Two miles of marshland could soak up a foot of storm surge, and save countless homes — people don’t know that. We need to be educated, not only about the environment but about environmental connections of mental health.”
Sapp’s working with local leaders to establish lasting help. “We’ve built a team ... to establish centers that offer prenatal care, a pre-school, basic medical care, pastoral counseling, and alcohol and drug treatment. And we’re seeking to set up these centers right in the Bayou, so people will go to them.”
Sapp invites the wider American Baptist family to come “down the Bayou” themselves. “The people here aren’t looking for charity. They’d much rather have you come down and enjoy yourself. Come enjoy the food — the shrimp, and the crawfish and the crabs. Come for some of the best fishing you’ll find anywhere. Come dancing in the little halls where people of every generation — kids to seniors — gather on Friday nights. Don’t send a handout. Come down and enjoy this land and its people.”
Doug Davidson is a freelance writer and editor living in Berkeley, Calif. He served on the Boards of American Baptist Churches USA and National Ministries from 1996 to 2001. Davidson attends Shell Ridge Community Church, an American Baptist church in Walnut Creek, Calif.
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