On Saturday afternoon of their fall break service trip, a team of 10 Elon students and two faculty members is dispatched to the property of Kim and Mark Uram, a middle-aged couple who lived just a few blocks from North Beach Boulevard in Bay St. Louis, Miss. Details…
Story by Cathy Hefferin
Photos by Jerome Sturm
University Relations
There is complete destruction in this area just north of the four-lane, two-mile bridge that once connected the town to Pass Christian. The bridge is gone. A railroad bridge that ran parallel is gone. All that is left on most lots are concrete slabs where the houses once stood and yards filled with twisted metal, broken boards, shreds of clothing and mangled household appliances.
Kim and Mark, both real estate agents who worked out of their home, have lived here for over 40 years on property inherited from Mark’s father. The house, one of the first ever built in this area and around 100 years old, was originally a caretaker’s house on a plantation. The caretaker’s name was Leopold, hence the street is named Leopold Street, Kim explains to the students.
The house had survived Camille, when Mark was a student at the University of Mississippi. It didn’t survive Katrina. They are trying to clear part of their two-acre lot in preparation for the arrival of a FEMA trailer, where they will live for the next six months to a year until they are able to rebuild.
The Urams have been living in a Jayco pop-out camping trailer, with no kitchen and no bath. “That blue tarp over there is our latrine,” Kim points out, explaining the use of lime to the students. “We go eat at the soup kitchen every day.” Between them, Mark and Kim have six children and two grandchildren with one more grandchild on the way.
Kim has been concentrating on raking the area where her bedroom once stood because she is looking for her wedding ring. The band had broken so she didn’t have it on at the time of the storm.
Half the team pitches in to help Kim clean, while Mark leads the other half to a part of the yard behind and to the right of where the house stood. It is filled with scraps of lumber, metal and other building materials, which must be carted to the edge of the street before anyone will come and carry it away.
Kim explains that she and Mark rode out the storm at a friend’s house in downtown Bay St. Louis. That house was spared major damage, but when they emerged after the storm and took a look around, her first comment was, “Oh thank God we’re alive.”
Kim says it took them three tries to get back to their property after the storm because the roads were covered with 25-foot piles of debris. “We’ve just been tackling this a little bit at a time,” she says, “It was like, where to you start?” The Elon students are the first volunteers to find them. The students ask about Kim and Mark’s lives while hauling bricks to a stack that will be salvaged and junk to the pile near the street.
Emily Dillard and Stephanie Herbin, both juniors and elementary education majors, don multi-colored Mardi Gras beads. “Kim said she collected them from a big Mardi Gras float,” says Stephanie. “After the storm there were big gobs of them in the trees.” Mark points out to the girls the spot where the couple’s refrigerator ended up, at the far end of their property line. Later, Dillard finds a necklace that has sentimental value to Kim.
Ocek Eke, assistant professor of communications, picks up a milky white vase. “I’m just amazed at finding fragile things like this untouched,” he says, as he lays it on a set of concrete steps where small pieces of the Urams’ lives are slowly accumulating. He is one of three faculty members who made the trip to Bay St. Louis with the students. Jaime Orejan, assistant professor of leisure and sport management, fires up a chain saw and makes quick work of a downed sapling.
Courtney Dimont, a sophomore business major from Elon, N.C., says helping the Urams was her favorite part of trip. “They were really, really appreciative,” she says. “We found the right people to help.”