Success is...

Having a child remember your name and knowing that that child has nothing consistent in her life right now.

Success is knowing that your sweat and tears is making a difference in the life of a child, a YMCA adult, an individual of a broken community, a parent that knows that for a short period of time their child will be well cared for and nurtured and reminded that not all is bad in the world. A short time is priceless to these folks.

success is getting up in the morning, loading up the van, driving the 25 minutes west into the "war" zone. Josephe, Zach, Leigh and Meredith travel each morning to Long Beach, a community 25 minutes west of Ocean Springs. The father west you travel from Ocean Springs the worst things seem, the worst things are. The communities of Long Beach and Pass Christian are juxtaposed on a peninsula of land in the Gulf of Mexico. When the waters rose to 30 feet above sea level and the storm surge topped that by another 12 feet is swept from one side of the peninsula to another. The sights we saw today are like nothing we have ever seen, or want to see again. Nothing remains in some parts. Communities have been wiped from the map. Standing on a corner of a small town in Mississippi today we realized that it is not just peoples homes that were lost to the sea but also their bank, local eater, place of worship, school, grocery, etc. It is what they did and who they are. Their whole life was taken by the sea.

It was personal. We stood on that corner and realized that the children we hug and feed and watch during the day have lost what we all take for granted and what we all know as home. Home is no more. Home has to be rebuilt from the ground up.

Elayne, Kim, Erik, and Howard all stay here at the YMCA of the Mississippi Gulf Coast to help in the nursery and at the Aquatics Center respectively. Howard spends his day lifeguarding, teaching swimming lessons and going back and forth between there and the nursery. The others have almost sole responsibility for infants and toddlers in an understaffed nursery. We wondered almost immediately upon arriving why everywhere is so understaffed; where is everyone. Well, everyone has left, ran from the storm to return to nothing to again leave for something better. The ones that are still here are working for FEMA for better wages or collecting unemployment simply because they can. Progress is on the horizon but we all know that the horizon can sometimes be an illusion.

success is not an illusion but a feeling. We feel it. Today was a good day and tomorrow will be even better.