July 25, 2009

NEW ORLEANS – While watching dozens of Lutheran teens clean up a cemetery, Bobbiann Lewis talked about how Jesus multiplied a few loaves and fishes to feed a crowd.

She said the teens were the "loaves and fishes" she needed to help restore a historic African American burial site. Two years ago, she stood alone in her effort to bring dignity to Holt Cemetery in the heart of the city.

"It's a pauper's cemetery," said Lewis, 52, a death educator at a community college next to the site. "There's no perpetual care. When it rains and time passes, the ground starts sinking in and bones are exposed."

The cemetery is a lumpy dirt field full of weeds and brush. Some graves are marked with wooden headstones, but many of the names of the dead are no longer legible. One headstone is made of Styrofoam. Others are broken, askew or missing.

Diane Simpson, a 52-year-old youth leader from Chicago, said she'd never seen a cemetery look so bad. She winced at the sight of the toppled tombstones and overgrown brush covering graves.

"I'm so sad at seeing this that I just don't have the words," said Simpson, a member of Holy Family Lutheran Church, Chicago, a congregation of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA).

Nearly 37,000 youth and adults are in New Orleans for the 2009 Youth Gathering, an ELCA event held every three years. It's the largest convention in New Orleans since Hurricane Katrina hit four years ago.

As part of the event, the ELCA is sending out 12,000 youths and adults daily July 23-25 to help with recovery efforts. Many youth arrived expecting to build homes.

"On the bus ride here this morning they told us we would be cleaning a graveyard," said Olivia Wedegaertner, 14, of Raleigh, N.C. "I thought, ‘Oh gross.' Then we got here and saw how much we were needed."

Just before lunch, she stumbled across a human skull.

"We blessed it and buried it back in the ground," she said. "We've tried to be very respectful."

Clad in blazing orange T-shirts, the youth recovered and reburied many bones as they worked. They filled several wheelbarrows with brush and weeds collected in 90 degree heat.

At one point, Nolan Leehy stood by the grave of a homeless person covered with a blanket and chairs. Family members brought her personal items "to appease her spirit," Lewis said.

"It makes me realize that a lot of people don't have things I take for granted in life," said Leehy, 15, a member of First Lutheran Church in Blair, Neb. "I never thought you could learn that from a cemetery."

Because Holt Cemetery is at water level, graves are dug by hand and only go four feet deep. Only wooden caskets are allowed, which hastens decay. That's important because bodies are buried atop of one another. One grave listed nine names on its marker.

"I was shocked that they have to put people in graves together, and at seeing the bones out there," said Gail Starr, 52, of Durham, N.C. "These poor people deserve all the dignity, respect and hard work we can offer."

More information is at Pretty Good Lutherans http://blogs.ELCA.org/prettygoodlutherans/, on the ELCA Web site. Information about the 2009 Youth Gathering is at http://www.ELCA.org/gathering/, on the ELCA Web site.

ELCA News Service