By CHLOE STEPNEY, Yahoo! News
The distance between Washington state and the Gulf of Mexico is no obstacle for Ché Gilliland, a kindergarten teacher in Coupeville, Wash., who regularly volunteers in the Gulf region.
"It's just a matter of time before I move there," Gilliland said. "There are just so many different efforts going on. There's just a vitality there of how many people want to help."
Thousands of people have registered in volunteer databases to help clean up the Gulf region after BP's Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded on April 20, 2010, releasing about 5 million barrels of oil over the following months. Yet only trained, paid workers are allowed to deal with the oil itself, because of its hazardous nature - which tends to limit the possibilities for prospective volunteers.
"I had to work at it: You have to get on a lot of lists and do a lot of research" to find volunteer opportunities, Gilliland said.
Gilliland first visited New Orleans on a volunteer trip in December, inspired by Tom Piazza's book "Why New Orleans Matters" to help with rebuilding after 2005's Hurricane Katrina. She fell so in love with the people there that when she returned from her nine-day excursion, she immediately started planning another visit to coastal Louisiana.
After taking care of her work and other home obligations, she was finally able to make it back in May. But in the intervening time, BP's oil rig had exploded, and her plan to continue Katrina rebuilding took a detour.
The trip lasted into June, and in July she went again, this time for three weeks. She planted in the bayous; she cleared trash from beaches and walked them looking for oil; she went door to door talking to locals about how they'd suffered, so that their stories could be documented. She even made hair boom to soak up the spilled oil.
"It was kind of like if you were a spinner or weaver," Gilliland said. The hair comes from sheep, alpacas, dogs and humans, donated by farms, kennels and hair salons.
"You put the pantyhose leg straight down [a PVC pipe], like you're putting it on your own foot. As you're stuffing it, it starts to look like a fat leg, like a sausage," she said.
She wrote thank-you notes to the hair providers, too.
Volunteer jobs are not glamorous, but they fill a hole, said Marianne Thompson of New Orleans, who works mostly with the National Audubon Society. She too said she was "kind of aggressive" in her quest to help - in her case, to help and save the birds she studies and admires.
"The problem is that for unskilled volunteers, there's a very limited number of opportunities. ... Unless you have the training, you can't touch the birds," she said.
Given that, "I was very happy to do anything."
Her first job was calling around in search of volunteers for the National Audubon Society. "Well, shoot," she thought, "I'm going to sign myself up."
Eventually she became a "transportation liaison" — basically, a chauffeur for rescued birds. She has also been involved in bird counts, establishing baseline populations.
Thompson held a full-time job until three years ago, when she became a freelance copywriter. Her flexible schedule lets her help wildlife whenever opportunities arise.
"When you fall in love with a place that is hot, humid, you know, full of mosquitoes that suck your blood, swampy," Thompson said, "it's absolute, total love. ... This is the scene of great beauty. It really is what motivates me."
But it's a scene that scientists consider one of America's most endangered. Louisiana's shoreline was already losing a football field's worth of marsh every 38 minutes: That's a statistic that several volunteers cited independently. The oil spill deteriorates the coastline even more.
"In recent years, it's become clear that the Mississippi River Delta is in a pretty catastrophic ecosystem collapse," said David Ringer, Mississippi River initiative communications coordinator of the National Audubon Society.
"Instead of finding ways of benefiting from the resources it offers, we've basically sucked it dry, and the land itself is basically disappearing."
Volunteers are needed to help restore and protect the area, but "it's really important for people to understand the length of time it's going to take for this ecosystem to recover," Ringer said. "We need people to stay with us and keep making a difference in the future."
Meanwhile, though, reports suggest that oil now seems to be disappearing from the Gulf. Organizations and residents worry that cleanup efforts will slow down, and that the number of volunteers will fizzle, even though the Deepwater Horizon Unified Command reported that 26 percent of the spilled oil remains in the Gulf.
The worry about so-called compassion fatigue is echoed by volunteer Paula Purvis.
"I'm very concerned about the wetlands," Purvis said. "I would be a fool if I said that a year from now everyone would be as proactive. Americans have short memories."
Purvis — a New Orleans native who is a sales manager for a luxury hotel in the city — volunteers with the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana. But to get out in the field and help, she had to overcome more than just the usual logistical obstacles like home and work obligations.
She is terrified of snakes and murky waters.
One day her job was to help plant about 1,000 bull-reed pods to help restore the wetlands. "I never dreamed in my lifetime that I would be in a marsh," she said.
Still, she waded in, alongside people from federal Fish and Wildlife Department and the Barataria-Terrebonne National Estuary Program.
"It was probably one of the biggest highlights of my life. ... I had to do something that I was really scared of, but really proud of," Purvis said.
It's people like Purvis who inspire Gilliland, the Washington schoolteacher, to return to the Gulf to help restore devastated land and communities.
"I just want to throw my energy into the ring with them," Gilliland said.
Gilliland still feels just as compelled to help now, at home in Coupeville, as she did when was in the Gulf. She knows there must be ways she can contribute from afar - but she says it's only a matter of time before she moves to the Gulf.
"I just had no idea just how beautiful that bayou system is. I just imagined that they were deep, dark swamps."
For more information about how to help, visit the volunteering Web pages of Volunteer Louisiana, the Louisiana Gulf Response Involvement Team (GRIT) or the National Audubon Society.
