Feeling the pain in Kenly

KENLY -- Ron and Sue Fautz laughed a little, as if joking, when they said "guilt" brought them from their home in Wilson to the debris-strewn yards of tornado victims they didn't even know in Kenly.

They laughed, but they were not joking.

"There is a little guilt involved," Sue Fautz admitted. "You realize it could've been us."

Their home could have been turned into kindling and all of their worldly possessions strewn about the yard, exposed to the elements and the world.

"We just wanted to help," Sue Fautz said.

I'm glad the Fautzes admitted that guilt was part of the reason they came out to help strangers: The phenomenon known as survivor's guilt was also part of the reason I trekked to Kenly.

The tornado that killed two people and led Gov. Mike Easley to declare that section of the state a disaster area struck just one day before my boneheadedness with a pot of pinto beans -- don't ask -- almost left me homeless. Only the hasty response by the Durham Fire Department kept me from facing a fate similar to the now-displaced Kenly residents.

Helping someone left homeless through no fault of his own seemed like the least I could do.

Ron Fautz, retired vice president for advancement for Wilson's Barton College, and his wife felt the same way. "The tornado hit above us and below us," he said, recalling that the same thing happened 30 years ago when they were graduate students at Michigan State University: A tornado devastated a community three blocks from their apartment but left them unscathed.

"We saw the damage it did then, so we're very respectful when we hear the word 'tornado,' " he said.

Asked how they ended up out in the field with sore backs, stepping over broken glass and headless baby dolls, trying to help strangers salvage something of their lives, Sue Fautz pointed toward what used to be a house and explained: "Our daughter's in-laws are part of the disaster team in the yellow shirts out there. They said they could use all the help they could get."

By the time I got there around noon Monday, the men in yellow shirts -- volunteers from N.C. Baptist Men -- apparently had gotten all the help they needed. I was shooed out of the yard brusquely but apologetically by single-minded volunteers who explained that their work had been hampered enough by soulless gawkers. (They didn't say "soulless." I did.)

"The man who lived here was so upset that people were just coming up ... stepping over their things and taking pictures, that he was shaking," one of the yellow-shirted volunteers said. "He agreed to let us help if we kept everybody back" behind yellow police tape encircling what used to be a house.

Randolph Wilson, a coordinator with the Baptist men's group, said members had to gain the trust of tornado-battered residents. "It took us a day or two to build a relationship with them."

Gawkers, he said, were a problem "particularly on Sunday and Monday. A couple of families just didn't want people coming onto their property before they had a chance to go through their precious belongings and sift through their mementos."

Despite evidence to the contrary, the Fautzes denied being heroic -- "We're the wimps. A lot of people did way more than we did." But the looks on the faces of the families whose homes were destroyed or severely damaged told a different story: Everybody who came out to help them was a hero. Only those who came to gawk were wimps.