Editor's Note: Kathleen Koch is a Washington-based freelance journalist, author and speaker. Her best-selling new book, “Rising from Katrina,” traces her Mississippi hometown’s recovery from Hurricane Katrina and her experiences covering it. For 18 years, she was a CNN correspondent.

By Kathleen Koch, Special to CNN

I just returned from another visit to the Mississippi Gulf Coast, where gratitude is as plentiful this Thanksgiving as the “For Sale” signs that dot the beachfront. It might seem puzzling in a region where the recovery is still very much a work in progress.

“We are busier than ever, particularly since the oil spill,” acknowledged the smiling, silver-haired nurse at a fundraiser this week for Biloxi’s Bethel Free Health Clinic. The clinic sprang to life in 2005 to meet the needs of Mississippi residents who after Hurricane Katrina no longer had the money to pay for health care.

“This job was an answer to a prayer of mine,” said 70-year-old Bethel director Judy Jones. The retired nurse had been helping hand out cleanup supplies, but prayed for a paying job that better fit her skills and would help pay for repairs on her hurricane-damaged home.

For two and a half years, Jones ran the clinic out of a Lutheran church with volunteer doctors and nurses from out of state. But then the post-hurricane state of emergency was declared over. Jones introduced me to the tall, bespectacled doctor who came out of retirement to fill the gap.

FULL POST