Neighbors Gather Splinters of Hope Strewn by Andrew : Rebuilding: On one block in South Florida, loss is a common thread. But families keep eyes on tomorrow.

Miraculously, after his wife sprinkled holy water around the house, Domingos Gonsalves slept through the storm. But in the three weeks since, he has hardly slept at all.

“I wish I could sleep,” said Gonsalves, 54, a small man with short-cropped gray hair who owns a concrete paving business. “All my family lost their houses--my sons, my parents are living here. My wife and I are screaming at each other. Customers are calling. I’ve got $200,000 damage to my office.

“I’m trying to stay calm. But this heat . . . I tell you, if I could do one thing right now, I’d have electricity and put the air conditioning back on.”

There is no electrical power to most of this area, one of the hardest hit by Hurricane Andrew, and for the residents of one short section of Southwest 274th Street, there are only remnants of the routines and pleasures of their former lives.

Here, on one block in a vast zone of devastation in one of South Florida’s sunniest, most fertile corners, normal has been splintered, like the grove of avocado trees across the street, and the days have ragged ends. The people on 274th Street are not the worst off of hundreds of thousands affected by the storm. But they are typical.

Next door to the Gonsalveses, Amy Cumbie can’t work as a seamstress without power and can’t shuttle her four kids back and forth to school because a palm tree fell on her van. And besides, until a week ago there was no school.

Around the corner, Ronald Bishop is living in a tent next to the debris of his two-story house, collapsed in a heap. On another corner, Marcia and Ken Pitts have abandoned their home altogether until it can be made habitable.

Still, knee-deep in wreckage and rubble, most residents express an optimism and a recuperative faith: They will rebuild. “It was our dream home,” said Ken Pitts, a football coach and business education teacher at South Dade High School, who says he was “the scaredest I’ve ever been” as the hurricane blew away half his roof in the early morning darkness of Aug. 24. “But this is an excellent neighborhood. Two years from now, we’ll sit back and not be able to believe what it looks like now.”

Many residents of this area called the Redlands moved here in the last decade. They came south from Miami, fed up with congestion or crime or because they had another child and needed more house and more space than they could afford in Coral Gables or Miami Shores.

Four growing children propelled Doug and Amy Cumbie here three years ago from South Miami. They paid $160,000 for a four-bedroom home on an acre lot, with a pool, trees and room for their children, ranging in age from 9 to 14, to keep pet rabbits, birds and snakes, and to ride their bicycles far from city traffic. “It reminded me of Miami when I was child,” said Cumbie. “A lot of people my age were coming here. It was green and peaceful.”

Now the Cumbies are working to the incessant drone of a gas-powered generator trying to salvage some of that peace. Under a wide-brimmed straw hat, Doug Cumbie is patching the roof, burning six rooms worth of rain-soaked wall-to-wall carpet, propping up trees that still have a root in the ground. Amy Cumbie, her custom dressmaking business on hold, watches for the insurance adjuster, tries to take the warp out of kitchen cabinets and family pictures, and with the children, plans daily trips to relief centers for supplies.

She has learned which church passes out the good Ocean Spray juices and what time the ice truck arrives at the nearby disaster tent. She and the children have eaten free spaghetti lunches in Red Cross shelters and brought home MREs--meals, ready to eat--handed out by Army troops. “I never imagined we could live this way,” said Amy Cumbie.

Around the corner it gets worse. In the midst of a stand of native pine trees, Ronald Bishop had built his home on 10-foot steel stilts. From the second-floor bedroom, he could peer into the eyes of treetop birds or watch the jets land at Homestead Air Force Base, five miles to the east.

But when winds that could have been near 160 m.p.h. blew the windows out, and the house began to sway on its stilts, Bishop, 38, ran for his life. He escaped as the house crashed around him in pieces.

Today Bishop is struggling. He had no home insurance. He is sleeping in a tent next to the ruins while working as a roofer, and battling his ex-wife over custody of their daughter. Bishop’s father, Harold, is living in a trailer on the lot, trying to build his son a hut with a watertight roof. “The boy needs help,” said Harold Bishop, 59, red-faced, sweating in the 90-degree heat. “I don’t think this thing has hit him yet.”

For many, Hurricane Andrew smashed more than just houses and jobs and the closest grocery; it destroyed a bit of their identity too. The Pittses, both in their mid-40s, had a showplace yard. Neighbors knew that if Ken and Marcia weren’t out fertilizing a tree or working in the flower beds, they weren’t home. “Their place was always immaculate,” says Amy Cumbie.

Most of the 70 trees--oaks and royal and coconut palms--the couple planted in the last two years are gone. The inside of the house is virtually gutted. They are staying with friends as repairs begin.

A new roof is going on the Gonsalveses’ house, and the nonstop hammering is getting on everyone’s nerves. Otilia Gonsalves is looking after Domingos’ aged and now homeless parents, Antonio and Arminda, while trying not to think about her losses: a roomful of French provincial furniture and a collection of Italian porcelain. Son George, 26, and his wife already lived there; now sons Dominick, 30, and Charlie, 24, and their wives have also moved in because their homes were lost.

Domingos Gonsalves feels the pressure of being the head of a large, extended Portuguese family, now under stress. And there is more than just the problems of his wife, sons and parents; about half of Gonsalves’ 40 employees lost their homes, several trucks were damaged and his business is operating at about 30% capacity.

Amid all of this woe, the people of 274th Street see hope and opportunity. Doug Cumbie, 46, a technical writer with an engineering background, has not had steady work for two years, and for several days after the storm he mused about having his home declared a total loss, receiving a large settlement check from his insurance company and moving. Until Hurricane Iniki, he had Hawaii in mind.

Now he’ll stay, maybe even find work as a result of Andrew, perhaps using his experience designing sugar mills to help rebuild packing and processing plants.

The Cumbie children, liberated from television and Nintendo, learned they could play together. Tired of Monopoly, the 14-year-old, Dougie, even invented his own board game.

The storm has also deepened a sense of neighborliness along 274th Street. Dominick Gonsalves brings bottles of wine to the Cumbies and tells them where ice is available. Amy Cumbie takes messages for neighbors without phones; the children serve as runners. “Life around here now seems like what my parents said it was like during the war,” says Amy Cumbie, a native of Leubeck, Germany.

But it is Ken Pitts who sounds the neighborhood’s most optimistic theme. As a football coach at the smallest of Dade County’s 30 high schools, he is used to long odds. When classes finally began Monday in storm-battered South Dade High, only 25 boys showed up to try out for the team. Many of the best players, fearing for their chances at scholarships later, had moved to other schools.

Pitts says he understands. “Sometimes things happen that make us realize how fortunate we were to have this much,” he says. “This area is not pretty right now. But we have to look beyond now to tomorrow. That’s part of life.”

When Disaster Comes Knocking

Most residents of the neighborhood known as the Redlands express an optimism that they will rebuild. But for many, Hurricane Andrew smashed more than just houses and jobs; it destroyed a bit of their identity:

Where They Stand:

Bishop: Uninsured home collapsed in the storm. Owner now sleeping in a tent next to the ruins.

Cumbie: Family car lost in the storm. Six rooms of carpeting destroyed. Mother makes daily trips to relief centers.

Gonsalves: Roof ravaged by the storm. Owner’s parents and children move in after losing their own homes.

Pitts: Storm took half the roof, baring the inside to wind and rain. Owners have abandoned it until repairs are made.