After seeing the situation in New Orleans this spring, I knew I had to return to the region to help again. I found one such opportunity in this trip. I'll be heading to Gretna, a suburb of New Orleans, along with people of all ages. This trip is organized through a national organization. That meant a lot more initial paperwork, but it will also proably mean a much better organized trip. As on my last trip, I'll be updating this journal daily with my trusty wireless-enabled laptop.
The group turned out to be much larger than I'd expected. We met briefly before leaving today, and I counted about 33 people. I've never worked with a group of this size, so this should be a new experience for me. For a start, the group is large enough to justify a bus, quite a change from the extended vans I usually take on mission trips. We left sometime after 1:00 PM, and the bus ride has been fairly uneventful so far. It looks like we'll be driving all night, so this will probably be posted after we arrive tomorrow.
3:00 AM and we're already at the Mississippi border. We'll probably be there before noon. That's the advantage of driving all night. Of course, the disadvantage is that I hardly slept at all.
Around 6:30 AM we stopped in Jackson for a full breakfast. I had the obligatory grits with my meal; I always have to have those when I come to this region. I was impressed with The Cracker Barrel, where we ate. It had a breakfast-only restaurant attached to a kind of old-fashioned store, all fairly rustic. Actually, I think there's one of those in Lincoln; I may have to check it out sometime.
As we approach New Orleans, I think I'm seeing less signs of the disaster inland than I did last time. Maybe it's because I'm passing through a different area, but I'm sure progress has been made on cleanup around here. I didn't see any visibly damaged buildings until just south of Brookhaven, though before that there were downed branches and at least one tall sign stripped bare. Actually, now that I look at it on a map, that's not a lot better. Brookhaven is farther inland than Hattiesburg (where I started seeing damage on the spring trip), and as I said, I saw some minor damage north of there. Still, whether due to rebuilding efforts or due to my own weak powers of observation, I'm sure I saw less damage along the way this time.
We just barely made it to Gretna by noon, due to our hour-and-a-half breakfast and some traffic problems in New Orleans. At one point, we crossed a bridge overlooking a large expanse of houses that I remember from my last trip, and I'm sure I saw far fewer tarps on the roofs this time. There were still a few, but not the sea of tarps I observed last time. I took a picture then (though I never posted it online), so the next time we go by there I'll take another picture for comparison. To my further surprise, the church we're staying at proved familiar as well: it's the same one I visited at the end of the Pascagoula trip in the spring.* After arriving and going out for some food, we went over some ground rules for the facility and started settling in for the week. Many of us are starting by getting those showers we couldn't get on the bus ride.
Around 6:00 PM, we attended a contemporary worship service. Though conducted in the church we're staying at, it was actually a different church holding the service - one that lost its church building in the hurricane. They used to be located in Buras, about a 75 minute drive away. Before the storm, they had over 230 members, but now only 80** are able to make the trip to Gretna for church. The others have found other closer churches or simply not returned to the area yet. Talking to us after the church service, the minister told us that the same thing happened to their church almost 40 years ago when Hurricane Camille hit. Looking at their location right out on the river delta, I'm not surprised.
I should get to bed early since I'll be getting up quite early tomorrow morning, but I've heard there will be a fireworks display at midnight to mark the new year. I've stayed up late enough writing this that I'm seriously considering going to have a look. On that note, I've discovered that consumer fireworks are legal within the city limits here, and they're being sold all over for the new year celebrations. Growing up, I had to go out of town to shoot off fireworks, and I only did so for the fourth of July anyway. Today, I've been hearing firecrackers and bottle rockets all day.
Apparently, there's an official blog for the trip. You can find it at http://www.elkhornhillsumc.org/gretna/.
* Whoops, it wasn't the same church. The church I saw in the spring was the Aurora United Methodist Church, out of which the organization we're working through on this trip is run and from which we have borrowed tools for our work throughout the week. If you could see the two churches, you'd understand my confusion. Their architecture is very similar.
** Apparently I misheard - the actual number was 18. You would think I could tell the difference from the service I attended, but I thought the Buras church had a traditional service as well as the contemporary service we attended. Mishearing 18 as 80, I assumed this referred to the total attendance of both services.
Well, I didn't end up going to see those fireworks; it looked like everybody else had gone to sleep. I found out this morning that at least one person stayed up until midnight, and she told me she only had to step outside to see a good show: the whole sky was lit up by fireworks shot from almost all of the homes around us.
We split into two teams today: one to roof and paint a church building, and one to gut out a house. I ended up going with the latter team. We talked to a mother and a daughter* who owned the house but didn't live in it. The mother had grown up in the house, and her mother had been living in it until her death in 2004. They were just getting over this loss when Katrina hit the house, destroying most of what they had left to remind them of their (grand)mother.
The walls were board and plaster, which proved difficult both to take down and to remove from the house (shovels don't pick up long boards very well). There was a terrible termite infestation: I'd say the house sustained more damage from termites than from the storm. One wall (not load-bearing, fortunately) hardly had any studs remaining at all. That wall contained a massive termite nest, extending from the floor to the (10 ft. or so) ceiling.
Despite various obstacles - the cumbersome boards, multiple layers of wall coverings in the bathroom, numerous layers of flooring in the kitchen, and a couple of minor injuries - we made great progress. If we have to return and finish anything, it will be minor details. I'm very pleased with the amount of work we got done.
I was impressed with our supper tonight. I tried black-eyed peas for the first time (as far as I can remember), and I have no regrets. We ate in the church, as we will for the rest of the week, with our designated cooks (part of our group) providing the meal.
After supper, I pretty much spent the evening writing and talking with some of the other people on the trip. I should probably get some sleep now; I have another early morning ahead of me tomorrow.
* I stand corrected: the two we talked to were sisters. One of them was living in the house after her mother's death, and then when Katrina hit she evacuated to her sister's house in Baton Rouge.
We weren't as efficient today as yesterday, but we did still make some progress. A group went back to the church we worked on yesterday and finished up, but we didn't need to revisit the house my group worked on. The job my group finished yesterday was supposed to be a two-day job, so some reshuffling was necessary to find another job to replace it today. We ended up sending our second group (including me) to a house that needed new flooring in two rooms and repairs to the eaves. They aren't the same groups as yesterday - our team leaders are reshuffling groups from day to day to give us the opportunity to interact with everybody on the trip.
Both of the projects at our house weren't the type that everybody could work on at once: most of us spent a good deal of time waiting for an opportunity to work. To complicate matters further, the work on the eaves required us to buy some new lumber and nails, for which we had to find transportation. (The bus that brought us here is shuttling us to our work sites, but our driver just drops us off, leaves, and comes back later to pick us up.) Eventually, we called someone at the church, who found a volunteer with a pickup truck at a Rotary meeting which was taking place there.
I went from one task to another as needed. We didn't finish either of our two jobs, but we were well on the way there. Unfortunately, we never got to see the homeowner. A smaller group (not including me) will be returning to finish that house tomorrow.
My laptop was so popular tonight that I haven't had much time to journal. I think I'll have to cut it off here so I can get some sleep.
We split up into four separate work groups today. One returned to the house I worked on yesterday, one went to paint a house, a third went to finish sheetrock work on another house, and the fourth group, which I was in, went to shingle a house. The four work sites were spread out in very different areas of New Orleans. Despite my original impression that this trip would be limited to Gretna, we have in fact been working on projects in other areas of New Orleans all week.
We were the smallest group, with only six people. In the morning, we dropped off all four groups in sequence, ours last. The bus stayed at our worksite for the day. None of us had any significant experience with shingles, but our bus driver did. So, he pitched in, helped out, and taught us a few things. This is actually the fifth mission trip he's driven for (if I remember correctly), and our leaders specifically requested that he drive us. His sarcastic humor has certainly helped to keep things interesting on our trip.
There was certainly a lot more roof area to shingle than we thought. We could have used twice as many shingles as we had. Still, we made quite a bit of progress, and the nice thing about shingling is that you can see your progress.
Toward the end of the day, the owner of the house next door came by and talked with us for a bit. Her roof survived the hurricane, and it was in nice shape. She informed us that the standing water in the area was about three or four feet deep. It was there for three weeks.
As we went from site to site to pick up the other work crews, we got caught in more traffic. While a professional football game at the Superdome was responsible for the traffic on our way in, this time it was the Sugar Bowl. As we drove, I realized that the dark flood lines that I observed in the spring are gone. I suppose that they were washed off by the rain, but they had probably been there for five months when I saw them. I'd think if rain could wash them away, it would have by then.
Tonight, our supper was prepared by a member of the church that some of us worked on at the beginning of the week. As a gesture of thanks, he made jambalaya and shrimp gumbo for us. It was a wonderful treat, completely unnecessary but heartily welcomed.
Due to an 80% chance of rain tomorrow, we probably won't be able to finish putting shingles on the house my group worked on today. It sounds like smaller groups will be returning to two or maybe all three of the other sites we worked on today, and we'll have to find new work for everybody else. We're planning to spend Friday on some sightseeing, so tomorrow will probably be our last work day.
We were certainly busy today. One group returned to finish the house they did sheetrock work on yesterday, and a few painters returned to their house for part of the day. The rest of us - 21 in all - went to one house to gut it. When the painters finished, they joined us as well. We had our work cut out for us.
The house we arrived at had hardly been touched since Katrina. Mold was everywhere, and the bedrooms were packed with the ruined possesions of the family that had lived there. Furniture, clothes, a mattress, carpets. . . it was a mess. Since we had so many people, we had to pay some attention to organization and structure things both for efficiency and safety. We knocked out some windows and passed some things through them while we also hauled other things through the hallway and out the front door. We had the debris cleared out before noon. Then we began on the walls and ceilings. Fortunately, the walls in this house were sheetrock, which comes down easily. We removed all of the sheetrock from the walls and ceiling in every room but the bathroom, and we cleaned up most of the bits of sheetrock and insulation we'd left on the floor, but a garbage collection crew arrived around 2:30 PM, and they made us stand 25 feet away while they picked up some of the trash from the curb with a four-wheeled vehicle that had a bucket loader on the front. They hadn't finished by 3:00, at which time we had to leave so we would have time to pick up the other team, organize our equipment, and drop off the tools we borrowed from the Aurora Methodist Church. I was a little disappointed that we didn't have time to finish, but we certainly got a lot done. I have before and after pictures of one of the bedrooms:
That house was so filthy that we took a number of precautions to prevent getting mold everywhere we went. On our way from our work site, we covered the bus seats with trash bags to keep them clean for our ride home, and before entering the church, we removed our footwear so we wouldn't track mold inside. Anticipating a run on the showers, we drew numbers from a hat for our places in line. Since the women on this trip outnumber the men dramatically (about 25 to 10), we gave them two of our three showers, and we were efficient enough about using the one shower remaining that seven of us men got a shower within the hour or so we had before supper. (The other two or three weren't very anxious.)
After eating, we gathered to listen to a presentation by the same person we met with on the last day of my trip to Pascagoula. We've been working through his organization for this trip. Just like in the spring, I learned some interesting statistics. Some bad news: Of about 1400 homes in St. Bernard Parish, only 2 were not flooded. Good news: This organization is currently working with about 4000 volunteers at a time. They have gutted about 600 houses and finished renovating somewhere between 14 and 20. That may seem like a small number by comparison, but it's much more work to put things back together in a house than to tear them apart, and rebuilding also got a very late start due to delays I learned about in the spring. At one point in the speech, the speaker said that gutting a house was one of the least pleasant of the jobs to do here, and we were quick to say that we found it the most enjoyable job. As he explained why it is difficult, I realized the reason for this disagreement. We enjoyed the simple, stress-relieving work of stripping a house down to its studs. The difficulty lies in the cleaning that must be done beforehand. We didn't even have to worry about this on Monday, and when we did it today, the owners weren't around to make it harder. A tremendous amount of history and emotional attachment can be tied up in a person's possessions, and when all of those possessions suddenly become mere garbage that must be thrown out and hauled to a landfill, hearts are almost always broken. The owner need not even be around for the cleanup crew to feel this pain: one volunteer in another group found a family's photo albums in their house, ruined by floodwaters, and the realization that they had lost even their photo albums moved him deeply. It's hard enough to lose everything, but having the fact rubbed in your face when you see all of it in its ruined state would multiply the effect.
Well, that's it for our last work day. Tomorrow, we'll be. . . well, sightseeing. I was thinking of describing it as "experiencing some local culture," but we've been experiencing local culture for most of the week. We certainly will see a different side of the culture, though.
Update: We'll be leaving directly from the French Quarter on Friday, so I won't be posting my final entry until Saturday.
Our trip to the French Quarter was fun, and it took me to some areas I didn't get to see before. We had plenty of time: our bus pulled into its parking space (not in the French Quarter but within walking distance) around 9:45 AM, and we didn't need to return until 2:45 PM. I set off with a group of 7 of my peers. We stopped at a couple of shops for souvenirs, including a candy shop at which the employees were very generous with samples. We stopped at an open-air cafe for some beignets, French rectangular-shaped doughnuts served with powdered sugar. After exploring the Saint Louis Cathedral, an incredibly ornate Catholic house of worship, sitting by the Mississippi River for a while, and (of course) shopping some more, we stopped in at a restaurant and ate. One of us was just nuts about crawfish, so she had to have a platter of them. She shared it with the rest of us, so those of us who hadn't had the experience before got to try at least one crawfish. Personally, I had my first experience with them in the spring. A couple of us also had whole shrimp, and they shared as well. I was surprised at the size of the things, coming from a region where any shrimp I see are about a fifth of the size. I had a platter of three Cajun dishes, all of which contained rice (they certainly do like their rice here). We swung through Bourbon Street on the way back, and it was. . . well, Bourbon Street. I saw it in the spring, so I knew what to expect.
We got started a bit late, but we're close to our planned schedule. After stopping for supper in Jackson, we had a bit of fun on the bus. For most of the week, the women in charge of the trip have been planning to have a "bridal shower" for an engaged couple that came along, and this evening we had it. Among the joke gifts people gave were "boyfriend training treats," a "voodoo love kit," and applications to McDonald's. After this was over, we watched a couple of movies and tried to get some sleep ("tried" being the operative word, at least in my case).
The rest of the bus trip was uneventful. We stopped at another Cracker Barrel for breakfast, and we arrived in Omaha early - around 11:30 AM as opposed to our goal of 1:00 PM. Then it was time for us to go our separate ways. I'm not usually good at keeping in touch with people I see only briefly for events like this, but I'm certainly going to try. I met some wonderful people on this trip.
In hindsight, while I'm impressed with how far the recovery effort has come since the spring, I realize that the job is only starting. Houses are looking better on the outside (in most areas, at least), but there is much to do inside those houses. While significant progress has been made on gutting houses, it should say something that some 400 houses are still in roughly the state in which we found the house we worked on this Thursday, even more than a year after the storm. Volunteer teams have only just begun to rebuild the interiors of houses. There are even ruined houses that still need to be destroyed in some areas. In fact, one house across the street from the Thursday house was in that condition. I'm glad I was able to go and help out some more, but I need to make a habit of it (and/or find other ways to help).