SMCNOLA

Remembering Rosie

2009-04-25T18:25:00.000-07:00

We are sad to be commemorating our dear friend Rose Boitmann after her unexpected death in March 2009. We held a memorial service for her on the Saint Mary's College campus in Moraga on April 19. Not all of the veterans of the 12 SMC NOLA trips could attend, so this page will help them to get a feel for what they missed. We had a lovely day, even though we missed all of those who could not attend and we were, of course, sad to be without Rosie. Our good friend Lisa Trigo came from New Orleans, so that helped to ease our pain a little bit.

About 40 of the student relief workers along with a number of related friends and supporters came to the event. When they arrived, the NOLA folks found nametags waiting for them that were designed by our own fabulous artist, Kate Coulouras. Each nametag had our NOLA slogan ("Everyone. All the time."), along with the person's name and the number of trips that person had taken with the SMC relief workers.
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Here are the basics of our service. Most of the participants submitted their pieces, though they might not have been delivered word for word.
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***Welcome (Aaron Arnold):
Welcome and thank you to everyone for coming, especially the student relief workers who have returned from far and wide to be together here again. For those who didn't travel to New Orleans on the SMC relief trips, we're glad you've joined us in honoring and celebrating one of our most special friends.

We are here to celebrate the life of Rosemary Boitmann, known to us as Rosie. She died on March 12, 2009, of a combination of cancers.

This is not a funeral or a mass; Rosie's funeral mass was held on St. Patrick's Day at her home church in New Orleans. Many of us attended mass with her there, so we know how important that church and its congregation were to her.

Still, she was special to us all the way over here in California and because many of us were unable to attend the services in New Orleans, we decided to hold a memorial of our own.

Thanks again for joining us.
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***Video Introduction of Rose Boitmann
(Introduced by Justin Verrips, Produced by Marcia Ong and Bryan Navarro)
On January 7, 2006, 27 of us got off of our bus in the Upper Ninth Ward and crossed North Claiborne to meet Rosie Boitmann. On that day, we had no idea how much our lives would become intertwined with hers and how many times we would return to see her again.

On that day and every day with Rosie, her beauty and light blasted through all of the pain of New Orleans after Katrina. It was a privilege for us to know her and to be there at so many of the important stages of her return to her lifelong home.

Actually, Rosie owned three homes in the 4000 block of N. Claiborne and we have grown to know all of those properties like our own homes away from home. We helped her clear the houses, gut them, decontaminate them, and rebuild them.

And along the way, we got to hear stories of buried treasure, of the changes in the Ninth Ward, of her father, mother, and her grandfather, and of her unshakeable Catholic faith. We also got to eat a lot of donuts, because that's the thing she liked to feed us most.

But just before we met her, she went through an experience more traumatic than most of us can imagine: she rode out a hurricane. We can't describe Rosie or tell her story the way she could, so we decided to let her tell all of you what it was like. The video you are about to see is from a short documentary prepared by Marcia Ong on our first trip in January 2006. Many of you have seen these clips before, but for those of you who haven't, we'd like to introduce to you our friend Rosie . . .

Here is the video clip we showed:

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***Prayer (Prepared by Erik Coloma)
Psalm 23
A psalm of David.
The LORD is my shepherd, I shall not be in want.
He makes me lie down in green pastures,
he leads me beside quiet waters,
he restores my soul.
He guides me in paths of righteousness
for his name's sake.
Even though I walk
through the valley of the shadow of death, [a]
I will fear no evil,
for you are with me;
your rod and your staff,
they comfort me.
You prepare a table before me
in the presence of my enemies.
You anoint my head with oil;
my cup overflows.
Surely goodness and love will follow me
all the days of my life,
and I will dwell in the house of the LORD
forever.
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***Reading I: Old Testament (Ecclesiastes, Chapter 3)
(Porsia Tunzi, Ana Ahnen, Vanessa Fortney, Brad Parry)

*Porsia Tunzi:
There is an appointed time for everything, and a time for every affair under the heavens.
A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to uproot the plant.
A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to tear down, and a time to build.
A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance.

*Ana Ahnen:
A time to scatter stones, and a time to gather them; a time to embrace, and a time to be far from embraces.
A time to seek, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away.
A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to be silent, and a time to speak.
A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.

*Vanessa Fortney:
What advantage has the worker from his toil?
I have considered the task which God has appointed for men to be busied about.
He has made everything appropriate to its time, and has put the timeless into their hearts, without men's ever discovering, from beginning to end, the work which God has done.
I recognized that there is nothing better than to be glad and to do well during life.
For every man, moreover, to eat and drink and enjoy the fruit of all his labor is a gift of God.

*Brad Parry:
I recognized that whatever God does will endure forever; there is no adding to it, or taking from it. Thus has God done that he may be revered.
What now is has already been; what is to be, already is; and God restores what would otherwise be displaced.
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***Reading II: New Testament (1 Thessalonians, Chapter 5)
(Dave Blanchard)
Therefore, encourage one another and build one another up, as indeed you do.
We ask you, brothers, to respect those who are laboring among you and who are over you in the Lord and who admonish you,
and to show esteem for them with special love on account of their work. Be at peace among yourselves.
We urge you, brothers, admonish the idle, cheer the fainthearted, support the weak, be patient with all.
See that no one returns evil for evil; rather, always seek what is good (both) for each other and for all.

Rejoice always.
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***Musical Selection: Let it Be
(Soraya Parker, Shana Dhillon, Shawny Anderson)
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***Tributes to Rosie
(Shawny Anderson, Emily Robbins, Julie Nisco, Darcy Tarbell, Elvia Hernandez, Mallory Lee, Hugo Leon, Shane Keane, Salvador Ortiz, Brianna Hardy, Julie Wesler-Buck, Vince Sison, Kate Coulouras, Scott Eberhardt, Sergio Trejo, Linzy Gustafson, Samantha Yeates, Matt Wheeler, Katie Leonard, Tommy Bell, Rebecca Wright, Juan Zaragoza, Amanda Arreola, Erik Coloma, Mark Araujo, Bryan Navarro, Obi Uwakah, Lindsay Ryberg, Lindsay Swoboda, Renee Egan, Lisa Trigo, Alli Arkfeld, Feke Lauti)

We knew that we needed to write a tribute to Rosie, but then we realized that many tributes had already been written: as entries in our NOLA journals over the last three years. We searched for references to Rosie, then assigned the readings to different people at random, in order to protect the confidentiality of the journals’ authors. Here are the selections we read:

In her song “Feels Like Home,” Bonnie Raitt sings: “A window breaks down a long dark street and a siren wails in the night. But I’m all right, ‘cause I have you here with me and I can almost see through the dark there’s light. . .” These lyrics parallel the feelings we share with the people of New Orleans. I had the privilege of talking to Rosie about her experience. As much as I wanted to hear about what happened to her, she was more interested in talking about how grateful she was to have our assistance. We were her light, but she was ours.
(SHAWNY)

Never in a million years did I think I would meet someone who had truly lived life to the fullest -- even if it ended up almost killing her. But I watched her -- and she was so well-spoken and genuine I just hoped the whole time that one day I could be half of that. I think our relationship with Rosie really established the relationship that we were hoping for -- the ones from our readings. The chance to actively dialogue with such an amazing woman was truly once-in-a-lifetime.
(EMILY)

I went up to Rosie and introduced myself. As I put out my hand to shake hers, she pushed my hand away and exclaimed, "Baby! You ain't gonna get away with no handshake here! Give me a HUG!" She grabbed me and hugged me. I could feel the gratitude in her strong hug. As she finally released me from her firm grasp, I realized that it's hugs like those that make all the hard work, hammered fingers, and mosquito bites worth it. We are so blessed and it is so true: every day just gets better and better.
(JULIE N)

Whenever we see Rosie, she calls us her little angels sent down from Jesus. But are we?
(DARCY)

Everyone really seems to have a spot and a purpose. Even the way that we reacted to Rosie's house, the rubble being taken away, everything really balances. When someone falls back, someone else runs off the bench, takes the job, and kicks butt. Who does that? We do. I get to be a part of that. Go me. How did I get to be so lucky and blessed?
(ELVIA)

"This isn't work for ladies; the men should be doing this."--Miss Rosie
(MAL MAL)

These people lost EVERYTHING and had no one to turn to. Don even cried on Shawny's shoulder while we buried Smokey, his dog we found dead in the house. He cried on a COMPLETE stranger -- that's how much we mean to these people. Rosie told me that we "restored her faith in humanity." Just by being here we're touching so many people that had lost hope in the human race.
(HUGO)

When I was working with Rosie, pretty closely going through her possessions together, she kept saying, "Baby, this is hopeless. I'm hopeless." And the only thing that came to my mind was the complete opposite. There are so many people that just left their homes. . . and she wants to come back!
(SHANE)

Then one of the most emotional times came tonight while at Lisa's in Destrehan where Rosie made gumbo for us and Connie and Jerry were there. It felt like family there, like we all have a bond that I can never find anywhere else.
(SAL)

. . .[T]he whole room was so alive and full of love. It made me think back to our first encounter with Rosie, when she talked about how we shouldn't be afraid to love. This class has completely let me do that. For me, trusting people enough to be myself around them is really hard but I realized tonight that somehow on this trip it was like we had always known each other, or I had always been looking for friends like this and I finally found them when I least expected to.
(BRIANNA)

Working at Rosie's has become more rewarding because we get to see how thankful she is and it allows us to keep pushing even when we're tired.
(JULIE W-B)

Every morning Rosie greets us, making me smile and forget that I could easily sleep another few hours. Although I've been tired, I get up easily, almost like I've become a machine.
(VINCE)

Today Rosie said she's never seen anything like what we are doing for her in her 75 years of life. Those comments allow the tiredness to disappear.
(KATE)

Rosie invited us to walk through her house. It was cool to see how great it looked from the work that had been done in past years and to think that the houses we're working on now will eventually look like that.
(SCOTT)

I was talking to Rosie about the tree that we were axing down. We were talking about its size and she told me how big it once was. She said it took over and shaded almost all of the neighbors' houses. She told me she had a picture of it. I was about to say, "I'd love to see it" when she reminded me: "But I lost all my pictures in Katrina, at the same time that I lost my tree. I planted that tree with my mother, you know." Something about that just shook me up.
(SERG)

It was so sweet that a guy like Jared, with the 504 (New Orleans) area code tattooed on his neck, would tear up, name his dogs Leo and Rosie, and get so sentimental with us. . .
(Z)

We went to Rosie's and I was assigned to work on flooring in the second house. It was a really stressful process because it requires you to be so precise. Even though it took a long time to get the process down, it's looking good so far.
(SAM)

Today was the best day by far. We did the sheet rocking in one of Rosie's houses. We put actual walls on the framework of the house. By the end of the day there were walls up on the studs. The first room of Rosie's house was livable. That's amazing. We totally transformed something in just a handful of hours. We had done some big changes before, but this was different.
(MATT W)

For a while I cleaned the floors. Rosie wanted to help and she wouldn't take no for an answer. So I just embraced it and loved it that Rosie and I got to sit on her new floors and pick off tape together. It's that solidarity we were going for.
(KATIE)

I can't believe how much we've transformed Rosie's backyard. It looks amazing and every time Rosie sees it, she says that she had never dreamed this was possible. I'm glad we've proven her wrong.
(TOMMY)

I put in a few trees so I am definitely excited to see these trees grow into huge ones that offer shade (or maybe olives) to Rosie.
(REBECCA)

I absolutely love when the cars drive by Rosie's and honk. It's great to have support and after two and a half years the people of New Orleans are still appreciative. I think every day at Rosie's we get at least three honks; it's a great feeling and is helping me to keep going, work harder, and get my butt off that bus every morning.
(JUAN)

Today was absolutely beautiful. Although it was freezing outside, we all were warmed by the Holy Spirit. We attended Mass today with Rosie.
(AMANDA)

The highlight of the day was going to church with Rosie. I really needed some resuscitation, so this was a perfect time. The service was very moving. At one point, Rosie went up and spoke about us which is usually not a big deal but this time it was. I started to cry. We have such a connection to Rosie and that neighborhood. It feels like home!
(ERIK)

This time mass was kind of sad, because we all know that we only have two days left in New Orleans and also two days left with Rosie. I sat by Rosie in church and as I sat there, she squeezed my hand and looked at me with those beautiful eyes and I really almost cried because I realized how much this woman who I've known for a little over 3 weeks has impacted my life so greatly. I really do love her and she will always have a place in my heart.
(MARK)

Rosie tells us that we are her angels, but she is mine. I was never that spiritual/religious before this trip, but I really do believe that Rosie's strength, love, and safety before, during, and after the storm have come from her prayer.
(BRYAN)

Rosie is like the grandmother I never had and to see how much she truly appreciates our efforts makes it all worthwhile. Now I feel like any Jan Term NOT spent helping to rebuild New Orleans would leave me with a void in my heart.
(OBI)

After Rosie's, Bryan ran with me to Habitat and on the way back he waved to Sarah in her car, said goodbye to Mr. Pitts, asked Red how he was doing, and we waved to the kids again. It felt like a neighborhood. It's coming back. It is back.
(RYBERG)

Saying goodbye to Rosie and Lisa was just so sad -- it was the hardest goodbye because we really weren't sure if we were ever going to see them again or be in this neighborhood again.
(SAY)

Rosie is so funny and really nice! She told me that she made a pact with God that no matter what the time in Purgatory we all have, she wants all that time to be put on her because we mean so much to her.
(RENEE)

I can't believe that's our last day at Rosie's house. I was scrubbing the floor after having signed the porch and I just totally broke down thinking about how Rosie's was our first day in January '06 and our last day as we end here today. So much has changed in our lives, in NOLA. It was so cool to wrap it up having turned her life around so much but it's hard to accept that we won't be here again.
(LISA)

Rosie just kept saying, "I'll see you in heaven, my little angels." I couldn't stop the tears. I had to run into the bathroom so no one else would see. Not because I'm afraid of others seeing me cry, but I know that as soon as one person starts, everyone else follows because the tears are on the very edge of their eyes.
(ALLI)

We began the day by working on our projects and interviewing Rosie. Tears filled my eyes as she spoke. She talked about the blessings the storm had brought to her and had such a positive and spiritual outlook on her life. There is one thing I don't ever want to forget about that interview. She stopped talking for a brief second and heaved one of her heavy smoker's breaths and then looked me straight in the eye. She said, "This world is becoming messed up, baby. It's your job now to help change it." I don't know why it had such an immense effect on me. It could have been the fact that she was looking me right in the eyes or it could have been the passion in her voice. All I know is that she's right. It is up to us to make a difference. It's our turn as empowered college students to help. That is my plan. Thank you, Rosie! I’m ready!
(FEKE)
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***The Lord’s Prayer (Led by Aaron Arnold)
Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.
Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread, And forgive us our trespasses,
as we forgive those who trespass against us.
And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. Amen.

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***Tribute to NOLA (Brianna Hardy)
How can any one of us effectively communicate our feelings for New Orleans? How can we begin to explain why it is so special? This week I kept asking myself: how do I pay tribute to something so meaningful? It just seems like anything I mention would be too obvious. But then I got to thinking about it and it's really not that obvious. What IS so special about New Orleans?

Let's face it; NOLA is far from perfect. In fact, it is a very flawed, imperfect place. There's the obvious: its below-sea-level elevation, local government, levees, nonexistent green movement, and horrible roads. It is not typically considered an aesthetically beautiful city. The controversial aspects of the history of our country are more concentrated in New Orleans, and continue to be more deeply seated there than in many other large cities in the US. The architectural masterpieces of the Garden District, while perfectly symmetrical, cannot hide the imperfections of their origins.

Yet even a city with clear barriers between race and class gave birth to communities like the corner of Bartholomew and N. Claiborne. New Orleans became one of the first cities where freed black slaves could reside, and eventually even become homeowners, though only in neighborhoods with some of the most underfunded schools in the country. Yes, New Orleans is marred with imperfections. Even the most perfect of Blues solos is grounded in exactly that: the Blues.

I'm sure many of us here today still think of New Orleans as home, or perhaps one of our homes, home to a piece of us. I in no way mean to argue that any city, home, place or any thing for that matter, is perfect. But it doesn't take much thought to make the point that our beloved NOLA is far from perfect, will never be perfect, and isn't really striving to be perfect.

Rather, New Orleans is full of problems and contradictions: single story homes raised a story or two above the ground, newly remodeled houses that may never quite feel like "home," history, MRGO, depleted wetlands, a growing demand for oil and jobs, and on and on . . .

New Orleans is human. We can see ourselves and be inspired by its imperfections, even though it always has room for improvement. The way "home" should be.

So it kind of makes sense that this particularly imperfect place brought out our best versions of ourselves. Rose was not perfect; she was an inspiration and a sage yes, but also a smoking, drinking, sassy woman. And we would not have had her any other way.

New Orleans, even before we came to know and love the city so well, was not perfect. Katrina exacerbated that, but now we're seeing progress. Progress is not "perfect" neighborhoods with brand new homes -- 2 bedrooms, 2.5 baths. Progress is the 9th Ward, looking tired and run down, but with people walking around, gathering on their porches, not living in the house they deserve after everything they've been through, but not living in a FEMA trailer either. It's the existence of classrooms, charter/magnet schools, public schools, recovery schools, now forced to compete against each other for students and funding, but enrolling students nonetheless. While controversial, progress is the new research hospital that will create jobs within the city, even though it will require the demolition of a historic neighborhood.

New Orleans is not perfect and is not trying to be perfect -- just a version of what it once was and a place that will always feel like home.
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***Visual Tribute (Prepared by Salvador Ortiz)
(Introduced by Brianna Hardy)
And now, we've told you quite a bit about Rosie and we've even let you hear her tell her own story of Katrina. We have lots of post-Katrina memories with Rosie too so we'd like to take one more opportunity to review our experiences with her, this time with some of the thousands of pictures we've taken over the years. Sal Ortiz selected some of the best photos that feature Rosie and made a slide show for us. For a lot of us, these pictures remind us of the stories Rosie told us or the jobs that we did with her. Please enjoy this moment of nostalgia with us.

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***Words of Gratitude (Lisa Trigo)
We are all here today to celebrate Rosie’s life. Rosie had many difficult moments in her life but Katrina was definitely the worst of all. However through this tragedy so much good came into Rosie and Janice’s lives. St. Mary’s was a huge part of that good.

You gave them hope, you showed them love and compassion and I promise you none of it went unnoticed. Without all of you Rosie could never have returned to her home she so strongly desired to be back in. Other than the 14 months Rosie lived with me and my family she had always lived on that one block of North Claiborne you have all come to know so well. It is where she was born and was her home when she left this world. It was where she was most comfortable and all of you returned her there. I cannot thank each of you enough for giving Rosie that gift.

I returned to 4005 on Thursday for the first time since Rosie had died. As I walked up the ramp to the back door I could feel all of you present with me. I stopped to read some of your notes you had written on the railing of the ramp and I noticed how they were starting to fade away and this made me very sad but later when I was speaking with Shawny she mentioned how appropriate that these messages should fade away now as they were your notes to Rosie – personal notes of love and she is no longer here to read them and they were not meant for its future owner.

As I continued my walk up the ramp I stopped at Rosie’s “smoking chair” and realized never again would I stand out on this ramp to fuss at Rosie about how she needed to quit smoking. As hard as this may be for some of you to believe in Rosie’s last month here on earth she preached to everyone who smoked the need for them to quit smoking. It was certainly a sight to see.

As I walked in the back door of 4005 everywhere I turned I saw all of you and the work you did and even though the next owner will never know any of you and all that you did to return 4005 (4009/4011) to become homes again, your presence will forever be in their walls and floors. You have physically, emotionally and spiritually given parts of yourselves to NOLA that will remain with us forever.

As I sat on the bed in 4005 and went though Rosie’s things I thought how lucky I was that God had placed Rosie into my life. As I thought back on Rosie’s life I thought what a unique individual Rosie was and how blessed all of us are to have had her in our lives. There was only one Rosie and I feel sorry for those who never had the opportunity to know her.

Rosie did not live the 105 years she thought that she would but she certainly lived 76 years marching to her own drum. She loved to drink, smoke and say whatever was on her mind. These are some of the things that stand out about Rosie in our minds but she was so much more. She was a very spiritual person who always thought of others and was quick to share God’s love with them. She prayed for each of you everyday and I am sure she continues to do so.

Rose had a lot of issues with trust but when St. Mary’s students came that first time ya‘ll touched her heart in such a way that she was able to let all of you in and for Rosie that was a humongous deal.

As I said earlier Katrina was the worst thing to ever happen to Rosie but it was also the best thing to ever happen to her. She experienced tremendous growth in her journey with our Lord and opened her heart to love and trust others in a way she was not able to due prior to Katrina. St. Mary’s students were some of the chosen few Rosie let into her life and she loved you all so very much. Please continue to be the beautiful people you were to Rosie, Janice, NOLA and myself. Always place God first in all you do and there will be nothing you cannot accomplish in life.
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***Musical Selection: Amazing Grace
(All, sung to the tune of The House of the Rising Sun)

Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound
That saved a wretch like me
I once was lost but now am found
Was blind but now I see

Through many dangers, toils and snares,
We have already come
'Twas grace that brought us safe thus far
And grace will lead us home.
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***Prayer (Bryan Navarro)
When I die if you need to weep
Cry for your brother or sister
Walking the street beside you
And when you need me put your arms around anyone
And give them what you need to give me.

I want to leave you something
Something better than words or sounds.

Look for me in the people I've known or loved
And if you cannot give me away
At least let me live in your eyes and not on your mind.

You can love me most by letting hands touch hands
By letting bodies touch bodies
And by letting go of children that need to be free.

Love doesn't die, people do
So when all that's left of me is love
Give me away.
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***Closing (Aaron Arnold)
Thanks again to everyone for joining us here today. Special thanks to Lisa Trigo for flying in from New Orleans to make this event even more special. Thanks also to Renee Egan, who helped make most of the arrangements for today. Thanks to Porsia Tunzi for selecting today’s readings, and to Kate Coulouras for designing our name tags. And, of course, thanks to Rosie, for leaving an impact on all of us that we will never forget.

In her honor, I’d like to ask all of you to do something she always recommended we do to protect ourselves. That is, thump your thymus five times. Your thymus is right in the center of your chest, and Rosie was convinced that thumping it five times – HARD – would keep you safe and sound.

The students from the NOLA trips are now going to shift into a more casual reunion mode. First we’re going to gather in the front for a few quick moments, then we're heading up to Ageno East for a cookout. Everyone is invited.
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And so ended our service. We gathered at the front of the Chapel and everyone received several gifts to commemorate the day. We then went to the patio of Ageno East and everyone pitched in just like we were back on Eddie's lot. (Well, not quite EVERYone, but that's another story . . .)

We loved being together again and we pledged to keep in touch. Let's hope that's a pledge we keep!

a few more friends

2008-09-01T09:17:00.000-07:00

Some further reports on our NOLA friends have trickled in. Jan Term '07 students will remember Cindy and David Franatovich and their grown-up kids Dara and Dustin. They, along with Cindy's parents Connie and Jerry LeRouge (from Jan Term '06 and '07) are all safe in Vicksburg, Mississippi. '07ers will remember that we had the greatest crawfish boil of all time at Cindy and David's house out in Slidell.

As for Rosie, she didn't get to her friend's house and is instead in a hotel in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, with her cat and two birds. She is anxiously watching the overtopping of the levee at the Industrial Canal, which is at the end of her street. If that levee blows, her three houses will be in serious trouble.

Bruce Trigo is still home and dry, though he is without power. Of course, as mentioned below, it will soon be his job to restore whatever power is out in the region.

Sarah called again from the shelter and we learned a few more details about her evacuation. She drove out in her own car with her kids and some grandkids. She is reluctant to watch the news where she is, as -- like Rosie -- she finds the overtopping of the Industrial Canal too scary for her to watch.

Sarah knew that Red Perkins (Rosie's backdoor neighbor) had evacuated to Shreveport. He had hoped to ride out the storm, but was sent away by city and state authorities. David, too, is safe, having been sent away by the authorities as well. He is the person whose house is covered with musical instruments that he salvaged from the debris of Hurricane Katrina.

News Feeds from NOLA

2008-09-01T08:15:00.000-07:00

At this link, you can get live reports from NOLA stations: http://gustav.freeadsensehost.com/

One of them is showing the "overtopping" going on at the Industrial Canal, the channel right past Rosie's house with the bridge into the Lower 9th.

Gustav Preliminary Update

2008-08-31T19:54:00.000-07:00

Hello, Friends of SMC NOLA! We are glad to hear from so many of our friends this week, but we are very sad that we are hearing from them and about them because another storm is threatening the Gulf Coast just after the third anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. As we hear from some of the families you know from our blogs, we will post updates so that everyone can know all that we learn.

At the moment (it's Sunday night, August 31, 2008), it is very difficult to get any calls through to any cellphone network serving the New Orleans area. Still, we have managed to talk to a few of our longtime friends in the Ninth Ward.

Our beloved friend Rosie Boitmann is currently in Mississippi, staying with friends of her cousin Flo. (For the SMC NOLA peeps, this is the cousin who loaned us the metal detector with which we tried to find Rosie's buried jar of nickels. As you recall, we never found the nickels, despite a day of digging an area roughly 15' x 15'.) Rosie waited until today to drive out, because she was unsure which direction to drive to escape a double hit. That is, if she fled west and then the storm hit Texas, her situation would be twice as bad. She finally decided to drive east. When we caught her she was driving in thick traffic through Slidell.

In her car was the suitcase that she has had packed since we first moved her back into her house. One of the closet floors was reserved for the evacuation kit and today was the day that decision paid off. She also packed up her one remaining cat, Tony, and her two birds, one of which is a squawky macaw named Magoo and the other of which is a rescued wren from the time when she was a refugee.

Rosie's friend and adviser (and her host when she was a refugee), Lisa Trigo, had asked Rosie to flee to Dallas with Lisa and her daughter on Saturday in the wee hours of the morning, but Rosie waited until today and drove the other direction instead. Lisa had given Rosie lots of advice, including a recommendation that she fill her car with gas and do any necessary banking before the end of the week. It's not entirely clear if Rosie followed Lisa's advice.

One thing that Rosie sadly had to leave behind was her new set of teeth. She got fitted with them on Friday and was supposed to go pick them up either this week or the next. She has lived without them for quite awhile, but was excited to have a toothy smile for the first time in a long time. If all goes well, her sunny new smile will not be far away.

For now, though, as anyone can guess, Rose is very sad, very upset, and very apprehensive about what might come next. She said, "I can't take this. And I really don't know if I can go back. No matter what." We invited her to come to California and wait out the impact of the storm with us. She liked the idea, but instead sent her love to all of the students and asked for prayers in return.

As for the Trigos, Lisa and youngest daughter Lauren are currently in Dallas with Lauren's older brother Andrew. They left at 3:30 a.m. on Saturday to outwit the traffic problems that they knew they would face if they left in the daytime. Their strategy worked and their trip wasn't nearly as difficult as other people's evacuations have been.

Lisa gathered up all of her pictures and took them with her in the van, but didn't worry about many other possessions. She mentioned that her Aunt Té also took only pictures, though her aunt's pictures were almost all reprints that she had re-collected from family members who did not lose everything in Katrina, as she did. Té's grandson stuffed the car in which he rode as full of his possessions as he could, saying "Don't you remember how hard it was to replace all of that stuff the last time? I don't want to have to do that again!"

Apart from their own needs, all of the evacuees are worrying about other people as well. As one of the case managers for Catholic Charities' rebuilding efforts, Lisa is particularly troubled to have left three of her families who were supposed to move into their completed homes this week. She hopes that the move-in plans won't be delayed for long.

While Lisa and Lauren are with Andrew in Dallas, Lisa's husband Bruce is staying home because he works for the public utility company Entergy. He is on the first crew that will respond to the effects of the storm. He is keeping track of his family by cellphone for now.

Their other daughter Amanda and her new husband (Blake?) are in Baton Rouge with his family. Baton Rouge might well suffer some effects of the storm, but they didn't want to go too far from New Orleans, especially because they left behind most of what they own in a new apartment that is not yet covered by renter's insurance.

In general, Lisa believes that the entire area was better prepared for the approach of this storm, but she still fears that even though the evacuation went relatively smoothly, there is no way for the return to match it. She is aware that many gas stations have already run out of fuel and even if families can return next week, it will be almost impossible to do so. In fact, thinking about how, when, and where to get gas is one of the huge questions that occupies the minds of the evacuees, even though the issue of fuel probably barely occurs to those of us outside of the storm-affected areas.

Lisa said over and over again, "Let's just hope it doesn't go the same way this time." All of our friends in New Orleans wonder how many people will have the strength to return to the city again, whether or not it is ruined by this storm. Like Rosie, Lisa sends all of us her love and asks for our thoughts and prayers.

We finally got a call through to our friend Sarah Mercadel as well. Hers is the house we painted "tennis ball green" in January 2007. Once she figured out who was on the phone, her first concern was for Rosie; she immediately "tattled," saying "I don't think Rosie left. You've gotta call Rosie and get her to leave!" When she learned that Rosie is, in fact, safe in Mississippi, she assured us that she, too, is safe.

She was a little unclear, though, about where she is at the moment. She called out into the noisy room and asked, "Where are we? Where are we right now?" Though at first it seemed like perhaps she was in a crowded car or bus, it turned out that she was in fact in a shelter. Different people gave different answers to her question, but it seems most likely that she is in Lacombe, Mississippi. It was so difficult to hear (from either end of the phone), that we don't have many more details on Sarah. We do, though, have a solid promise that she will keep us posted from this point forward.

The last family that we can account for at the moment is the Palmer family. Don, Troylyn, and their son "Little Don" all live next door to Rosie. We helped them gut their house in January 2006 and repair it in 2007, and we gutted two houses owned by Don's dad, Leroy, over the years. All of the Palmers are gathered now in Baton Rouge, at the same house where Leroy has been staying since Katrina, which belongs to Little Don's aunt (Big Don's sister).

Little Don visited all of us last May as he contemplated whether or not to start college. He started classes two weeks ago in New Orleans, studying mortuary science. Now he gets a few days off from classes, but if the delay is very long there is a way to continue his studies through a related program in Baton Rouge. Little Don assures us that all is well. He was quick to report that their new dog is with them and is also safe.

From our end, we are in a bit of a frenzy full of fear and "what ifs . . . ?." We are keeping each other posted about Facebook messages from other volunteers or from our NOLA family members, about text and cell messages/conversations, and about the latest news reports that we've heard. On their end, they are learning some of what they know from us. The neighbors didn't all hear about each other's plans, but now they all know where the people of their corner of the world have landed, at least for now.

We hope that all of this anticipation and action turn out to be unnecessary. No matter which way things go, we will post updates when we have them. Thoughts, prayers, hopes, and best wishes should all be directed to the Gulf Coast tonight . . .

Day Twenty-Two: January 2008

2008-01-30T00:31:00.000-08:00

Day Twenty-Two: Tuesday, January 29

A clear morning awaited us, despite predictions of thunderstorms for our packing session. A few folks ran off to the ferry to bring back beignets for breakfast, while another set headed out to Rosie’s to do some last minute touchups. The rest started clearing out the bus, the warehouse, the tent, and every other place that we had left our stuff.

Rosie’s crew got to take in the house one more time and they got to hug Rosie a few more times as she cried over our departure. They looked back at the messages that we had scrawled on the railings at her house and thought “Maybe we should clearcoat these at spring break.” We still hope to take down her carport, build her a space for a new shed, and finish landscaping her yard. Who knows? Maybe we’ll be back in just a few short weeks.

As for the cleanup crew, they were quite efficient. They knew that many things had to be tossed, but they also were very judicious in deciding which things could stay with the bus (including our new kitchen tents and our old folding tables), which things could go to Bree and Shane (including open balsamic vinegar and our other “fancy” foods), and which things could be used by the residents of the tent city we pass almost every day. We had lots of food to offer, along with a few sleeping bags, blankets, clothing items, and umbrellas.

Though we were breaking down our NOLA home, we were all in a pretty playful mood. Shawny busted out some of the remaining awards and bestowed them on people. Because some of them were squirt guns and harmonicas, things got a bit crazy for just a short while there.

We finally got the lot back to the condition in which we had found it and headed in for one last run through the French Quarter to pick up souvenirs for ourselves (and for YOU!). Some grabbed one last muffaletta sandwich, some had red beans and rice, and some just hurried to shop.

As we sat at the airport, we realized that we felt like we were re-entering civilization after a long absence. We were overly fascinated with TV screens (a tendency that was even more evident last night at the restaurant when we got mesmerized by a competition in which people were breaking as many as ten concrete blocks at a time with their bare elbows) and we started to get the scoop on celebrity gossip until we remembered that we just don’t care.

Bryan pointed out that he would have to make a big mental adjustment to stop treating his clothing like one big napkin (as we have done with our dirty work clothes for the past three weeks). Others talked about how weird it felt to just sit and wait, rather than pushing on to the next task. Still others predicted that the Moraga routine was going to feel even more strange, as we are unlikely to match our NOLA level of productivity when we are back there.

Despite these losses, most of us were eager to sleep in our own beds tonight, to eat favorite foods, and – most of all – to see family, friends, roommates, girl/boyfriends, pets, and even our cars.

We will see each other in the morning, assuming that we manage to wake up without the presence of 28 other stirring bodies to roust us out of our beds. We’ll review things, look forward to what happens next, and then kick our projects into high gear so that our breaks are not too terribly interrupted by their completion. And, apparently, we will begin to think about spring break and how we want to spend it.

We’re very tired. Our clothes are very dirty. And we are changed. Talk to us, listen to us, hug us, and let us be different than the people we were when we left. Thanks for listening, watching, and reading. We hope to see you on February 13!

Day Twenty-One: January 2008

2008-01-28T23:06:00.000-08:00

Day Twenty-One: Monday, January 28

The morning came too early, especially because it was the morning of our last workday in New Orleans. We are still ready and willing to work, but we are not ready for this experience to end. Also, we knew that our workload for the day was daunting. Like every day, we charged on.

We all hurried to Rosie’s house and hopped on the long list of jobs we had identified as our final push priorities. We occupied ourselves by painting the porch and front doors, touching up interior paint, scrubbing remaining glue globs from the newly-installed floor, caulking the baseboards, completing the brick walkway behind the two houses, finishing the birdbath, scrubbing the vinyl siding on the front of the house, and sweeping, sweeping, sweeping, and sweeping some more. One by one, the jobs got checked off the list.

We got distracted over and over again by visitors who wanted to say goodbye. Two Habitat staffers came over and brought us to tears as they thanked us and told us they’d miss us. Neighbors from all around Rosie’s house came by to talk, to thank us, and even to pray for us. And other neighbors that we don’t already know came by and asked us for help.

When evening began to fall, we knew that it was time to load the bus in front of Rosie’s for the last time. We had just pulled the tape from our paint job, so one by one we crossed the street to look back at our most recent work. As we stood there and took it all in, we fell quiet.

Veterans of multiple trips found themselves reviewing all of the many stages of Rosie’s houses that we have experienced together. They remembered the initial swirl of belongings in those houses back on that first Saturday in January 2006; they remembered the shovels and wheelbarrows and the huge piles of debris that we accumulated there. They remembered the big awful freezer that we wrestled off the porch with a triumphant thud. They remembered the smells of those waterlogged houses, especially the refrigerators and the sickening substance inside them that we lovingly called “fridge tea.” They remembered the huge claw that came along and scooped up everything we had removed from those houses. They remembered the tears that we shed on those front porches and the many lunches that we shared there as well. And they remembered the slow but sure reawakening of each house, one by one.

Newcomers (who are all solid veterans now) reflected on all that has happened for them – and for these houses -- in the last three-plus weeks. We all thought back to the houses we initially entered: framed-out skeletons standing inside a shell of vinyl siding. And we remembered the struggles of learning to insulate, learning to sheetrock, learning to install flooring, learning to paint properly, and learning the basics of the logic of construction. The more we looked back at those newly painted doors and porch, the more we leaned into each other and hugged each other. Tears started to fall.

We let this time float on for awhile then organized ourselves for a picture or two. We decided to have dinner in the French Quarter tonight then come home all together rather than dispersing throughout the souvenir shops, cafes, and bars. Over dinner we had each person stand up and praise the person to his or her right at the table. We got to say sweet things about each other in front of each other. It wouldn’t have mattered who was next to whom, as everyone has plenty of evidence that every person at that table deserves a lot of praise.

We’re getting up early in the morning (5:00 a.m. for the early shift) to gather up everything in our lovely little village and pack it up to head back to California. Leo will drop us off then start the long drive back to central Indiana. We have more work to do this week to complete our projects, some of which will be presented publicly at 7:00 on Wednesday, January 13th in the Soda Center at Saint Mary’s. Please join us that night if you can.

It wasn’t all about the hours worked for us, but we are still impressed with our own achievements. Today we added another 261 hours to our overall total, taking our collective running total to 5529 hours. Because a few of us are going to make one more pass through Rosie’s in the morning to finish some quick tasks, we’ll add those hours in before we declare our ultimate total. But for now, we say “whew!”

Day Twenty: January 2008

2008-01-27T22:45:00.000-08:00

Day Twenty: Sunday, January 27

It wasn’t cold today. It wasn’t raining. Nice. We slept in, ate powdered eggs and artificial bacon and got to Rosie’s by 9:00. Most of us went to mass with her, while others got the jobs going for the day. This was our second-to-last workday and we knew that we had a lot of ground to cover. Some ground literally needed to be covered, as we planted grass seed today that we had to protect from the nearby pigeons. Otherwise, we stayed in the middle of things: painting, flooring, sanding, landscaping.

And also, we got sad. Not terribly sad, but we reached the level of sadness that comes with the awareness that this beautiful experience is about to come to an end. We have suffered, there is no doubt about it. We have struggled, we have frozen, we have ached, and we have cried. But when it comes right down to it, we love what has happened here: for us, for Rosie, for this city, and for our collective sense of what comes next.

We wanted a lot of triumphs today, but we only got a couple: we finished the flooring in the second house, and we primed the porch, which has been taunting and torturing us for over a week now. We also painted all of the internal doors, which is a total nightmare of a job. We finished counters and cabinetry, trim, and touchup paint. Everyone disappeared into a little private zone and worked and worked and worked. We each came out at lunchtime to enjoy a rare treat: grilled cheese sandwiches made by Team Team on the stove at Rosie’s. Some of them were made on raisin bread. Mmmmmmm.

We came out of our work zones again when Jerrad showed up with our beloved puppies, now named Rosie and Leo. They have opened their eyes now, making Lindsay Ryberg comment on the fact that the puppies are opening their eyes just as our eyes have been opened to a whole new way of seeing the world.

We also came out in the middle of the afternoon when Linda Bell, Tommy’s mom, showed up with a pile of treats: cupcakes, Gatorade, donuts, seven-layer bars (made by Tommy’s aunt), cinnamon rolls, and lots of other great stuff. Tommy’s sister and her son also came along, having driven over from a conference in Houston to connect with us. It was fun for all of us to show a parent what we’ve done. We think that all of our parents (and friends and loved ones) would get a kick out of dropping by over here. Thanks for the treats, Linda!

At one point in the afternoon, we started to re-assess whether we could complete all the jobs we have planned. After almost abandoning a few of them, we instead decided to kick in and make things happen. We all stayed until 7:00 p.m. today, while some of us stayed until almost 8:30 (having arrived at 9:00 a.m.) to finish the flooring job.

We all went to the Dry Dock tonight (the sweet restaurant close to the ferry stop right by our camp) and sat for a few hours catching up on the day’s events and talking about what it will mean to head back home. We came home tired and giddy, intending to clean the bus thoroughly, but instead standing with each other laughing and telling stories. Bringing down our tents and emptying out the bus is going to be a very difficult experience. It will happen soon. Oh dear. . .

Our hours today total 262; our running total now is 5268.

Day Nineteen: January 2008

2008-01-26T21:55:00.000-08:00

Day Nineteen: Saturday, January 26

We crossed over the 5000-hour mark today! Wow! And what a workday it was! We accomplished a lot for one day at Rosie’s, even though most of us worked a shorter day than usual. We realized that it was probably too rainy for us to do any big jobs at Habitat, so we put most of the bus on rain delay and let people sleep. A few hardy souls headed out to Rosie’s house early to crank up the jobs that we are doing there. The rest joined them a couple of hours later and folded into the systems that they started.

We had a special visitor today: Dustin Cramer, a Saint Mary’s alumnus who has followed our trips for the last two years. He came out and worked with us as we installed flooring today and he finally got a firsthand look at the whole SMC NOLA experience. We were glad he was with us.

The fabulous floor team in 4009 worked out a system today where it really looked like they each had four hands. They were applying glue and installing planks so fast (but still neatly) that it was awesome to behold. Obi in particular used his massive wingspan to reach from side to side in the room so that no steps were wasted. They finished the flooring in that side quickly.

All of the floorers have learned quite a bit as they have struggled to apply perfectly-shaped flooring planks to thoroughly imperfectly-shaped rooms. Their reliance on phrases like “factory edge” attests to their newfound expertise. They have also developed their own vocabularies to trade around tools and materials in the rooms where they work. The maniac crew in 4009 has its own private way of talking, usually in unison, usually at top volume.

That front porch crew kept sweating the prep for painting the doors and porch tomorrow. Some of them replaced the glass that we removed over the last few days. For many of them, it was their first crack at glazing (installing window panes using putty and metal points that help the window to expand and contract in changing temperatures). The overall porch/doors job has to come to an end, so we have to settle for the state of smoothness we have achieved, even if we haven’t removed every scrap of paint. Many people will spend tomorrow bringing those doors a whole new look.

Another huge set of people took on cabinet installation in 4011. They found that the contractor had planned the electrical and water outlets in ways that don’t quite match the size and shape of the cabinets that Rosie purchased. They “got creative” (as Justin likes to say) and figured out new ways to capitalize on the resources that we had.

Linzy, Scott, and Amanda tackled the sand that Matt W. moved into the backyard yesterday, spreading it around to try to make the backyard level so that water won’t collect there in its usual way. If the weather holds tomorrow, we will be able to put in some grass seed and begin the rebirth of Rosie’s green (but now clean) yard.

We even had a special visit today from our old friend Jack Watson, whose house we cleared back in January 2006. He lives on Desire Street, just a house or two down from our friend Leroy Palmer. (For you old vets trying to remember which person he is, Jack was in our documentary Blessed to Be a Witness, telling us to hurry home to escape from the mosquitoes.) Justin drove down Desire, saw Jack on his front porch and decided to stop and say hello. Jack came back to Rosie’s with Justin so that he could greet all of the old-time veterans who met him two years ago. Shawny, Justin, Chris, Emily, Jed, Shane, Brianna H., and Elijah all gathered around to catch up with him.

We ended our day early (just after 5:00) to pursue an opportunity that has never presented itself in our prior trips: we attended a Mardi Gras parade. We were all a bit mystified going in, as it seemed like we would just be standing around on the street watching floats go by. We didn’t quite see how it would be very fun to go, but we’ve been encouraged to go by so many people that we made sure to work a parade into our schedule. This fun idea was made even better by the fact that we received new letters today from our sixth-grade penpals at Happy Hollow Elementary in West Lafayette, Indiana. They sent us Mardi Gras (or Valentines Day) cards that helped us to get in an appropriately festive mood for our chosen parade.

Our friend Lisa Trigo picked the Caesar Parade in Metairie, saying that it was the prettiest parade available with the most floats. Last night lots of parades got canceled, so we weren’t sure if we would miss out on the whole idea. Happily, the parade went ahead as planned. Lisa and her husband Bruce picked up big piles of Popeye’s chicken for us and even brought a card table to set up on the parade route. When the floats started rolling, we at first thought it felt like we were returning to some other decade. As we got into the swing of things, though, we had an unbelievable blast.

The general gist of Mardi Gras parades is that local groups called “krewes” plan floats around some loose theme and as they parade through the streets, they throw beads and other treats to the people along the route. As for us, our job was to jump up and down, wave our hands in the air, and yell “Throw me something, mister!” We turned out to be great at this job and before we knew it we each had a minimum of 25 beaded necklaces around our necks. Elijah and Obi probably had 50 or more each, making it difficult for them to lean their heads back due to the bulkiness of the beads.

There were prizes other than regular old beads to be caught as well. There were fancier versions of beads, including glass ones, stuffed ones, flashing ones, and ones that had big medallions on them. There were also all kinds of other prizes, including souvenir plastic cups, foam footballs (and a soccer ball, caught by one of our SMC soccer players: Mark), zippered bags, and even Mardi Gras underwear (thongs for both men and women!). When one marching group went by, the sound system kicked on our unofficial theme song of the trip: Boots with the Fur. Actually, we hate that song, but we’ve heard it so many times on the local radio station (2006 vets, it’s the new “Doncha”) that it is burned into our psyches. When it kicked up on the parade route, we danced like crazy people and had a great time. We stopped for beignets before heading home and giggled and laughed some more about the blast that we had tonight.
What a great NOLA day! Two more workdays ahead and then we pack and leave. Today’s work hours total 240; our running total has now reached 5006.

Serg keeps stripping the paint off the front of the house. After hours and hours a scraping the doors are almost ready for a fresh coat of paint.

The duplex’s are finally starting to look like a home. We can’t believe that only two weeks ago these walls were made up of just a bunch of studs.

Obi and Mark finish laying floors in the kitchen of 4009. They’ve got themselves quite an interesting and entertaining way of putting ‘em down.

The BLOKEs interview a Habitat worker for their group project.

Bryan and Eric meticulously glaze the windows in.

Erik makes sure the windowpane fits perfectly in the front door. We had a limited amount of glass, so we had to make sure we didn’t break any.

Comin’ in hot! Mark and Matt carry boxes of wood flooring to be installed in 4009. They were able to finally finish the floors. Way to go guys!

Brad putties a piece of glass to put into the front door.

Emily and Lindsay were some of the early risers who got to Rosie’s and installed flooring.

Bryan and Tommy install the last few panes of glass in the front doors of 4011.

Jed masterfully cuts perfectly measured pieces for the floor in 4009.

Justin, Chris, Scott and Shaine discussing ideas on how to make the kitchen look the best.

Lunch break in front of 4011.

Sanding off old paint is never a clean job.

As you can see, laying down the flooring involves many people and can be very messy.

Aaron wetting his whistle at the watering hole

Julie sanding the last part of the front door

An old friend, Jack Watson stops by to say hi to everyone

The Souljas after a long day at Rosie’s

Matt flooring the living room, which is the last room that needs flooring in 4009.

Too many beads. Too much fun.

Day Eighteen: January 2008

2008-01-25T21:18:00.000-08:00

Day Eighteen: Friday, January 25

Our Friday morning wakeup included news that it wasn’t raining. We actually kind of hoped that it would rain so that we could head to Rosie’s instead of going to Habitat this morning. Instead, we split the difference. Those who had crucial jobs to continue at Rosie’s went there, and those who could spare some time for Habitat joined in on the events there today.

The Habitat folks started with some big jobs, including laying decking (the flat part of the roof) on one house and finishing shingling on another. We all enjoyed the heights, the challenges, the power tools, and everything about those jobs. The wind was picking up, though, making our huge sheets of plywood function like sails sometimes. No one took flight. Just as we broke for lunch, though, it began to rain and the temperature dropped dramatically. We went inside one of one of the more-advanced houses and waited for today’s special lunch to arrive: pizza! We also enjoyed brownies that were cooked for us by our Habitat staff friend Katie.

After lunch we had to abandon all of our roof jobs (reluctantly) and take on some other tasks that didn’t involve sliding around on top of houses. Several of us took on siding the highest parts of the houses and others installed hurricane straps on the house with the double hip roof. Hurricane straps are flat bars of 12-gauge steel that are nailed into a stud and then bent over the cap plate (the highest 2x4 in the main house structure) to help hold the parts of the house together in high winds. Each of them takes 14 nails, making their installation a very slow process. Elijah got to enjoy himself on the hurricane strap task, as he got a big kick out of bending the heavy steel plates with his bare hands.

Our house leader on that job (Jordan) bid us farewell today. We were a bit surprised because we still have one more day at Habitat; Jordan, however, is going out of town this weekend, so we won’t see him again before we leave. We’ve been through a lot of stages of this house with Jordan, so it is sad to see him go. It also reminds us that we, too, are about to leave town and that we are about to say goodbye to a number of our new (and old) NOLA friends. We were so struck by our impending separation from our Habitat friends that we invited them all over to dinner tonight at our place.

We headed over to Rosie’s after our Habitat day and found that the early shift had made huge progress on the jobs that we had left undone. Matt W. almost single-handedly moved the 15,000 pound sand pile to the backyard. Others managed to help him a bit, but he said that he really like the mindless monotony of shoveling and toting the sand. He’s a hero for the day.

Briana, Brad, Shane, and Justin teamed up on the front doors and installed the new glass panes as they also continued sanding. This door job – which was not on our original list of chores – has turned into one of our most time-consuming undertakings. It would have been incredibly expensive to replace the doors and the windows that surround them, but the amount of time that we have spent on the entire porch area is pretty enormous. We expect that whole area to be beautiful any day now.

Even more impressive was the work of today’s floor crews. The first crew consisted of Jed, Scott, Matt P., Mark, and Obi (with a lot of help from Chris and Justin) and the second crew consisted of Emily, Lindsay R., Sam, Alec, and Aaron. The first crew got things going during the early shift and managed to take the board-by-board vinyl plank flooring through the bathroom, back entryway, and two bedrooms. Because the process involves spreading a fierce glue over the floor, peeling the adhesive back off of the vinyl plank, then applying it to the glued floor, there is much room for error and even more room for making a total mess. Everyone on the floor was covered with glue, despite all of their attempts to control where the glue belonged.

We ended the day very, very dirty, but we really wanted to celebrate with our Habitat friends anyway. In the bus we decided to make tonight a big thanksgiving dinner, complete with stuffing, mashed potatoes, yams, and turkey. We had all but the turkey, so the late shift workers stopped and got some on the way home. Our night was loud and fun. Colin from Habitat brought his trombone and proved that he is an excellent player. We played games in the tent and played music for each other. We stayed up later than we should, but we want to have fun too. We’ll definitely make our 5000 hours, as today we worked for 302 hours; now our running total is 4766.

Best friends, Sergio and Erik, sit on Rosie’s stoop after a long day of flooring.

Kate Julie and Lindsey laughed as they painted Habitat signs and made up songs about the indescribably cold weather.

Julie sketched the Habitat for Humanity symbols on all the signs.

Jed the stud rocks the power tools.

Bryan and Elijah keep the morale high as they paint Rosie’s walls and sing songs.

Lindsay and Eric laid out some plans while on top of another Habitat house early today. The wind was fierce but they powered through it! Our troopers!

We consider Shawny to be our agent – we go wherever she sends us! Amazingly enough, she is able to put in a solid day of work and coordinate what will occur in the days that follow all at the same time

This was the view that we woke up to this morning, it was freezing but we all looked forward to a good day at work!

Amanda, Shane, Chris, and Sam enjoyed some relaxing time back at camp after dinner. We were treated to a great dinner of Turkey, stuffing, and mashed potatoes - It was delicious and well deserved!

Elijah was hard at work today putting up the decking at one of our favorite Habit houses.

Day Seventeen: January 2008

2008-01-24T20:58:00.000-08:00

Day Seventeen: Thursday, January 24

Today’s Katie’s REAL birthday! We had her party on Tuesday, but we’ve kept the celebration going until now! Happy day again, Katie!

Because we crossed over our 4000-hour mark, we got to sleep in while Chris, Justin, and Shawny cooked breakfast for us. They made French toast out of all different kinds of bread, including raisin bread. They also bought bread and lunch meat for sandwiches for lunch, so that both the breakfast and lunch crews could skip the prep nightmare this morning. Just as we were awakening, a light rain began to fall.

We wondered if Habitat would call the day off, but we hustled onto the bus as if they would not. Just as we headed for the gate, one of the Habitat staffers called us and told us to skip out. We all headed to Rosie’s in the rain and kicked things into high gear.

The paint crew got new paint, some of which had to be used to correct the problems caused by yesterday’s improperly-mixed paint that didn’t match the rest of the walls. Though repainting was a drag, it meant that the walls that got two coats look really great. So do all of the painters, by the way, as they are covered head to toe in the paint color, which is called “Elegant White.” It looks less elegant when it is splattered all over people’s glasses and skunk-striped through their hair, but it is a nice indication of who is a painter and who is not. The paint team is loosely led by Serg and includes a range of other people such as Kate, Sam (who took on almost all of the trimwork in 4011 with no complaints), Lindsay R., Nicole, Lindsay S., Julie, Erik, and sometimes Elijah and Bryan. All in all, the painters have brought the houses to a state where they finally look “real” to us. We are pretty proud of what we’ve made happen inside the framed-out walls that greeted us when we arrived.

Apart from the painting, today was a day of unglorious jobs. No one got to be a hero, except maybe the people who scrubbed out the bathtub surrounds that had gotten covered with construction dust and footprints. Mark and Obi tackled this job and managed to make the tubs look like they had just been installed. No scratches, no marks, no dirt in sight.

Other than that task, all of our jobs today were pure drudgery. Some of us were scrubbing the floors (even though at this moment they are still only covered with plywood (technically OSB) to prep them for installation of vinyl flooring, possibly as early as tomorrow. Katie (on her birthday!), Matt W., Aaron, and Jed worked up quite a funky process to bring up all residue from the subfloor and remove it with a wet/dry vac. Even when it was still pretty light out Jed performed the procedure wearing a headlamp. Hopefully someone will post a picture or some video of this group doing its job.

Others continued to remove years and years of old paint from the original front doors that we chose to salvage. Briana and Brad have been committed to the sanding job for days now and Emily and Shawny joined in for the full day today. Almost everyone in the group has put in some time on the front doors and porch, so we all have a stake in their eventual beauty.

Outside the house, six yards of sand showed up today. The plan is to carry the sand into the backyard so that we can level the ground and plant some grass seed, bulbs, and other plants. We are, of course, experts at moving huge loads of sand, so another 15,000 pound pile doesn’t bother us a bit. Today’s floor crew is going to continue floor duty tomorrow, then take on the sand pile.

Our lunch today was a special one too: we actually had loaves of bread (Wow! We never have that!) and lunchmeat. The lunch crew (the Souljas) went into Rosie’s house and used the broiler to toast our sandwiches into ultimate yumminess. We needed some warmth on this chilly day and those sandwiches really hit the spot.

At the end of our workday, we headed home and waited for Chris, Matt, and Scott to return in the truck. They left with Rosie at about 4:00 to go pick up the flooring that we will install this weekend. As it turned out, though, they had to go to five different Lowe’s stores to find as much as we needed. They didn’t get home until almost 8:00 p.m.

When they arrived, they had a special treat: a cake for the birthday girl that they now call “Demolition Katie.” They decided that they wanted her cake to acknowledge how tough she is for working a ten-hour shift on her birthday. They actually got the bakery to let them draw some images on her cake, which included a unicycle (her vehicle of choice), a sleepy smiley face (she is always ready for a nap, though she rarely takes one), and some other rough and tumble images like explosions, etc. Everyone hooted and hollered when Chris explained the imagery of her cake, and now we are likely to call her “Demo K.”

It looks like we will make it to 5000 hours, as today we hit 291, taking us to a running total of 4464.

Brad works diligently on scraping the paint off of the front door.

Brad, Bri, Sam, and Erik try and finish the front room of 4011 so that we can complete the house.

Justin meticulously tries to scratch of the paint on the front door of 4009.

Thanks to Leo, Shane, and Tommy we were able to nearly complete the glass on 4009.

Our beautiful bus waiting for us to finish a hard days work at Rosies.

Nicole and Linzy played Cinderella for the day as they prepared the floor boards for the enamel flooring to be put in on Friday.

Rosie checking out the progress in the backyard.

what we do after a hard day of getting paint on us. It’s handy having a chauffeur.

Lindsay was part of the paint crew and is always happy to paint the trim.

Emily scraping the door to prepare it for paint.

The putty was difficult, but these window panes are going to look great after we’re done with them.

Bryan and Lindsay team up for a precise cut on closet baseboards. Precision is excellence in action.

Cleaning and prepping for flooring is collaborative effort.

Smile Brad! Great job on that door…it looks great.

Lunchtime in the back of the pick-up is always a great way to recharge and replenish body and mind.

Day Sixteen: January 2008

2008-01-23T20:15:00.000-08:00

Day Sixteen: Wednesday, January 23

Yes! A warm morning with no rain! Things were grey and foggy, but not cold and wet. We’ll take it! We had leftover king cake for breakfast, prepped lunch, then headed out for Habitat. A few of us passed around Leo’s maddening metal dexterity puzzles (those brainteaser things where two curved pieces of metal are interlocked and the challenge is to separate them). These things have made the rounds through the whole group and some other peripheral folks. Even though we are sick of hearing the clinking of the parts, everyone still wants to try again whenever one of the puzzles is near.

Once at Habitat, the morning was full of jobs that were not exactly our dream tasks. One group blocked cabinets and closets in the house, which involves nailing boards between all the studs to serve as cabinet supports and closet structure supports. It’s an awful job that usually involves lots of hammer hits to our own fingers and hands. We persevered.

Another group applied weather stripping to the windows throughout the lot, while others worked on finishing the very highest parts of the siding on some of the houses whose exteriors are nearly finished. This job is particularly difficult, as it involves holding heavy strips of siding parallel off two ladders twenty or so feet in the air while also hammering them in. Matt P., Scott, and Lindsay S. were moving along swimmingly until we suffered our first hospital run of the year: Lindsay got an eye injury that seemed somewhat serious. Happily, it was not. She did not scratch her cornea as we suspected and has already recovered substantially just by using special drops.

While Lindsay headed to the ER, others kept working away at Habitat. Lindsay R. and Julie worked on truly beautiful signs for all of the houses in the Habitat block. And then our group was offered two special jobs: decking the double hip roof whose trusses have driven us crazy for a week and framing out walls on the house on which we built the floor system last week. We couldn’t finish either job, but tomorrow should bring both to an end.

The folks who went to Rosie’s house continued painting and working on those crackled front doors. We resorted to paint stripper and a pressure washer to move the sanding job along, with Brad as the chief paint removal specialist. Shane ordered replacement panes for all of the sections of the front doors. Some others cleared more parts of the area surrounding the house, including exposing a sidewalk that was almost entirely buried in muck and construction debris (not ours). Matt W. and Aaron got very artistic on a salvaged birdbath that we found at yesterday’s garden; once they have finished their artistry, we’ll show you their handiwork.

A side job also occupied a few people this afternoon: several of Rosie’s neighbors asked our crew to help eliminate the search party X’s that have been spray-painted on the fronts of their houses for two and a half years now. That means that some of us are learning to replace sections of vinyl siding without destroying the trim or the surrounding siding. Because we know how important it was for Rosie and our friend Sarah when we removed the markings from their houses, we knew that we wanted to help. It’s not as easy a job as it sounds, but it is worth it to us to figure it out. We worked past sundown, but hustled out quickly because we were hungry.

For dinner, we got to have lots of leftovers from Katie’s birthday bonfire, including chicken and vegetables that didn’t come out of cans! We’ve eaten well the last few days, which will help to keep us going as we make our final pushes at the Habitat site and at Rosie’s. There’s still a lot of work to do, but we are confident that we can make it happen.

Our hours for the day number at 295; our running total now is 4173.

Julie and Lindsay enjoy each others company as they make lovely signs for the Habitat work site.

Scott and Nicole work diligently on removing nails as they look to perfect their project.

The puppies get some much needed play time in the back of Jared’s truck. We can’t wait for their eyes to open!

Bri, Amanda, and Sam work on finishing the siding on the front of the house.

Bryan gets up close and personal with the stripper!

Dr. Aaron helps Lindsay S. before she heads to the emergency room to get debris out of her eye.

Leo and Stephanie take a break from working hard on the siding.

Julie paints beautiful signs to label the Habitat Homes.

In preparation for the wall raising ceremony, Amanda works to build the walls that will be brought up tomorrow.

Katie gracefully and courageously nails in the first piece of decking along the edge of the house.

Matt and Scottie reach great heights as they hammer in the siding of one of the habitat homes.

Mark and Aaron come down from the roof where they spent the day installing drainage.

Lindsay helps paint a sign displaying the address of one of soon to be completed Habitat for Humanity homes.

Elijah and Emily dangle from the trusses of the roof as they nail in the rest of the roof’s framing.

Amanda and Emily take part in the seemingly endless sanding of the large front door of Rosie’s house.

Lindsay R. working on signs for the habitat houses in the West bank village

Tommy Bell on the edge working on side fascia

Bryan working the chop saw at habitat for window rain diverters

Aaron and Mat hash out the plans for Rosie’s birdbath

Kate keeping moist after a day’s worth of painting

Day Fifteen: January 2008

2008-01-22T23:20:00.001-08:00

Day Fifteen: Tuesday, January 22

Today is Katie’s birthday! Well, not really. Katie’s birthday is two days away. But we had such a beautiful summer-like day today that we decided to hold Katie’s birthday party tonight on a beach on the Mississippi River. But, of course, we worked all day first, so we’ll start there. . .

As usual, one person from each group went to Rosie’s house to keep the jobs going over there. Today was a big milestone, as the group at Rosie’s began the painting process in the first house. Things look really different (and really RIGHT) when a fresh coat of paint is applied. There were lots of other jobs to be done as well, including completing baseboards and continuing the sanding job on the porch.

The big group continued working with Parkway Partners, but at a different garden this time. This garden was in the Bywater neighborhood and it happens to be a garden that we restored back in January 2006. Back then, there was a huge tree in the middle of the space, but our group managed to bring it down with very few appropriate tools. Now the stump that we left behind is the home of a lovely thriving fern and the garden has changed dramatically since our last visit.

Now it is a microfarm run by a great guy named John. He wants to provide healthy food right in the Bywater neighborhood, where convenience stores are some of the only sources of groceries. He already had some beets started in one large section of the garden, and we helped him to supplement the soil in the other sections by spreading enormous amounts of used coffee grounds all over the lot. We also moved lots of debris from all around the garden and a few of us weeded the sections that were already planted. All in all it was a pretty easy morning for our hardworking crew, and we finished most of the job before lunchtime.

We decided to eat lunch before moving over to Rosie’s house, so we placed ourselves all over a huge rockpile across the street and somehow got comfortable enough to enjoy our surprisingly great vegetarian sloppy joes (with the necessary addition of our most important pantry staple: Ritz crackers). As we enjoyed our time on the rockpile, we noticed that there was one of those rubber traffic barrels at just the right distance from us to make a great target. We seem to have an obsession with throwing things at targets, so of course we had to make the most of that pile of rocks and the nearby barrel. Almost every one of us took a few turns at trying to hit the target; we found that the thump that accompanied a hit was a triumph in itself. Jed meticulously cleaned up any stray rocks that had landed in the nearby roadway, so we left no trace of our lunchtime game behind.

When we joined the group at Rosie’s house, things just started cranking. Jobs were getting knocked off the list more quickly than ever and even new jobs that emerged proved to be no big challenge. At one point we recalled that the back step of the 4009 side of the duplex had too great a drop from the doorway. (Jack pointed this out before he left; we aren’t skilled enough to notice such a thing.) It looked a little too complicated to solve the problem with the materials that we had, but Chris, Brad, and Obi decided to give it a try. The end result looks great and evened out the distance of all of the steps out of the door. Huge progress was the name of the game today on every job.

As mentioned above, our great productivity was surpassed only by the beauty of the day. It was like a gorgeous summer day rather than a follow-up to the below freezing temps we experienced yesterday. We loved it. When we noticed that the forecast was for rain the next few days, we decided to capitalize on the climate and head out to Macon’s house for an early birthday party.

Our group has spent many wonderful evenings (and workdays!) with Macon, so we knew that we needed to schedule a night at his house. He lives on the river side of the levee, with a long, low beach on which we can build a bonfire and sit right on the banks of the Mississippi. There’s something magical about the place that only gets compounded when you add yummy cheeseburgers, barbecued chicken, and s’mores. As we sat there, a thick fog rolled in and actually dripped on us occasionally, but never to the point where we needed to run for cover. A few of us took spins in the canoe and did a little loop around a nearby pier. Whether or not we were floating on the water, we were all floating on air.

And we celebrated Katie’s birthday! We’ll save part of the celebration for her actual birthday on Thursday, but it was fun to make a special meal together and hang out around a huge bonfire in honor of our favorite unicyclist. Katie is a freshman Nursing major who has shown a lot of guts on this trip. She is happy and full of awe every day, helping to elevate our spirits when the jobs are getting tough. Happy, happy, day, Katie!

Total hours today = 235; Running total = 3878

The Parkway Partners garden that we worked on today

Lindsay and Kate busy at work hauling wet hay to the front of the garden.

Nicole, Lindsay, and Matt place a pathway in order to prevent weeds from growing.

Aaron, Jed, and Tommy help Macon deliver the coffee grounds to enrich to soil.

Part of the pile we made today, which consisted of hay, branches, and miscellaneous objects.

After a long day of work we were all surprised to find out we would be heading out to a bonfire at a friends house overlooking the Mississippi River.

Shawny and Scott helped lug out extra debris from the garden as others worked on various projects at a Parkway Partners garden on the West Bank.

Thanks to our handy laptops Elijah was able to sit out at the worksite with Lindsey as she landscaped Rosie’s backyard.

Here we see Shawny, Katie, and Matt Wheeler working on a plot at Parkway Partners.

Katie and LinZy helped unload the 1500 pound sack of coffee that would be used as compost for the garden.

Sam weeding the garden full of snow peas.

Obi and Brad work on the stairs in the back of Rosie’s house

As we cleaned up, Jed took charge and got us wrapped up quickly.

Our beautiful artwork made out of Rosie’s old ramp.

Bri sands the front door of Rosie’s house

As we arrive on the work site, Shawny gives out orders to the group to get the day started.

Katie and Jed at the bonfire celebrating Katie’s 19th birthday. Happy Birthday Katie!

Jed asnd Makon use their strength to lift the big pile of wood into the bed of the truck.

While working with Makon and Parkway Partners, we came across this interesting sign posted on the local dumpster.

Bri, Amanda, Brad, Bryan, Erik, and Sergio all sit around the bonfire at Makon’s house waiting for the tasty burgers to come off the grill.

Day Fourteen: January 2008

2008-01-21T21:27:00.001-08:00

Day Fourteen: Monday, January 21

It was only 30 degrees when we awoke this morning, so we are counting this as a warming trend. The Souljas made powdered eggs and spam for our guests Dave and Erik and then we all went out to work. One person from each team went to Rosie’s to prep the houses for painting soon. Chris, Justin, Katie, Erik, Serg, Tommy, and Sam worked to complete trimwork and caulk wall edges so that we can start the painting process. We believe that we can start painting on Tuesday in 4009, then on Wednesday in 4011. If things go our way over these next few days, we think we will actually finish this job. We hope, we hope, we hope. . .

As for the rest of the group, we rejoined our old friend Macon Fry the Garden Guy from Parkway Partners, a greenspace agency that supports public parks and monuments and community gardens. Today he asked us to join him at a garden in Gentilly. The farmer at that garden was the only organic farmer in New Orleans for about fifteen years, before others caught on to the lure of organics. Now she runs a space of about an acre in the Gentilly neighborhood and once it gets into full swing, she will be a primary supplier for some well-known chefs in New Orleans.

The job at that garden today was to spread sand over some of the beds. Though this task sounds harmless enough, the amount of sand to be spread made it a much bigger deal that it seems. Huge trucks delivered 40 yards of sand to the garden in one enormous mound. Our job was to use regular old shovels to transfer the sand to wheelbarrows then push the wheelbarrows all over the acre of land to scatter it. We deposited the sand into walking paths or into sections of the garden that grow lettuce and other produce that will thrive in sandy conditions.

Even that description probably sounds pretty low-key, unless you know several things: 1) the mound of sand stood higher than most of our heads when we arrived, 2) according to our research, a cubic yard of sand weighs 2700 pounds, meaning that 40 cubic yards of sand weigh 108,000 pounds, 3) 108,000 pounds equal 54 tons, 4) the crew at the garden was only 24 people strong, and therefore 5) each person moved an average of more than two tons of sand. We are having trouble believing these figures, but they seem to be true. And you, dear reader, should believe two things about us: 1) when we say we did “tons” of work, we did, and 2) when we say we can move mountains, we can.

The garden crew headed over to join the crew at Rosie’s in the afternoon, and helped to plug away at the middles of the jobs that are in progress there. We all decided to knock off at 5:00 today so that we could head back to camp and give everything a good cleaning. We gave the shower trailer a good scrubbing, we emptied and vacuumed the bus, we reorganized both the tent and the warehouse, and we gathered up our laundry (370 pounds of it!) and sent it to be washed.

We met tonight to outline our hopes and dreams for the next seven days of our trip, particularly relating to the jobs we intend to complete. Our list is long and daunting, but we expect to check off every item.

We bid farewell today to our three visitors: Shawny’s sister Sherry, Dave Blanchard, and Erik Robert. Thanks to all of you for joining our group!

It’s a little hard to calculate hours for today, especially because the chain gang that moved the sandpile believes it deserves double credit for every hour it worked. Still, the rough total for the day is 244, making our overall running total 3643.

Exhausted from wheelbarrow races, Matt and Elijah take a short breather in the barrows.

Obi and Elijah stand on the top of the sand mountain and throw shovel after shovel full of sand into the wheelbarrow.

Little Aaron wakes up from a lunch time nap as Alec tries to hide from the camera.

As the workbooted members of the team shoveled soil for the Parkway Partners, the team members wearing tennis shoes stayed nice and warm in the greenhouse.

4 tons of sand were delivered in the morning which gave us the daunting task of working together to move mountains.

Meanwhile, as Eric gets to work, the rest of the group goes into a well deserved relaxation mode.

Apparently Eric, our guest, has family in New Orleans and thought that if he went to go see his family he wouldn’t have any work waiting for him when he got back. HAHA, little did he know that we had a little present waiting for him when he got back.

This weekend we had some guests come stay with us. One of our guests, Eric has some visitors of his own at the work camp. It’s his New Orleans native family that he hasn’t seen in years.

People say that pictures speak 1,000 words. Well this picture shows how this extremely large sand pile attempted to break 1,000 backs. Everyone puts in their work and shovels loads of sand.

Today we had to move a sand pile that weighed approx. 106,000 pounds. Knowing us, and with all the competitive people we have here, a competition between two teams was inevitable. Here Elijah (team 1) is running the returning leg of his wheel barrel run.

Matt and Scott head back to the sand pile to get another load.

Everyone “takes five” after finishing the Parkway Partners job.

Shawny and Linzy shovel away at the mountain of sand we moved today.

Look at Lindsay go! We all took turns pushing wheelbarrows of sand to help level the lots.

Today we worked at a Parkway Partners Community Garden. Hopefully the farmers will soon be able to provide organic food to the neighborhood.

Day Thirteen: January 2008

2008-01-20T22:38:00.000-08:00

Day Thirteen: Sunday, January 20

What a warm and balmy morning we had this morning! We awoke to find that the temperature was 27 degrees. Ouch. We knew that it would be cold, so we were pretty ready for it. Still, as soon as the air hit our faces, it felt like quite a chilly slap. Our breakfast crew, Chicas and the Men, made pancakes for us and we drank much more hot chocolate than usual. The BLOKEs prepared breakfast as everyone figured out what their warmest work clothes were.

We were all at Rosie’s house again today and because it was clear we could actually make some progress in the yard. We waited to do so, though, as this morning we took a special break: most of us went to mass with Rosie. It was a real treat for us, but an even bigger one for her. Things all just aligned perfectly, as today’s theme was a celebration of service, and today’s hymns seemed like they were speaking right to us. The first hymn was “Joyful, Joyful, We Adore You” and it featured lines about opening to the sun and melting the clouds. Another line says, “Teach us how to love each other” and a few of us glanced at each other knowingly. An even more striking hymn was “The Servant’s Song,” which starts with the line “Will you let me be your servant?” and has another verse that says: “We are pilgrims on a journey, we are trav’lers on the road, we are here to help each other walk the mile and bear the load.” We not only glanced at each other on that one; we got teary-eyed.

The whole service was a special one as it was a celebration of the deaf and all parts of the service were done in sign language. It was also special because the church (Francis Xavier Seelos – a blessed but not yet sainted New Orleanian) is very beautiful. The church suffered an awful fire in 2003, it parishioners were relocated for about a year, and then Katrina hit in 2005. Happily, the church only sustained damage to its floors, which were quickly restored. The building has wonderful stained glass windows, some of which were dated to the 1860s. We see why Rosie loves her church so much.

The priest called Rosie up to the altar and asked her to introduce her friends. She called us “California Angels” and talked about how much we had done for her houses, but how much more we had done for her life and her spirit. They asked us all to stand and they applauded for quite awhile; we just bowed to them and thanked them.

After church we kicked into high gear and capitalized on the sunshine and clear skies. The air was crisp and very cold, but if we moved around enough we could handle it. Today was Jack’s last day so he cranked the kitchen cabinets into place in 4009 before he headed for the airport around noon. Our student experts jumped all over the trim job in 4011 without any guidance from Jack. Others stayed on the arduous job of sanding the porch; we really look forward to seeing the fruits of those labors.

Still another group kept plugging away at the huge backyard that we have now emptied out. Our friend Jean Fahr from Parkway Partners (the greenspace agency that was our first major work contact when we came here in January 2006) gave us some trees and other plantings to contribute to Rosie’s whole new world. We also got a boost from our dear friends at Happy Hollow Elementary, the sixth grade class taught by Shawny’s sister Sherry. When they heard that we had no budget for Rosie’s yard, they took up a collection to add to our materials. With all of these sources combined, we have now planted six young trees and lots of other plantings in both the front and back yards of Rosie’s houses. We still have tons of work to do there, but this is another place where we look forward to the fruits of our labors (hopefully literally).

Throughout our day we were reminded that today is the birthday of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. One of Rosie’s neighbors, David, played tapes of some of King’s most famous speeches on a public address system for most of the day. David’s house is easy to spot in the neighborhood, as he went around after the storms and collected all of the musical instruments that he found. He placed them all over his house, especially on the roof, and turned his entire property into a tribute to New Orleans and its musical culture. Today, his tribute turned to the life and work of MLK. Though tomorrow is the holiday celebrating King’s life, we got a nice day of reflection about his important ideas in advance. Thanks, David!

As for our labor today, we tallied about 254 hours, bringing our running total to 3399.

Matt and Aaron show off the NOLA ping-ping ball they found while moving dirt outside.

Mark takes the measurements to cut the window trim in the 4009 house.

Bri sweeps the front porch, which was covered in paint chips after we sanded the awning and doorframes.

Emily, Katie, and Bryan worked hard all day shoveling dirt outside of the houses. With the new tree and less dirt, the front of the houses look brand new.

Justin and Aaron lay bricks and cinderblocks outside of 4009 and 4011 to make a planter for a tree.

There were a couple statues outside of Rosie’s church that reminded the group of how important faith is to the people of New Orleans.

Rosie appreciated the members of the group who joined her for Sunday morning mass.

These are the new cabinets that are going in Rosie’s rental house.

David is working at sanding down the walls and prepping them for paint as Justin works on trim.

Aaron and Justin work on leveling out an area in front of Rosie’s rental house for a planter box.

Day Twelve: January 2008

2008-01-19T21:38:00.001-08:00

Day Twelve: Saturday, January 19

Special Note: If you didn’t see the “Puppy Love” video below, check it out at the bottom of Day Eleven. (Sorry about the bad sound; we’ll try to fix it. All of you oldtimers will crack up.)

As for today, we started the day with rain, rain, rain, rain, rain. A big storm came through and made our bus shake and rock while lightning flashed and rain poured down. The boys who sleep in the bins got wet, as they leave the bin doors cocked open a bit to help them get fresh air. The rain found its way right into that opening and dripped onto their pillows or their feet, depending on which way they sleep. For those who don’t understand this part, there are six guys who share three under-bus storage bins as their sleeping quarters. Sometimes they have the best beds in the house; sometimes they’re the worst.

Our Habitat gig was canceled because of the rain, so we all piled into Rosie’s house to see what we could do. The first house that we started working on (4009) was the farthest one along. Yesterday we textured it, meaning we (that is, Justin) sprayed bits of drywall joint compound all over it to help cover whatever flaws might have been visible in our taping and mudding of the drywall sheets. From there, others go through with flat “knives” (like wide putty knives) and knock off the bits that stick out so that the texture (supposedly) resembles an orange peel. All the while, Julie and Katie moved from room to room offering to do whatever odd jobs needed to be done.

Because that whole process was complete in 4009, we made the unusual move of installing the trim around the windows and doors and the baseboards. Many of us were involved in this process, measuring, cutting, and installing them with great skill. Lindsay S., Kate, and Brad took the lead on this important set of jobs. Scott and Mark and our visitor Erik Robert installed closets and shelving, while Alec, Chris, Jed, Tommy, and a few others learned the ins and outs of hanging doors (pun intended). The door-hangers struggled mightily, as they learned that the doors that had been purchased did not match the size of the holes that had been left for them. Jack was very impressed over how quickly they learned what needed to be done and adapted the doors and/or spaces to make things work.

Another group finished the feathering of the drywall in 4011 then took on the slow (and MESSY!) job of texturing. Lindsay R. was the primary mud mixer (a tough job, as the boxes of powder weigh 48 pounds each). Matt P. was the mud delivery guy and assistant sprayer, and he got covered with almost as much of the joint compound as the walls did. Linzy, Aaron, Erik, Briana, Josh, and Shawny all joined in to knock off the drying texture, so they all had big white chunks all over themselves as well. That work group completed its job right as darkness fell, meaning that on Sunday that unit will be ready for the treatment that 4009 got today.

Another crew, headed up by our visitor Dave Blanchard, meticulously sanded parts of the porch shared by 4009 and 4011. They struggled with sanding blocks, handheld paper, scrapers, and a belt sander to try to make a difference in the crackled paint. (Mark had a strange strategy for contributing to this job, as he held the electric belt sander over his head and scraped away at the chipping paint, even though he had no extension cord and therefore his electric sander was not plugged in.) After a couple of hours of work, they had one stretch of the porch scraped, but there is still a long way to go. Once finished, though, the porch will definitely look fabulous.

The other big crazy job that a few folks undertook was the leveling of the backyard. When we returned after the rains had fallen, we realized that our stump hole was a new low spot in the yard, along with the holes we left when we dug for Rosie’s buried (and still undiscovered) treasure. Our friend Jean Fahr from Parkway Partners came by to give us some ideas about how to deal with Rosie’s yards and even offered to help us acquire some trees and plants. She encouraged the yard team to move dirt from the front yard to the backyard to help even out the space. Because we didn’t have wheelbarrows at first, the team on the yard (Emily, Bryan, Sergio, Sam, Amanda, Matt W., and Elijah) carried the dirt from the front yard to the back in five gallon buckets. Matt and Elijah were the main dirt mules and they were covered from head to toe in muck. If we have a clear day tomorrow, though, we should get pretty far in laying out Rosie’s new lawn and gardens.

It’s been interesting for us to endure the storms this year and the cold that fell over us tonight. We are very focused on providing shelter and the comforts of home. We think about these issues constantly, especially as we live in our relatively primitive conditions in camp. We have begun to notice the obvious things like how wonderful it is to use a flushing toilet or to have running water in your kitchen, but we have also become aware of smaller issues, like how different it is to wash your hands under a warm faucet than in a cold garden hose. We’re learning a lot about what we love, what we want, and what we need. When we head home and pass the enormous homeless encampment mostly made up of people who were evicted from FEMA trailers, all of these issues flood our minds and we wonder what to do. For now, we intend to just keep working. . .

Hours today = 284. Running total = 3145

Dave and Nicole sanding the deck in the freezing cold but still are having a good time.

Julie helping sand the pillars on the porch.

Kate doing a fine job at caulking.

Matt covered in mud from texturing the house.

Bryan, Emily, Serg and Elijah digging the front yard after the down poor of rain.

Emily washes a trowel to prepare for mudding the last of the drywall. We were able to finish texturing the walls in the second part of the house.

Bryan, Erik, and Lindsay put finishing touches on the wall before texturing. All of us had to work in the cramped quarters of Rosie’s due to the rain, so everyone had to get nice and cozy.

“Jesus Christ is Lord. Amen.” The dumpster outside of Rosie’s gave an inspirational message while we worked.

A shot of North Claiborne, the street we work on each and every day at Rosie’s.

Mark and Dave sanded off the old paint and wood on the porch that went through the hurricane.

Lindsay, finishing off an amazingly done job of mudding and taping, before we were able to texture.

The “Buddy Pro,” what we use to heat the rooms and dry the sheet rock.

Dave finishing off sanding old paint so we can apply new paint.

A five minute break is hard to come by, but we managed to find some time for ourselves. Everyone took a break for some much needed caffeine, which was provided by Shane Keane.

Alec and Jed work hard on the water heater door. They had to make some masterful cuts in order to customize this and perfectly fit it.

Bryan, Erik, and Lindsay smoothing over the walls with plaster

Dave and Mark sanding on the porch of Rosie’s house

Matt Pelascini texturing the walls

Emily, Bryan, and Serg dig out the mound in front of the duplex and move the dirt to fill in a pond that formed overnight in the backyard.

Serg mudding the ceiling of Rosie’s house

Day Eleven: January 2008

2008-01-18T21:13:00.000-08:00

Day Eleven: Friday, January 18

We have visitors today! Shawny’s sister Sherry is here from Indiana, and Dave Blanchard and Erik Robert are here from SMC. They are all taking advantage of the Martin Luther King Holiday to spend time working with us in New Orleans. Lucky us!

Because we had a late night in the French Quarter last night (everyone was in by 11, but not necessarily asleep), we decided to eat granola for breakfast (no prep time!) and take Ramen noodles for lunch, using our electric tea kettles to cook them. Thus, we slept in for an extra half hour and hustled madly to get to work at Habitat.

First, though, we had to face the fact that we were out of propane both in our showers and in our kitchen. It’s a good thing that we had already decided to have an easy breakfast, as we were completely unable to cook until someone made a propane run. That person turned out to be Shane, who ran into a whole series of difficulties that took practically all day to solve. He was nice enough, though, to run the tanks back to camp and hook them up so that we had lovely hot showers as soon as we arrived home at the end of the day.

Back to the subject of our Habitat day: most of us had jobs that we had already started, so we got back to those tasks. Something just clicked in and everyone had a pretty satisfying day. One big group went crazy on the roof, installing shingles and other edge pieces that meant they were dangling twenty feet off the ground fearlessly. Scott in particular picked jobs that had him hanging with only about 25% of his body on the roof and the rest just hanging over the sandy ground. He wasn’t at all worried and even believed that if he happened to fall, he would be able to roll out of trouble in the sand. Insane. Sam managed to conquer her fear of the roof from the other day and just shingled away all day; she says she actually loved every second of it. Amanda and Lindsay S. also remained unshaken by their time up there, as did a whole series of other people who made quick work of that assignment.

Several people joined forces to take on the next phases of the double hip roof, which continues to be one of the most complicated jobs we’ve ever done. Though it is confusing and frustrating, none of us seemed to mind today; that crew felt like it got a lot done, even though they realized at the end of the day that some of their work would have to be taken apart. Oh well.

Nine of us skipped Habitat altogether today, instead focusing on more progress at Rosie’s house. Jack was the king of the world as usual, outworking our entire group put together. By the end of the day, the first house (#4009) was fully drywalled, taped, mudded, feathered, sanded, and textured. Justin, too, was covered with every substance involved in this whole process, and when the big group arrived he looked like he had been through some tribal mud ritual that none of us quite understood. Even though he looked kind of crazy with splatters of drywall compound speckled all over him, it’s probably true that most of us wished we were just as dirty.

In the second house (#4011) the crew got pretty far on mudding and taping, so that we should be able to finish those jobs on Saturday and prep for texturing on Sunday. We measured for kitchen cabinets in 4009 and brought home floor samples so that Rosie can decide what kind of floor she wants us to install. She has a very low budget for these improvements, so we have to be very judicious in picking out materials that won’t cost much, but that will last. It’s great at these moments to have Jack with us to help us understand the options. He leaves Sunday and we will be greatly diminished when he goes.

We left Rosie’s house exhausted by our day, but as usual we got a second wind as the BLOKEs cooked dinner. These times just hanging around in our tent, listening to music, talking, playing cards, and waiting until it’s time to go to sleep are really precious to us. It’s like we have a very happy low-key party every night. Wow. Who knew that a fenced vacant lot could make us so happy?

Today's total hours were 324, which, when added to our previous total of 2537, gets us to 2861.

Kate, Nicole, and Lindsay Swoboda start to nail shingles

Katers conquered her fear of heights and spent the day on the roof at Habitat

Scott and Lindsay risk their lives to nail on the drip lines on the edge of the roof.

Nap time for Alec after a long days work mudding

A shot from the habitat house roof made possible the combined efforts of the efforts of the Nola ‘08 group.

alec has spent a lot of quality time and effort into the drywall in Rosie’s house.

Bryan helping Scott get a 65 pound bag of shingles, up a ladder and on s too the roof.

We used a special heater to help the mud dry faster so we could get as much work done as possible.

Erik, Julie, Scott, and Bryan nailing in shingles on the roof

Evidence of a day of hard work.

Day Ten: January 2008

2008-01-17T20:25:00.000-08:00

Day Ten: Thursday, January 17

Another chilly morning started with banana pancakes and powdered eggs. Skies were grey but no rain fell, so that counted as a solid return to our Habitat worksite. A few of us split off and continued work at Rosie’s as well.

At Habitat, one group (Brad, Lindsay, Obi, Amanda, and sometimes Jed) started making boardwalks for the worksite, to help all of us navigate the mud puddles that pervade the space without sinking in. The muddy pathways are particularly annoying when someone is carrying lumber or heavy loads of nails. In fact, we have learned very quickly that much of the work at a construction site involves moving things around and organizing them. We spent one morning this week digging piles of lumber out after they had sunk in the mud. In a wet and humid climate like New Orleans, this shifting happens all the time, so every once in awhile, everything just needs to be moved.

Another group installed hurricane brackets that pin down roof trusses from the inside. As a member of this group, Nicole suffered a painful (but not catastrophic) injury when she hit her finger with a hammer badly enough to make it gush blood. She was obviously in a lot of pain at that first moment, but she managed to shake it off and continue working pretty quickly after Aaron helped to clean and wrap it. We are sorry that Nicole got hurt today, but it helped us to appreciate how few injuries we have experienced on this trip.

Another group continued to struggle with the trusses on the double hip roof. Frankly, that group is about to lose its collective mind. Each truss needs to be raised in a way that meets four criteria: 1) the pieces should line up properly and be flush with the parts of the house on which they rest, 2) the truss should have a ten and a half inch overhang at the point, 3) the angles should be square, and 4) the truss should be level vertically. Because of issues that preceded our arrival, almost no truss that we raised could meet all of those criteria. We overlapped with one college group (that shall remain unnamed) who might have contributed to some of the goofiness of the structure. Thus, whenever the truss rests on the beams looking crooked, we can all grumble in unison and blame it on _______ College. That helps.

Another group got the triumphant job of laying tarpaper on the roof that was completed last week. Matt W., Sam, Lindsay S., Matt P., Mark, and Aaron all contributed to the completion of that job. Many of those people have spent their entire Habitat worktime on some roof somewhere and at least one of them admits that he is getting a bit sick of heights. They might not be thrilled to know that we will be installing decking on that maddening double hip roof tomorrow.

Oh, yes, and we saw the puppies again today! Lots of notes are asking about them and we are happy to report that they are getting stronger and stronger. Their eyes are still not open, but it seems that things are progressing just fine. Someone will probably post a photo of the pups below. (Teams pick their photos and write captions as we are coming home each day, so their tastes at that moment determine which photos get posted. Elijah gathers them all up then posts them late at night, assuming that all of our systems work as they should.)

One person from each team went to Rosie’s today to help back up Jack as we prepped the first house for texturing tomorrow. The whole group joined that early team after the Habitat day ended, and we actually finished hanging the sheetrock for the second house by the time we left. The incentive for getting it done was a trip to the French Quarter tonight. Even though we were tired and had to come in early, it was fun to take the ferry for the first time this trip and then wander the streets that most tourists associate with New Orleans.

We ate at Bubba Gump’s then had about an hour to check out the Quarter. Some hit the souvenir shops, some went to Café du Monde for fresh beignets, some hit Bourbon Street, and some went straight back to camp after dinner to get some sleep. No matter what anyone chose, we all knew that we had to hit the worksite again at 7:30 a.m. We should be ready after a night of blowing off steam. We hear it might rain again tomorrow, so we’re not sure how that will affect our plans. We’ll be ready, no matter what. . .

Oh yeah! By adding Josh and Jack in to the mix, we now have 330 hours to add to our grand total, which is now 2537!

Matt Wheeler had a great day today – he followed through with all of his jobs, setting a great example for all! A+ Matt!!!!

For the second half of the day we all met at Rosie’s to continue work on dry walling and taping. By the end of the day we had completed all of the dry walls and nearly all of the taping!

Nicole Sweeney began her morning nailing in the hurricane braces to the trusses. These braces are so strong that they can stand up to 150 mph winds!

Mark, Matt Wheeler, Aaron, and Sam laid out tar paper on the roof this morning. This is one of the first steps for roofing. By the end of the day they

Brad, Matt Wheeler, and Jed helped move the trusses that were delivered today for one of the houses. The trusses for Habitat homes are built elsewhere and delivered to the worksite by truck.

Alec is taking a break from the severe sheet rocking of 4009 and 4011 to moisturize his dry eyes.

Eric saws to precision as he cuts a 2 x 4 for one of the houses.

Jed is working hard by tucking in the creases of the mudding in the corners of the walls as we work to finish the walls in Rosie’s house.

Lindsay and Shawny work diligently on trying to finish to trusses on this house.

Tommy, Z, and Jared lift one of the many trusses as the roofing of the next house comes into focus.

Day Nine: January 2008

2008-01-16T21:03:00.000-08:00

Day Nine: Wednesday, January 16

Hallelujah! We woke up and it was raining! Though we usually wish for clear skies, we knew that rain this morning would mean we could sleep in for the first time. The banging of the raindrops on the roof was a lovely little lullaby for us at 5:45 today. Shane, Chris, Justin, and Shawny decided to surprise us with a special breakfast. As it turns out, their late night grocery run was all about real eggs, bacon, sausage, fruit, potatoes, milk, orange juice, and pancakes.

They got up early and laid out the tent like it was a dining room with table settings and candles, and they started cooking an hour before any of the rest of us got up. For the most part, we all got to sleep as long as we wanted. (As it turns out, our early morning schedule means that none of us managed to sleep all that late anyway.) Jack and Josh showed up with huge bags of beignets from Café du Monde to add to our feast. Everyone was awake by 10:30 and we ate huge amounts of food, listened to music, and just had our own little morning party in the still-dry tent (our gutters are holding!). We praised our own ingenuity in installing the temporary kitchen floor, as the water did its usual trick of rising up from underground and flooding our tent from beneath. Because we raised our floor, though, we had no trouble functioning.

We finally got things moving and headed off to Rosie’s. We all managed to fit inside the house, with the exception of Alec, Lindsay S., Mark, and Kate, who started up the job of scraping and sanding the porch so that we can repaint it before we leave. Otherwise, people were spread out over both houses working on all of the parts of drywalling. Most of us worked to tape and “mud” the sheets we had hung yesterday. Once we got the mud ready, we made a little ritual out of marking almost everyone’s face with two stripes of drywall compound and declared ourselves the Mud Club.

Some of us got very professional at mudding very quickly, especially Briana, Julie, and Katie. Tommy, Jed, and Josh took on the job of taping the inside corners of all of the rooms, while virtually everyone else taped seams. Late in the afternoon, our new supply of sheetrock arrived, so we got to move toward finishing the other side of the house. Justin, Sam, Bryan, Mark and Scott got moving pretty quickly and covered another room in record time. Aaron and Matt W. tackled the laundry room and its maddening angles while Obi, Chris, and Briana took on the bathroom on that side. None of these jobs got completed today, but they got far enough along to make it much easier to complete them tomorrow.

We spent a long time making dinner tonight (Chicas and the Men made some fabulous soupy chicken stew) and people spent quality time with their buddies. Every day we rotate partners to check in on each other’s days and on our general states of mind. It really helps us to process what we’re doing. We also write individual journals and we do quite a bit of processing and talking in our group meetings.

We’re glad we had a slowed-down day; we needed it. We’ll be ready to hit things hard again tomorrow when we return to Habitat to continue jobs we started on Tuesday. A few of us will go to Rosie’s all day long, as we have some big jobs to finish while Jack is still here.

Because we had a shorter day than usual, our total hours for today are 189; that brings our running total to 2219. Let’s see if we can make it past 5000. . .

Amanda and Katie try to mud a wall while in a crowded hall way.

Nicole and Linzy laughing at Dane Cook jokes while mudding a wall.

Linzy and Nicole tilling Rosie’s backyard and building a path.

Matt gets over his fear of heights while mudding his side of the wall.

We work till dark as Matt keeps mudding in the dark.

Everyone entering Rosie’s to finish mudding.

Mark and Matt working on taping and mudding.

Kyle delivering the final pieces of dry wall.

Julie and Briana working on the mildew resistant dry wall in the bathroom.

Mark removing the window bars so we are able to give it a fresh coat of paint.

Kate and Lindsay sand the posts on the front porch so that they can be painted in the coming days.

Katie cleans up the messy mud that splattered all over the window. It’s a dirty job, but somebody’s got to do it. Thanks, Katie!

Matt muddes the window in the front from to prep for painting.

Julie uses the roto-zip to cut out a hole in the drywall where an electrical outlet will go. Go, Julie, go!

Alec and Serg take a break while Nicole sweeps the floor before installing the next piece of drywall.

Day Eight: January 2008

2008-01-15T23:02:00.000-08:00

Day Eight: Tuesday, January 15

5:45 came very early this morning, but slightly warmer weather meant that we managed to drag ourselves out anyway. We got to have an excellent breakfast that included some leftover taco fixings from last night, including taco-flavored TVP and canned chicken and even a big bucket of actual sour cream. The Elevaters (Emily, Alec, Lindsay, Erik, and Mark) were responsible for the great tacos; they are often our most creative cooks. Chicas and the Men (Julie, Kate, Briana, Jed, and Tommy) capitalized on their leftovers by making them into some scrambled eggs. We were about to make it to work on time, but we had to jump the bus with the rental truck, so we got there at 7:45.

Most of us went to Habitat and continued jobs that we had started last week. That meant that lots of us were up on ladders putting up roof parts. Sergio, Shane, and Erik worked on fasciae (facing under the roof eaves). Lindsay S. joined with some volunteers from Boston to do trim work. Bryan, Matt W., Aaron, and others were finishing the decking of one roof, and Nicole, Linzy, Kate, and Sam worked on the undersupports for that same roof. Emily, Tommy, Elijah and Shawny kept plugging away at that crazy double hip roof (one that has all four sides sloping up to a pointed top). Jed, Brad, Katie, Obi, Amanda, Lindsay R., and Justin put the finishing touches on the floor system at Anne’s house, which was a major triumph for our group.

We’re all dragging a bit today, so a pick-me-up seemed necessary. When Justin and Shane went to pick up our 310 pounds of laundry, they also picked up a rare commodity: Cokes! We needed some caffeine and just something special to keep us going when we went to Rosie’s house. One crew had already started the day there: Matt P., Briana, Alec,
Julie, Scott, and Mark. Jack and Josh were there too, as well as Chris. They kept the drywall process rolling as fast as they could, though they pretty quickly ran out of full sheets and had to work with lots of scraps. They still did incredible work and got a couple of full rooms finished before the rest of the team arrived. Once we all were there, some of us continued the yard and garden work while others threw themselves into sheetrocking.

A fun diversion for the day was Rosie’s acquisition of a metal detector, which she hoped would help us find some jars of coins she and her mother had buried long ago. The metal detector had a depth of only six inches and it kept going off practically everywhere we used it in the yard. Still, Shane, Elijah, Bryan, Amanda, and different random other folks dug diligently when the signal seemed particularly strong. We haven’t found any real treasures yet, but it seems likely that we will.

We expect big rain tomorrow. Honestly, we are praying for big rain tomorrow, as Habitat will not work in downpours and that would give us time to catch up on some morning sleep. We just can’t seem to stop talking, hanging out, looking at pictures, and planning projects at night, so we never get to bed early enough to get substantial rest. Maybe tomorrow morning will be our time. If it’s not pouring, we believe that we must meet our obligation to Habitat and get there as close to 7:30 as we can. Come on, rain!

We put in another ten hour day today, meaning we have added another 295 hours or so to our running total, which has now reached 2030 hours! That would be a full year’s work for one person, but we managed it in just seven work days. For those who are interested, we are also keeping a tally of the number of u-turns we take in the bus. Some of them are necessary parts of our path, while some of them are corrective measures. In any case, turning our huge bus around on the road is a pretty impressive feat. So far, we have taken 13 u-turns. Way to go, Leo!

The “Next Top Model” has nothing on the crew from SMC as the NOLA volunteers pose for the camera.

Aaron explains how to make a difficult angle to Z at the Habitat Site

Bryan concentrates as he accurately slices the board like butter.

Matt W. Working hard putting in Support on the trusses at Habitat.

On a nice day in New Orleans Leo works hard putting up siding even after he drives us around.

Matt P. and Scott prepare a sheet of dry wall to be put into Rosie’s rebuilt house.

Aaron instructs Bryan and Linzy on how to use the speed square inside the habitat house.

Perfecto! Time to start taping.

Matt Wheeler hangs from the roof as he nails in the wood braces for the trusses.

Matt Wheeler hangs from the roof as he nails in the wood braces for the trusses.

Day Seven: January 2008

2008-01-14T21:04:00.000-08:00

Day Seven: Monday, January 14

We got a little extra sleep today, but still found ourselves slowing down a bit after our day of 150% performance on Sunday. Maybe it was the 35 degree temperature to which we awoke; maybe it was the fact that we are just plain tired. Maybe we are tired because one member of our group has started some very high-volume cartoon snoring (like the loudest, log-sawing spoof version of snoring you’ve ever heard). Another group member seems to be responding sympathetically to this snorer by matching his rhythm (but happily, not his volume). In short, things have gotten pretty loud in the bus.

In any case, we had another full day at Rosie’s, where we finished hanging sheetrock on one whole side of the double. Everyone on the inside of the house did every job available, including measuring, marking, scoring, cutting, and hanging the drywall. On the other side, we almost finished the ceilings and we covered some of the walls. There’s still a lot of work to do there, but it is possible that we will be able to finish it tomorrow.

We got more evidence today that Jack Verrips is the most impressive worker we have ever seen. Yesterday one of our teams spent most of the morning struggling with the complexities of a very tight closet that houses the heating unit. Jack, on the other hand, covered the parallel closet in the other unit in about 30 minutes. Sure it was demoralizing on one level, but it was so awesome to see that we didn’t let it get us down. We’re glad Jack is here to show us the standard to which we aspire.

Erik showed some excellence too, as he went through and finished all the insulation in the center wall between the two units. Now no one has to deal with little fiberglass bits all over them for at least a little while. In general, lots of people have developed some pretty advanced skills. Most of us actually look like real pros while working, especially because we all have flat pencils behind our ears and tape measures hanging out of our back pockets. Some real standouts on the drywalling have been Samantha, Briana, Bryan, Aaron, Emily, Serg, and Matt W. Another team that dealt with some of the trickiest spaces was Matt P., Obi, Mark, and Scott; they sounded like a comedy team as they tried to conceptualize why there is a difference between the way a piece of sheetrock looks when it is lying on the floor and the way it looks when it is hanging from the ceiling.

Out in the backyard we conquered the stump once and for all. Serg, Linzy, Brad, Jed, Tommy, Nicole, Justin, and many others hacked at it for hours to reduce it down to near ground level. And then we rented a stump grinder. A stump grinder is like a huge oversized circular saw with enormous teeth that take off layers of the stump by scraping it across the top. We took this huge chunk of tree that had been occupying the center of the yard ever since the tree toppled (and even when it stood) and reduced it to a pile of sawdust in no time at all.

The rest of the yard crew spent the morning digging dozens of bricks out of the dirt so we could till the entire space and make it level. We also dug for buried treasure, which we still expect to find because we know that Rosie and her mother buried it about thirty-five years ago. We spent much of the afternoon running alternative scenarios for how to lay out the landscaping across the three backyards. Rosie was right in the center of it all and we discussed and drew option after option for how to arrange things. One of them even involved a fleur-de-lis-shaped patio. When we realized that whatever we did had to be done with no budget whatsoever, we decided to make use of those muddy old bricks and every other piece of usable debris that we could find. The plan now involves the use of bricks, blocks, extra roof tiles, rusty metal poles, and lots of seeds to bring beauty back to the space. We think it will be an entirely different place when we are done. Rosie is pretty excited and so is Nicole, who has taken on the role of the prime designer of the yard. We hope that our grand plans aren’t thwarted by the expected rains later in the week.

Tomorrow we will split our group. Some of us will return to the Habitat site where we’ve been working and some of us will go to Rosie’s to finish the drywall. It’s better when we are all together, but we will make things work until we all return to Rosie’s at the end of the Habitat day.

Today was a nine and a half hour day. That means we did 280 hours of work, to take our running total to 1735 hours of manual labor so far. Whew!

Chris shows the boys how it’s done as he grinds down the trunk of a 60 year old pecan tree in the middle of Rosie’s backyard. The stump is stubborn but so are we.

The sun shines in on Matt as he carries the drywall and ladder from the front of Rosie’s house to the back room.

Nicole lays down the bricks for the patio in Rosie’s backyard.

Shawny grabs hold of the stump grinder from Chris and shows the boys how it is really done.

Tommy measures the small space in the closet in order to lay down the drywall.

Everyone joined outside to watch the stump grinder do in an hour what we were able to do in a few days.

Shawny taking control of the stump grinder.

This group gets to work putting sheet rock on the ceiling of the second house.

Rosie looks over her soon-to-be new garden.

Putting up sheet rock isn’t easy, but here everyone works hard to get it up.

Day two of the stump and almost gone…

Emily finishes putting the insulation in one of Rosie’s houses

At the end of another looonngg day, what’s better than a hug? Matty and Shawny celebrate as we clean up.

Soulja Serg raising some dry wall up to the ceiling.

The longest yard… Julie and Jed measure out one of the many pieces that will make the ceiling of Rose’s houses.

Our meal of quinoa. It’s a healthy grain that everyone actually happened to enjoy!

Everyone is putting up installation and drywall.

Yummy Lunch at Rosies prepared by the SOULJAS!!

After the other part of the group removed the massive tree stump and continued to landscape the backyard of Rosie’s rental property, the sun begins to set on the pee pee tipi :) .

Day Six: January 2008

2008-01-14T08:11:00.000-08:00

Today was a slower day. We were all getting

Day Six: Sunday, January 13

Today is Shane’s birthday! This is the third birthday that Shane has spent with us in New Orleans, including his legendary 21st birthday two years ago. It’s hard to believe that now Shane lives in New Orleans and is working to improve things here along with his longtime girlfriend Brianna Hardy. We are very lucky to have him as part of our team, not only because he lends a helping hand, but also because he is hilariously funny, deliriously happy, and exceptionally skilled at some of the tasks that we are undertaking. Happy day, Shane!

Today we started the big push at Rosie’s other properties next door to the house we moved her into last May. As we’ve noted before, Rosie is unable to cover the taxes and insurance on all three houses that she inherited from her family unless she can rent one or both of the ones in which she is not living. We hope to get them ready for occupancy by the time we leave. If today is any indication, we will succeed.

We slept in just a bit since we didn’t have a deadline for our arrival set by Habitat. We decided to wait until 8:00 or so to go to work, rather than our usual 7:30 start time. We got moving so fast once we got up that we made it to Rosie’s right on time. She was gushing over our group, as she had not yet seen all of us working at the same time. Actually, the word “working” doesn’t even begin to capture it. The level at which we were laboring exceeded our sense of our own capabilities.

Most of us jumped right into the job of sheetrocking, whether or not we had ever been trained in drywall before. Jack helped us to figure out what we were doing then he, Chris and Justin each took a section of the house and supervised as we learned what to do. All of them were astounded at the speed with which we learned the ropes. We started with the ceilings, which are, of course, the most difficult parts to install. Thirty of us shared a total of only five ladders, which complicated our ability to do everything we wanted to do as quickly as we wanted to do it. Because we have an abundance of very tall team members, though, we managed to make do.

We had all gotten the bare basics on drywall installation from Chris and Justin, but we had not thought carefully about a number of things: 1) the walls of houses in New Orleans are generally not square, making lots of difficult cuts a necessary part of any job, 2) there are dozens of little places like switchboxes, light fixtures, vents, and door frames that require very difficult precision cuts, 3) to install drywall on a ceiling, it is necessary to hold your arms over your head for a long long time, 4) there is quite a bit of math involved in installing drywall, and 5) it is not at all difficult to break the corner off of a brand new piece of sheetrock.

Another primary job of the day was to finish the installation of insulation. Lindsay S., Briana R., Brianna H., Emily, Alec, Mark, and Erik were particularly dedicated to this undertaking. They had to learn once again that fiberglass is, in fact, glass. They had little bits in their hands and even on their faces, but they all followed instructions and washed with cold water to remove it.

The final big job at Rosie’s was the continuation of clearing the back yard, including stump removal and elimination of a series of fences. As it turns out, in the days that theses fences were installed, the practice was to drop some concrete into a deep hole then drive the poles four feet deeper than the concrete blob. We decided to remove them entirely rather than just cutting them off at the ground. We have a tendency to choose the more difficult path. We rocked them fiercely in all directions until we looked like we were stirring dirt cauldrons, then dug under the concrete blobs until we thought they were free. Then we employed our most powerful weapon of the day: Alec.

Once we were ready to pull the huge poles and their anchors out of the earth, Alec would squat all the way to the concrete blob and just slowly lift it all by himself. It was like Hercules had joined our crew. Once he had cast them aside, it took two or three of us to drag them out front and lift them into the dumpster. We had to make sure that they didn’t fall down vertically or they would stick out over the top, so we had to javelin them into a container that was higher than most of our heads. We managed.

Whenever someone needed a break, they didn’t sit on the porch or hang out on the sidewalk; they went into the backyard and hacked at the massive pecan tree stump with an axe. We have made quite a difference in just one day, but we are considering renting a stump grinder to get the thing all the way to the ground. Still, we like hacking at it so much that we might just leave it there and chip away at it day by day.

Our special guest worker today was our friend Jerrad from Habitat. He brought the puppies, who are now named after Mardi Gras crews: Bacchus and Isis. We took turns cuddling them and feeding them, and those of us who have been here a few times before started realizing that there was a metaphor unfolding before us. That is, in our first trip, we made the sad discovery of a dead puppy in one house we were gutting on this same street; at that point, the city, too, was lifeless, hopeless and sad. Last year, we were visited by a three-legged dog that managed to get itself around even though it had been abandoned; the city then seemed to us to be getting somewhere, even if things weren’t at all “normal.” This year, we have these sweet puppies in our world, and we can see that it will take lots of love and care for them to survive and flourish; we sense that hope is growing in New Orleans too, and we are glad to provide some of the love and care that this grand city needs.

We finished another ten-hour day today, with a couple of extra crew members helping us out. That means we did 335 hours today, bringing our running total to 1455 in five days’ work. We hope to put in 5000 hours this month. We’ll see. . .

Everyone helping to put up drywall on the ceiling.

Shawny and her motherly side

Lindsay and Tommy measuring out a piece of drywall.

Justin putting in a last piece of insulation.

Before the yard was torn out.

As you can see what used to be three yards is now one, and is almost completely cleared out and ready to be landscaped.

We had quit the feast today! Angel hair pasta, meat sauce, and homemade tomato sauce, left over birthday cake, and ice cream from Rosie. Thanks Chicas and the Men!

As darkness quickly approaches everyone works diligently to complete the sheet rock in the front room.

Mark and Emily put up their very last piece of insulation in the ceiling.

Here Rosie is looking out over her backyard while we work to clear it. In the background you can see Sarah’s beautiful house, which we painted last Jan Term, and the amazing ramp we built over Spring Break 07.

Elijah is taking a break from work on the roof.

Today was a slower day. We were all getting a bit tired. During lunch Amanda, Eric, and Brad take a quick nap during our lunch break.

The BLOKES and Wild Dogg (Zac) have formed a pretty tight group.

The Morning began with the whole group moving wood across the site. Lately people have been stealing wood from the Habitat site so we had to make it harder to get to.

The floor is finaly done so all its artists stop for a fun picture with their beautiful masterpiece

Erik and Brad cut into one of our favorite New Orleans delicacies. A treat courtesy of Rosie after a long day’s work.

We wanted to get one full piece in before sundown. The entire crew worked hard to get it done.

Kate and Lindsay R. work by floodlight. Kate sports a genuine Justin Verrips original; it’s said to bring superb sheetrocking skills to anyone who dawns it.

We wanted to get one full piece in before sundown. The entire crew worked hard to get it done.

Day Five: January 2008

2008-01-13T07:25:00.000-08:00

Day Five: Saturday, January 12

Today is Justin’s birthday! This is the third birthday he has shared with us in New Orleans and we are honored that he has chosen to spend his day here. Thanks for all you do for us, Justin, and happy, happy day!

As for the rest of the group, we actually almost made it to work on time today. Almost. Five more minutes and we’ll be there. Soon. Soon. The breakfast and lunch crews started cranking things up just before 6 today, with everyone else keeping their heads on the pillows until about 6:05. Elijah headed up the BLOKEs as they served some mean chilaquiles while the Souljas got up a big pot of TVP and couscous for lunch. (TVP is texturized vegetable protein, a soy product that looks a bit like sloppy joes if you drown it in barbecue sauce. They added hunks of tofu to make it a bit more nourishing, along with some pieces of water chestnut just to make it interesting.)

The day was beyond beautiful as we went from a clear 39-degree morning into a sunny and breezy afternoon. We started the day by visiting with the still-healthy puppies from Thursday, who were staying warm in Jerrad’s car and waiting to be fed through a syringe at appropriate intervals. They make sweet little moaning sounds that we imagine to be signs of contentment. We hope we’re right.

We cranked more floors, shingles, and roof trusses today, and we even got out a sledgehammer and removed some huge boulders of leftover concrete that had been set aside as the foundations were poured. One group re-stacked and reorganized lots of wet lumber that was finally drying out. As we were figuring out the system that would better organize the lumber, a neighbor (Miss Varela?) came to one of our houses and told us that people with trucks had come in the night to steal the wood that was there. She and her husband called the police and scared them off. As she was telling the story, we got to introduce her to our new friend Miss Anne, who will soon be Miss Varela’s immediate neighbor. As they met for the first time, they exclaimed like they had been eager to meet for a long, long time and held each other in a warm embrace. It was a beautiful thing to watch and it helped us to recognize that we are not just building houses; we are building communities.

Miss Anne is a full-time missionary who was born in Jamaica and who now lives in New Orleans. Today is the day that she will complete the 350 hours of labor that constitute her “sweat equity” in her new home. Most of those hours have been spent working on houses that are not her own. Though she plans to continue working on her own house (along with those of her soon-to-be neighbors), this day is a huge milestone on her road to home ownership. We are happy to be here to celebrate this day with her.

It was a pretty happy day all around, as just before lunch the target game that is played from the rooftops really took over the site. Whoever had been working on the rooftops in the morning took turns taking shots at the targets with their shingle scraps. Once again, Mark was the champion who pegged the 250-point sign, complete with a bonus for knocking over the water bottle and the sign that were attached to that target. Shane and Julie also combined for a double-whammy on the 250, meaning that they got to leave at lunch with Jerrad and eat McDonald’s for lunch. Most of us thought that eating at McDonald’s didn’t sound too appealing anyway, but we were still proud of our teammates. Along with those two 250’s, Katie also hit the 50-pointer so solidly that her shingle just rested right on the sign marking the spot.

Whether or not they hit the targets, our rooftoppers are all aglow, mostly because they are getting some serious sun exposure. We have some spray-on sunblock that everyone shares, so we are doing what we can to avoid awful burns. We heard that during the week before we arrived, volunteers were working in temperatures in the low 20’s, so we are very grateful to have such clear and beautiful skies, at least for a few days. We even capitalized on the dry weather last night by clearing out the lower level of the bus and vacuuming up the scrunge that had accumulated on the floors. We know that this state of cleanliness won’t last long, but it was nice to see, if only for a moment.

In the afternoon, the floor crew finally found its groove with their house leader,
Zac, aka “Wild Dog.” Their secret weapon today was specialization. They paired up and operated as an assembly line of sorts and they found that their system moved way faster than any method they had tried before. They were very proud at the end of the day.

The shinglers were proud too, as they finished their job with the exception of the ridge cap. Their lines were incredibly straight and their overall work was truly professional. The roofers next door created lovely ratruns and facing all around the eaves of the house. A few others did some beautiful siding work, while another hearty team braved the confusion and complexity of a double hip roof.

Everyone was so drained by the sun that we decided to go straight from Habitat to camp. We got the special privilege of taking the puppies home with us for the evening, as Jerrad needed to go after a crawfish pot for us to use for Justin’s birthday party. Justin decided he wanted to stay “home,” so we had our own crawfish boil with 80 pounds of live crawfish that we soaked, prepped, boiled, peeled and LOVED. Serg made up some great hamburgers and Emily and Lindsay S. put some vegetables on the grill that were a perfect compliment to our feast.

The crawfish lessons were a hoot and our best student seemed to be our beloved busdriver Leo. We can’t get enough of Leo and his stupid jokes and we couldn’t be more impressed with his driving skills. Every time we wonder if we can cut a corner or fit into a space, we all just say, “don’t worry – it’s Leo!” Jed is the chief navigator again and the two of them make an excellent team. So far they have tried (and accomplished) nine u-turns in the crazy streets of New Orleans. All that we do here would be totally impossible without Leo’s presence. Thanks, Leo (and Loretta, his wife, who lets him join us, and Dan, the owner of the bus)!

Our night ended with two birthday cakes: one for Justin and one for Shane, whose birthday is Sunday. We’re planning a full day of work at Rosie’s house on Sunday, but we’ll still find a way to celebrate Shane at the end of the day. Our secret whammy is here now: Chris and Justin’s dad, Jack! He will take our productivity to new levels, along with our overall work hours. Today we worked an 8-hour day, meaning that we have already worked more than 1000 hours in total on this trip (1120 or so). Thus, in four days’ work, we have accomplished as much as an individual worker might do in months’ time. Wow.

Birthday wish come true for Justin as he was able to spend a whole day of floor work with Jed.

It was a really special moment when Anne, the Habitat homeowner, met her new neighbor. We kinda cried a bit.

Wild-Dawg. The Blokes' pack leader.

Tongue and groove frustration moment: 3,487,429; but Wild-Dawg and Obi use the power of two heads to work as a pack.

After working hard on the roof, the group takes a quick break to inspect their work.

Emily and Matt put up some trusses, so that the group can begin decking the house next week.

With the precision of professionals Kate, Bri, and Leo put up siding on the house.

A lot of work was done to complete the flooring of this house for the homeowner who gave a helping hand with the student workers.

After a long day of work everyone was exhausted, especially Mark and Scott who caught a few ZZZzzz on the way home.

Kate working to help create a support beam for the trusses in a Habitat house.

Nicole and Kate enjoying themselves on an “adult jungle gym.”

Some of our crew enjoying lunch on a beautiful day in NOLA.

We work with many other volunteers when working with Habitat. We are getting instructed on our daily tasks.

Some members of the crew raising trusses and putting them into the proper place.

Matt concentrates on getting the correct measurements.

Z and Nicole climb on the trusses to nail them into the framework.

Aaron uses a speed square to line up his cut on a custom piece of decking.

We couldn’t help but laugh and cheer on Em as she held her breath in the crawfish tubs.

Justin fills up the tub holding enormous amounts of live crawfish, read to be boiled and eaten.

Day Four: January 2008

2008-01-11T21:06:00.001-08:00

Day Four: Friday, January 11

[Special Note: We are still struggling with our photos. Sorry they are a bit out of place. We're trying hard, but the posting of these things tends to happen at about midnight or so, when we are desperately in need of sleep. We'll keep trying.]

Well, our punctuality plan failed, so tomorrow we have to wake the breakfast crew at 5:45 and the rest at 6:00. Apparently that’s what it takes to make it to work by 7:30. Oh well. No matter what the time, we were thrilled to wake up to clear skies. Even though it was a very cold 45 degrees, the absence of rain automatically made it a great day.

We had GREAT jobs at Habitat today, with lots of sledgehammer-swinging, lots of daring roofwork, beautiful precision siding, and even a few games thrown in on the side. We learned that we are pretty quick learners, even if we are terrible at fractions. (Here’s one team taking measurements: “It’s 4 and a half inches and three lines.” This measurement might also be stated as 4 and 11/16 inches, but what’s the difference if the board comes out the right size?)

We also learned that a lot of the members of our group are entirely fearless. They walked confidently on the edge of the roof installing decking or laying shingles, and some had so much fun up there that they created their own target game on a foundation and floor next door. They placed some targets on the subfloor and gave each other points if they could hit the target with their shingle scraps from the roof. By some miracle, Mark hit the orange that was there three times in a row, making him a legend on that rooftop and throughout our group.

Almost everyone took a turn on one of the rooftops, including Sam, who is at least a little bit intimidated by heights, if not outright scared of them. Emily, Alec, Julie, Mark, and Shane stayed on one roof shingling practically all day long, while Sam, Aaron, Matt W., Bryan, and Amanda diligently laid decking on the roof next door. They claimed that visions of sliding down the slope involuntarily just never entered their heads, but for those who are afraid of heights, that image was all that was on their minds.

One team stayed away from Habitat today and instead went and finished up the last work on the gutting job at Leroy Palmer’s house. Matt P., Nicole, Serg, Scott, and Linzy knocked out that last parts of the bathroom and the linoleum floor, and cleared the final debris from the little house we demolished there yesterday. From there they went to Rosie’s to clean up the house in preparation for the installation of sheetrock. First, they had to unload 100 sheets of 4’x12’ drywall, a job that is especially challenging because the sheets will break if they bend too far.

By the time the rest of the group joined them, it was getting too close to dark to start the sheetrock job, so we decided to make quick work of Rosie’s thoroughly messed-up back yard instead. There were posts and links from a number of different iterations of fencing back there, along with lots of leftover debris from the storms. Rosie told us not worry about the huge pecan tree stump that was there because it would be “impossible” for us to remove it. Of course, hearing that the job is impossible means that we are determined to complete it. We’ll let you know.

We came home to find that Shane had bought us actual fresh broccoli and salad greens. Jed, Kate, Julie, Briana, and Tommy added some rice-a-roni to our fresh foods to make an almost-normal dinner. After dinner we had our group meeting, where we gave out our “Blood, Sweat, and Tears” Awards. Last night’s winners were Matt P. for all of his labor in prepping gear for the trip, Scott for his work in bringing down Leroy’s little backyard house with his bare hands, Briana for taking some bold steps in our group and on the jobsite, and Emily for being a daring beamwalker during insulation installation. Tonight’s awards went to Katie L. for her cheery attitude despite her lack of sleep, Mark for his target prowess from the roof, and Nicole for overcoming some deep fears. Lots more awards could have been doled out, but we need to save a few for the weeks to come.

The night ended with a great treat: individual letters to each of us from the students in the sixth grade class at Happy Hollow Elementary School in West Lafayette, Indiana. Whether they were fully decorated with elaborate drawings or just notes of encouragement, they brought great warmth, joy, and laughter into our lives. We’ll sign off in the same way that one of them did. . .

Until the cows come home,

SMC NOLA 2008

This is our action shot of the day – while an assembly line moves sheet rock into Rosie’s duplex, others take the time to get to know Rosie.

As we wrapped up the last of our projects for the day Lindsay Ryberg kept the girls thoroughly entertained!

Not only do we have each others back but we also have our feet… Matt Wheeler and Aaron Arnold helped each other out after a long day of work.

Brian, Matt Wheeler and Aaron Aarnold kept on working even after dark as they helped clear out debris from the back of Rosie’s duplex.

The Souljas got a special ride home, this is the view from the ferry.

Emily, Mark, Julie spent the day with four others nailing shingles on the roof of a Habitat house.

Lindsay, Kate, Bree, and Leo learned how to cut and hang siding on the same house while others were roofing.

After our day at Habitat we all went over to Rosie’s to finally meet her. Her close family friend, and ours, Lisa Trigo, was there to welcome us to New Orleans.

We ended the day at Rosie’s cleaning up the backyard. We did not have much time before sunset, but we accomplished a lot before we had to leave.

Matt, Aaron, and Bryan worked hard in the backyard pulling out an old rusted pole.

Jed, the stud that he is, takes a break from nailing down the flooring and builds the stairs for the stoop of the home.

Julie, Emily, Mark, and Shane work in sync on a roof at a house on the West Bank.

Obi works in the warm New Orleans sunshine after days of rain on the work site.

Alec, Julie, Erik, and Mark team up on the roof as Kate and our Habitat friend, Stephanie, install siding on a house.

“Goddess” Shawny puts her muscles to the test as she nails the final shingles into the roof of a Habitat home.

Along with the BLOKEs, Anne stops by to help with her own floor. She’s so enthusiastic and is almost done with her 350 sweat equity hours.

Lindsay shows off the incredible work of the day. We’re almost done with the floors.

These are the essential tools used to do flooring. There is a tool for every job!

In addition to installing the floor, Justin takes the lead in building a staircase which will lead up to Anne’s front door.

A bunch of studs are up there finishing decking and attaching shingles to the roof.

Day Three: January 2008

2008-01-10T21:14:00.000-08:00

Day Three: Thursday, January 10

[Special Note: Please go back a couple of days and look at the still photos that we collected over those days but failed to post. We are still getting our technological groove together and we are catching up for three days of accumulated pictures now. . . Please forgive our inability to rotate the pictures that need it; we hope to figure out this technique soon.]

6:00 a.m. That’s when the breakfast and lunch crews agreed to arise so that we could make it to work by 7:30 a.m. The rest got up at 6:15 and agreed to really hustle so that all of the jobs involved in getting out of camp would be done in plenty of time. The plan started perfectly as the first two teams got up at 6. Things got a little shaky, though, when rain started to pour down at 6:02. No one flinched, as we just kept moving no matter how wet the world became. The breakfast crew ditched its plan to make oatmeal and convinced everyone to eat granola instead. We hustled and hurried and moved like little worker ants, but we still didn’t pull out of the gate until 7:20. With the traffic we hit going to work, we arrived only slightly late at 7:40. Just a little tweaking of our plan and we should make it on time tomorrow.

Our first unusual experience of the day was the discovery of two newborn puppies under one of the houses at our site. Linzy and Amanda quickly became their surrogate mothers as they snuggled them close to keep them warm. Some nurses on site said that the puppies needed to get to a shelter if they were going to survive, so the puppy-mamas, a Habitat staffer named Jarred, and Justin went to find a place. Once the shelter turned them down, they decided that Jarred would take the puppies home and try to keep them alive. They stopped by the site first, though, and had Aaron remove the still-attached placenta from each puppy. For anyone who has been reading our blogs in years past, you might recall that we had a very moving situation involving a puppy in January 2006, so for some of us the rescue of two puppies is a very moving bookend experience.

As the puppy drama unfolded, most of the rest of us returned to the same jobs we had yesterday. The floor crew got the unfortunate news that they had to undo most of their work from the day before and stagger the floorboards differently. They were pretty cheery about the whole thing, especially because they really liked the other volunteers that were working with them and their house leader, Zac.

Another group finished installing almost every single window in all four of the houses that are in progress at the site. Alec, Scott, Matt, Mark, and Tommy were the expert crew who could go into business for themselves once we return. A different group helped to install facing and decking on the roof we helped raise yesterday. Don’t get too scared, parents, but we have gotten quite skilled at operating from the tops of 20-foot ladders, even when there are large sheets of plywood involved. Wow.

The last group finished jobs on a different house then added their talents to the raising of another roof. Several of the newcomers helped to bringing the trusses onto the roof, including Scott, Mark, Nicole, Briana, Julie, and Erik.

Throughout all of these jobs, we endured very confusing surprise cloudbursts where rain would suddenly dump from the sky with no warning or buildup, leaving us running for cover but still getting soaked to the bone. We actually enjoyed this happy juxtaposition: just as we were laboring to provide shelter for deserving families, we were reminded again and again of the importance of shelter and protection from the elements.

The cloudbursts got a bit stronger in the afternoon and a Habitat staffer finally told us to call it a day. We, of course, did NOT call it a day even though we left the Habitat site. We divided into two groups: one that began to install the insulation that will rest behind the sheetrock we will hang this weekend at Rosie Boitmann’s house, and one that went to finish the gutting job at Leroy Palmer’s house.

The group at Rosie’s house climbed into the attic and stapled insulation throughout and also covered about half of the interior walls. The group at Leroy’s house took out two layers of linoleum tile flooring, finished debris removal in a garage and another outbuilding in the backyard, and then followed Don’s request that we remove that outbuilding altogether. In California, that small building might be called a “mother-in-law” unit, as it was a small room with a tiny porch that might have been a guesthouse at one time. At this time, the room was clearly used for storage. It was a cute little building with a lot of character, but its instability meant that the safest move was for us to bring it down.

After clearing the space very carefully by using the bucket brigade method, Chris, Matt, and Scott realized that a few well-chosen cuts with the sawzall would make it possible to push the building over by hand. It wasn’t exactly a breeze for them, but it turned out that a lot of rocking and then a few big pushes brought the building to the ground. Everything unfolded very safely and according to the plan. The cutest part of the whole operation happened right at the end of it all. As the very last move, Matt and Scott turned their backs to the building to push off of a shed in the neighbor’s backyard. Once our building began to give, their backs were literally against the wall, so they just rode the house onto its side with their feet in the air.

Our ten-hour workday finally ended just before 6 p.m. We headed home and melted some Velveeta, added jalapenos, and ate it with our main pantry staple: Ritz crackers. The Elevaters whipped up some curry and rice for dinner as a favor to Team Team, who was assigned to cook tonight. We held our group meeting early (around 8:00) and agreed that it would be good to go to bed early and perhaps get eight full hours of sleep. At 10:30, we all realized that we had lost track of time in our enthusiasm to plan projects, flip through pictures, and just plain talk. Shawny keeps telling us she just can’t believe how outstanding our group is so early in the trip. As usual, we’re just happy to be here. Thanks for your support!

Two puppies found under Habitat for Humanity home. Aaron came to the rescue and cut the umbilical cord of one puppy and Amanda cared for the other.

Erik and Kate diligently prep for the installation of a window. After much hard work, very window was installed in all four Habitat for Humanity homes.

As the New Orleans storm poured down, Bryan, Katie, Aaron, and Shane ducked for cover under one of the Habitat houses. We endured three thunderstorms throughout the day.

Linzy and Lindsay help each other cut the panels for the side of a soon to be completed house.

Bri and Julie persevere through hours of pulling up linoleum flooring in Leeroy’s home in the lower ninth ward.

Yesterday’s hard work didn’t quite pay off like we thought. Upon arriving at the Habitat site, the BLOKEs found that the floor was done incorrectly and had to be removed and re-done.

The group crowds around the truck for a great lunch of lentils, tomatoes, and garbanzo beans.

Emily and Shane couldn’t wait to get off the ground again; they’re always eager to climb into the rafters. Here they are installing all the roof insulation at Rosie’s place.

The rain was pouring on and off all day at the Habitat site. Elijah ducks for cover during one of the many downpours.

The BLOKEs and Elevaters happily install insulation in Rosie’s duplex.

Relentless.

After the first of four down pours that lasted about five minutes made about two inches of water across the floor of one of the habitat houses.

Some Jan Term classes use notebooks to write, this is ours.

Potential from the ground up; foundation is key to a stable and great home.

Everyone sitting on the floor of the bus since we were all soaking wet.

With Chris, Matt, and Scott pushing from the back of the house down it went

Bryan cutting pieces for the sub-fasciae

During the break due to bad weather Aaron whittles away the pencil and the time.

“Measure twice, cut once” as the saying goes. Linzy and Aarom double check their numbers before cutting a piece of siding.

Day Two: January 2008

2008-01-09T22:28:00.000-08:00

Day Two: Wednesday, January 9

Wow. What a group! What a day! We had a rough night of sleep last night, as a huge thunderstorm rocked our bus and flooded our camp (but not our tent, because we have GUTTERS!). It was fascinating to watch the water pour down from the sky and also rise up from the ground because we are – we think – below sea level here. A few people were so zonked out from our redeye flight that they missed the whole thing.

Once the storm was over, we started the day EARLY, as the breakfast group volunteered to wake up at 6:15 to be sure that things would move fast enough to get us to work by 7:45. Everyone else got up at 6:45 and agreed to hurry and scramble to make the day happen fast. As usual, though, we couldn’t move quite as quickly as we imagined, and we didn’t get to work until 8:15. Oops. Our breakfast of chocolate chip pancakes and powdered eggs (both New Orleans delicacies as far as we are concerned) was worth spending some time in camp this morning, but we all see our work as our top priority so we will have to figure out a way to move more efficiently in the morning. (NOLA vets out there: does this sound familiar?)

We went to a Habitat for Humanity build in the West Bank, the area of New Orleans where we live. The West Bank is, strangely, east of almost everywhere else we go in the city, but we won’t try to convince the region to change its usages. Even though we were late, our great new supervisor, Megan, welcomed us and put us on some excellent jobs. Within minutes, some of us were learning the new floor system that Habitat is using, some of us were installing windows, others were building a “truss walk” (a temporary wall that will support us when we raise the roof), and others were actually raising a roof on a different house. It feels like we have already almost done it all, even though it was our very first day of work.

The Habitat crew knocks off work at 2:30 p.m., cleans up and leaves by 3:00. We followed their schedule with them, but when they all went home or wherever, we went to our next job: gutting a house in the Holy Cross area of the Lower Ninth Ward. Many of you might have heard of this neighborhood because it is one of the places where Brad Pitt has focused his energies and lots of media attention. We didn’t see Brad or his project there (yet), but we got plenty of satisfaction out of going into a house that had been partially gutted long ago, but never completed. Complete gutting is necessary to get a house decontaminated and ready for reconstruction. Someone had helped our friend Leroy Palmer get part of the way to that “zero mark” where rebuilding can begin, but we hope to get him all the way there by tomorrow afternoon.

Leroy is the father of Don Palmer, one of the neighbors in the Upper Ninth Ward neighborhood where we have spent the most time over the last three years. Don lives next to our dear friend Rosie and we helped him clear his house in January 2006. Leroy has experienced quite a bit of loss over the last few years: his home was nearly ruined in the storms of 2005, another house he owned was also destroyed, and within a year of the storms, his dear wife Odessa passed away.

We entered his home in Holy Cross at 4:00 or so this afternoon, and in about two hours time got very close to cleaning out his home once and for all after almost two and a half years of waiting. Though most of our crew had never done this kind of work before, they all caught on quickly and developed a great system for pulling down drywall and clearing the space. Everyone was swinging sledgehammers and flat bars like old pros. A couple of outbuildings there seemed to remain untouched since the storm, leaving our group gasping again about the force of the water and the damage it did. We tossed out piles of belongings but also salvaged a few, including a very warped but still recognizable photo album of young Palmer kids (maybe Don and others?) frolicking on fire engines and in parks.

We finally knocked off when darkness overtook us. Of course, that section of the neighborhood had no source of power for us to light our workplace, so daylight was all that we could use. We had completed nine and a half hours of labor when all was said and done. We hope all of our days can be so varied, so satisfying, and so harmonious. We’re glad we’re here. . .

Leo, Emily, and Briana unroll tape while working on the windows. Today we installed and framed windows with Habitat for Humanity on the West Bank.

Tommy and Mark install a window that will soon bring New Orleans sunshine into a home.

Sam and Julie are entranced with their first look at the Lower Ninth.

Erik and Scott give each other a high five as they put on their boots and hard hats to gut a house in the Lower Ninth.

Leo starts the bus to return to camp after dusk. We accomplished our first day of work!

Bienvenidos a Algiers!

In this picture you can see the spray paint from when the house was searched on September 8, 2005 and a sign welcoming neighbors back, a sign of hope.

What we found in Don’s father’s garage which had been untouched since the storm.

It’s all hands on deck, everyone helps getting the Habitat homes weathered.

Many of the students spent the day working to put up windows and trim.

This is just the end of our work site at habitat and everyone is having a great time and enjoying the great weather.

This picture shows us working with Habitat for Humanity. In the location where we are working they have ten different houses under construction, and this is what it typically looks like when you look out while you are working.

This was a burnt car filled to the brim with garbage by our second build of the day in the Lower Ninth Ward. It reminded me of the immense clash problems that New Orleans still faces.

Looking in at Emily and Julie painting siding for a house under a raised house built by Habitat for Humanity volunteers.

Brad and Obi began the day working on the floor joists at one of the Habitat homes - one of the many critical steps to building these homes.

Chris, Mark, and Alec decorating our new home and installing our gutter!

Tying his shoe, with a determined look on his face, Alec is ready to face any thing Habitat for Humanity can throw at him.

Workers from Ohio’s Kent State working to put trusts up on the newly built homes.

Matt Wheeler rises to the occasion and drives nails from the truss into the framing of the house.

Emily Robbins and Bryan Navarro in the process of gutting a house in the lower ninth ward.

Day One, January 2008

2008-01-08T22:02:00.000-08:00

Day One: Tuesday, January 8, 2008

Another redeye flight (that was surprisingly less painful than those we’ve taken before) brought us back to our beloved New Orleans today. Fifteen of us are veterans of trips past, having come to work and serve in this great city anywhere from 1-10 times since the storms of August 2005. Those relief workers have completed over 10,000 hours of manual labor so far. Others of us are experiencing the aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita for the first time. No matter what our level of experience, we are genuinely thrilled to be here.

Happily, we are also thrilled to be together. Something very beautiful is emerging already as this group solidifies and all of its members operate as one harmonious whole. We were, of course, quite groggy when we landed at Louis Armstrong Airport, but our bus buzzed with anticipation and so did the empty fenced lot that we will call home from today until January 29.

We have to brag -- especially for the benefit of veterans of our prior trips who are not with us here this January – that this is BY FAR the best camp we have ever created for ourselves. Much of the overall layout is the same, with four lovely portapots (from the local company with our favorite name of all – Doodie Calls) standing in one corner, the shower trailer we used last year set up nearby, a dressing tent along the side wall of the showers, our big beautiful rainbow bus expertly parked down the middle, and a three-peak kitchen and dining tent serving as our central gathering space.

The difference this year is some incredible ingenuity. Of course, the trials and errors of groups gone by have brought us to the place we are today. But any of those who have struggled with the quirks of our Bermuda-grass lot would be quite impressed with three things in particular. First, we set each of our dining tents just a few inches apart from the next and found a way to hang a rain-channeling gutter down the gap so that we could not possibly suffer the indoor runoff that last year’s group endured for 15 of its 22 days. Chris, Justin, Alec, and Mark are the primary sources of this very necessary innovation. Elijah, Erik, and Emily led a team that help to wrap the gaps between the poles and keep the wind and rain from finding its way in.

Second, we built a platform by the cooking area that will prevent us from having to stand in inches of rain just to heat some water that might possibly keep us warm. (This platform could also easily be seen – and used – as a stage; we’ll let you know if that happens.) Chris, Tommy, Linzy, and Sergio were the main movers and shakers on this new addition to our NOLA world.

And finally, we actually finally got organized about the way we will manage our gear. Instead of one massive pile of stinking socks and boots, each team will have individual bins in which they can manage their five members’ stinking socks and boots however they choose. (Thanks to Shawny’s sister Sherry for getting us those bins!) Each team also has a bin for its hard hats, gloves, and safety glasses and a separate five-gallon bucket with its assortment of tools. Kate C., Briana, and Julie worked for hours to make this happen. They even have special places inside the bus to store all the media equipment that has never been organized very neatly before. Matt P., Linzy G., Kate C., and others crawled around on the floor of the bus until this job was done. If everything goes as planned, these changes will have a huge impact on our efficiency and our comfort. Yes!

For fun we also found some cheap plastic indoor-outdoor chandeliers to make our tents feel like ballrooms, and we had a huge burst of creativity that led to dialogue sheets inside the portapots, including provocative questions to be answered in moments of quiet contemplation and clear instructions about how to show courtesy to the overall group when using the facilities. We were tired when we arrived, but we still found a way to use our humor and creativity to build a world in which we can all be as happy as possible.

As we settled into our busbunks at night, little flashes of lightning and quiet faraway thunder helped to keep things interesting until we finally drifted into much-needed sleep. Tomorrow we go to a Habitat for Humanity build not too far from our camp, then head over to the Lower Ninth Ward to begin gutting a house that still needs attention more than two full years after the storms. Thanks for joining us on our exciting journey.

Preparing to leave for New Orleans again!

2008-01-06T14:58:00.000-08:00

We're all losing our minds on Sunday, January 6th, trying to pack everything that we need to sustain ourselves for the rest of the month in New Orleans. We usually have the great luxury of throwing all of our gear in a trailer and letting the Verrips brothers drive it across the country for us. This year, though, they wisely decided to fly (and will arrive in New Orleans tonight to facilitate the advance work on our living space). Thus, we have the new challenge of trying to pack everything we need into bags that can be checked at the airport. It's been tricky, but we think we will make it. Special thanks to Matt Pelascini for the long hours he spent packing for the group after the semester was long over!

We'd like to go ahead and introduce our teams for this year, so please click on the YouTube links below to meet our crew! Special thanks here to Bryan Navarro for posting our videos and to Rob Limon, Rita Pearson, Alex Stillings, and Devon Perez for their help in preparing them!

The BLOKEs: http://youtube.com/watch?v=Gs-Cm79XFL8

The Elevaters: http://youtube.com/watch?v=KVl5hrZq8rA

Team Team: http://youtube.com/watch?v=gKJOv6mJCTk

Chicas and the Man: http://youtube.com/watch?v=5NxKIEazL74

The Souljas: http://youtube.com/watch?v=GZPpFqGDTKE

BREAK WEEK: Day Nine

2007-04-13T09:46:00.000-07:00

April 7: Day Nine, Break Week

Today we returned to California, meaning that our top priority in New Orleans this morning was to pack and load the vans so that we could make our way back to Houston in time for our flight back home. Still, we knew that there were a couple more jobs that we could finish in just a few short hours, so ten of us agreed to get up at 5:30 a.m. and head back to Rosie’s one more time.

On our way from Uptown to the Ninth Ward, we noticed thick black smoke billowing in the air in front of us. As we approached one intersection on South Claiborne Street in the Central City neighborhood, we saw huge flames shooting into the air and a bunch of emergency vehicles all over the streets. A huge old house and an adjacent brick building were being engulfed. It was a highly unusual experience to watch a half block of New Orleans dissolve into fiery embers when we were approaching our 1500th hour of reconstruction labor in just this one week. We drove by slowly, marveled over the weirdness of it all, and then just focused on the jobs at hand.

Once at Rosie’s we scrubbed the floors and grouted the last tiles that we set yesterday, we painted trim, we hung blinds, we cleaned up scattered tools, and we worked on a job or two for Sarah around the corner. Rosie made us coffee and stayed close by, talking about her excitement about the future of the house. Like us, she was still gushing about Janice’s achievement yesterday in walking the new ramp out back. We all took note of what a huge change that ramp would bring to Janice’s life. The folks who went to Sarah’s house learned that she had stayed up late on Friday night to make us homemade pralines, which, as usual, were the best we’ve ever tasted.

The people who hadn’t gone back to the Ninth took responsibility for cleaning and packing up our temporary NOLA home. They doled out our leftover food to other groups staying at our same house and gathered up our dishes, boots, toiletry items, and media equipment so that everything was ready to go.

The folks at Rosie’s and Sarah’s realized that it was time to go, no matter how many more little jobs we could find to do. Because Tommy and Shane were flying out of New Orleans directly (having made separate arrangements from the larger group) we decided to take them back to the houses on our way out of town so that they could finish even more jobs. In that way we got to postpone our goodbyes just a little bit longer.

We collected back at the house where we stayed, made everything fit into the two vans somehow, and headed back to drop Tommy and Shane off for the last time. Rosie had already agreed to drive them to the airport, so all of our loose ends were tying up very nicely. We hugged and hollered and took one last look down the streets of “our” neighborhood: the Upper Ninth Ward. And then we started driving west. And sleeping.

Somewhere along the way we realized why we were so tired: we had completed over 1500 hours of manual labor in this one week alone. Altogether, counting all four of the SMC trips to New Orleans, we have exceeded 10,000 total hours of direct hurricane relief. The numbers work like this on a trip by trip basis:

Jan 2006: 4160 total hours
Break 2006: 720 total hours
Jan 2007: 3700 total hours
Break 2007: 1542 total hours

Grand Total: 10,122!!!

Of course, we could easily count project work as hurricane relief of sorts, but even without counting that work, we hit 10,000 hours! We are exhausted and very proud.

We are also reminded that the work is not over. We know that we made an impact in our 10,000 hours, but we also know that we barely made a dent in the overall crisis still haunting the Gulf Coast. Many homes remain untouched still, almost 20 months after the storms. And people are still waiting. Rosie is waiting for the money promised to her by the state. Sarah is waiting for a reliable plumber to set up her kitchen and bathrooms. Natasha is waiting for the go-ahead from Habitat for Humanity so that she can take possession of her new home. Lisa is waiting for the time when her extended family is no longer is a state of acute crisis, so that she can resume a normal pace sometime in the near future. And thousands of families we haven’t yet met are hoping that a group like ours comes to help them turn the next corner on their road to recovery. Please help them in any way you can.

Thanks for listening, once again . . .

__________________________________________

We ate this morning at one of the all-time fanciest McDonald's that we have ever seen.

There was a lot of tricky tilework to be done in the back of the house, as the rooms are not square. Here's the bathroom floor as it slants around the new shower enclosure.

The kitchen, back entry, and bathroom all share this tilework.

Here's a peek at the new floors and newly-installed blinds in Rosie's bedroom.

Once all the paper is removed, Rosie's living room and bedrooms will have these beautiful laminate floors, perfectly painted walls and trim, and lovely ceiling fans. What a wonderful place!

The long drive to Houston included catching up on some web-posting.

BREAK WEEK: Day Eight

2007-04-06T21:29:00.000-07:00

April 6: Day Eight, Break Week

Habitat for Humanity took the day off today for Easter weekend, so we put all of our efforts into the homes of our friends in the Ninth Ward. Mostly, we concentrated on Rosie’s house to finish the jobs that we started there during the week. Our main jobs continued to be the flooring and the entry ramp, but there were tons of other jobs in motion as well. We also took on a big new job in earnest: installing the baseboards throughout the rooms of Rosie’s house.

We were all pretty tired and sore, but those factors had no influence on our levels of energy. We decided to get up even earlier than usual to be sure that we finished the jobs that we had started. No one balked at our 6:30 wakeup time, especially because we had a solid agreement to eat a fast food breakfast rather than our usual bagels and granola.

Once at Rosie’s, a few people immediately hit the floors, literally starting an entire day of crawling around on their knees. They finished tiling the bathroom and back entryway and grouted the tiles that they had set yesterday. At the same time, a whole crew was going through and installing baseboards, which is no easy task in a house whose walls are a bit askew. Others were disassembling a no-longer-necessary fence in the backyard to free up more space around the new access ramp. Suddenly the house that we had entered back in January 2006 looked totally different, as it had new exterior siding, new interior walls, ceilings, and floors, a fresh coat of paint throughout, and a liberating new ramp to access the house from the rear.

It is important to note that all of this was accomplished under somewhat primitive conditions, as we had many fewer tools than we normally have when the Verrips brothers drive a truck and trailer across the country to support our efforts. Thus, where we usually have a chop saw, a table saw, a circular saw and a reciprocating saw, we just had one Skil Saw that we adapted for all of our uses. We also had to innovate over power usage, as Rosie’s electricity is still not hooked up.

While all of this was happening at Rosie’s, Tim was leading the charge at Sarah’s to finish work on the security doors and bars on which she depends. Different people helped him throughout the day, but Tim was the one who dedicated himself entirely to her needs. Sarah stayed right by Tim’s side all day and talked about how blessed she feels that we are helping to take care of her house. By the end of the day, several of us gathered at her back door to attach her security door. It was quite an ordeal, but – as usual – our crew made it happen. Sarah immediately burst into tears.

We all were fighting back tears back at Rosie’s house, as just before the ramp was finished, our friend Lisa Trigo brought Rosie and her disabled roommate Janice out to check out the ramp and the interior work. As we have mentioned before, we built the ramp specifically with Janice in mind, as she currently uses a walker to get around. We just learned, however, that even with the walker, she has never been very mobile. In fact, Lisa told us that until the storm drove Janice out of the house on N. Clairborne, she had not left the house AT ALL for a full SEVEN YEARS!

When Lisa invited her to come see the ramp, Janice was very reluctant to go, thinking that she might not be able to make it up the ramp at all. She somehow got up the courage to try (Rosie’s encouragement sure helped!) and she got her first glimpse back into the almost-restored house. We all stood along the ramp and watched her go, trying to hold back tears. She was excited to see the interior of the house and she was ecstatically proud of her achievement in making it up the ramp. So were we. Rosie said that Janice kept glowing with pride for the rest of the evening.

As we think about it, that ramp might symbolize the biggest single change we have made in any person’s life in our NOLA work so far. Janice could not have maneuvered into or out of the house without that ramp, so we have given her freedom, sunshine, fresh air, and a new sense of pride in her accomplishment. Wow.

We stayed into the darkness finishing touchup painting and other tasks. We made a gumbo run that also included some fried shrimp and boiled crawfish. We held another candelight picnic in Rosie’s front room, joined by Sarah, Rosie, and the Trigos. A few of us made a run to get special souvenirs of our time(s) in New Orleans. We won’t tell you which people are involved, but we will tell you that their souvenirs came from a tattoo parlor. Oh dear.

We didn’t quite finish every job, as we needed to let some things dry before we could continue. So now about half of us are getting up at 5:30 a.m. to return to Rosie’s house and finish what we can before we leave on our long drive to Houston to catch our flight back to California.

We’ll check in one more time and let you know how things went. . .
______________________________________

Shane continued his mastery of the wet saw today as he cut many tricky notches and cut-outs to accommodate the intricacies of the bathroom and the entryway.

Justin gave a quick tutorial on grout application at the beginning of the day so that we could finish the kitchen floor at Rosie's.

Linzy was one of the lead installers of baseboards at Rosie's.

We communicate quite a bit through the open windows at Rosie's as some of us work inside and some outside.

Janeva and Lindsay work on installing the baseboards at Rosie's.

Brianna turned out to be quite a master at the art of grouting.

Sarah surprised us by cooking a lunch of spaghetti, corn, and bread for us today.

Sarah joined us for lunch on Rosie's other porch.

Tim took this great aerial shot of the ramp in progress from Red's steps behind Rosie's house.

Jack and Bryan sign their names on a slab of concrete that we poured by the ramp.

Here's a look at the floor after it was grouted.

A whole crew of us worked to install Sarah's security door so that she can finally lock her house entirely.

BREAK WEEK: Day Seven

2007-04-05T20:42:00.000-07:00

April 5: Day Seven, Break Week

What a day of work we had today! We started early, as Shawny has a new trick to get us out of bed: if we don’t get up when she awakens us, she sits by our beds and tells us stories about her childhood. Some of us heard about the tornado in her hometown when she was a kid, others about the tobacco farms where she grew up, and others got the scoop on the old moped that one of her friends used to have.

We hustled on out to New Orleans East to finish as many jobs for Alisha as we possibly could. We knew she was counting on us, so we went back and finished re-setting windows at one house and touching up paint and building a fence at another. We were again fixing errors left by other groups.

Among other things, we learned that the amount and quality of work that a group completes really establishes the reputation of the organization that they represent. For example, a couple of college groups were obvious letdowns for the Habitat staffers, leaving them still commenting about the shoddy work (or work ethic) of those groups. We are quite pleased to know that we are in a whole different stratosphere in terms of our reputation. The worst thing that we have heard about our group is: “You work TOO hard!” People are always impressed with our stamina and productivity.

Once we left New Orleans East, we headed back to Rosie’s to go full steam ahead on some of the jobs we still hope to finish. The two huge jobs of the day were 1) continuation of the ramp/deck that Jack began yesterday and 2) tiling the floors in the kitchen, back entry, and bathroom. There were tons of other catch-up jobs too, including finishing the paint jobs that we’ve been working on all week for Sarah and for Rose, moving Sarah’s massive concrete front steps into position, weed-whacking Rosie’s yard, and prepping Rosie’s baseboards for installation.

People fanned out in all directions to make all of these things happen today. There was a frenzy of power-saws and drills, as everyone was moving more quickly than ever in pursuit of the completion of these undertakings. A certain set of people crawled and climbed around the kitchen on all fours, applying mortar to backing board and installing tiles.

Our usual homemade lunch was rejected in favor of a big pile of cheeseburgers from a nearby Burger King. We made several runs to pick up more and more material for the jobs that we were on. We were like an anthill.

We kept going and going until darkness began to fall, at which point we located some light sources (Rosie’s electricity is still not hooked up) to make it so that we could go and go some more. We got hungry as the evening dragged on, and Elijah volunteered to make a run for one of our everlasting favorites: Popeye’s Chicken.

We hadn’t run a light to the front of Rosie’s house, so we improvised for our dinner and ate by candlelight. It was unbelievably sweet to sit in that crowded room with its flickering glow and toss biscuits from one side of the room to the other.

By 9:00 p.m., we realized that we had to stop our saws from squealing into the night. We gathered up everything, packed it all away, and pledged to ourselves that we will return super early tomorrow to keep the momentum going.

Rosie is thinking of a new name for her house: “Saint Mary’s Cottage.” We like it. . .

__________________________________________

Bryan and Matt were part of a fence crew that laid out property lines, dug postholes, and set fenceposts for a fence at Natasha's house.

Elijah and Bryan pour cement to stabilize Natasha's new fence around her house in New Orleans East.

Bryan and Matt have spent the week shooting footage for a break documentary. Today they interviewed Kate on Sarah's porch.

Bryan, Lindsay, and Bree work to clear the rest of Rosie's yard where the shed used to be.

Shane tends to the wet saw as he prepares to cut ceramic tiles to be installed on the kitchen and bathroom floors at Rosie's. It turns out that Shane is a bit of an expert at this particular job.

It took a big chunk of our crew to move Sarah's concrete steps back into place in the front of her house.

Here is a perspective on the ramp that Jack and Justin designed as the back entry to Rosie's house.

Linzy, Justin, and Shawny join into the Popeye's picnic by candlelight in Rosie's front room at the end of the day.

BREAK WEEK: Day Six

2007-04-04T21:00:00.000-07:00

April 4: Day Six, Break 2007

We broke into two groups this morning; one went back to finish the roof on the Law St. house and one went back to New Orleans East to help Alisha finish the houses over there. Soon after the roofers began their task, rain started to fall and the Habitat staffer at that site pulled everyone off of the roof. When they learned that they would not be able to get back on the roof all day, they decided to join the other part of the group out in New Orleans East.

There they found their teammates spread around the neighborhood doing a range of jobs. Some were digging post holes for chain link fencing that will be installed around Natasha’s purple house. Others were touching up paint at two different houses. A few were installing the porch ceiling at a house around the corner while others were doing some work on the edge of the roof at that same house. No matter what anyone was doing, we were all actually thrilled to see the rest of our team arrive.

We have learned over the course of our four trips that we love it best when we are all together or at least within walking distance of each other. Maybe that’s why we love to work with the families of our favorite blocks of the Ninth Ward so much: they live close together, meaning that we, too, can be close together.

We all congregated briefly and talked about how best to use the day. Once we realized that we had a solid chance to work on Rosie’s floors without having everyone in our group passing through the rooms, six of us split off and headed to the Ninth to install laminate flooring.

We were determined to finish those floors today no matter what. The easy way to do it would have been to put thresholds between all the rooms and just fill the floors in from wall to wall. However, we realized that Rosie’s roommate Janice already depends on a walker to get around; thus, we needed to make the floors as smooth as possible, meaning that we needed to run the floorboards all the way across the door frames and into the next room.

Even though we were installing “quick” clip flooring, the notches, edges, irregularities, and overall quirks that we had to address were quite challenging. Fortunately, Chris, Shane, and Aaron were up to the challenge and figured out just what needed to be done over the last couple of days. After arriving at 10:00 a.m. to finish the floors, the floor crew took until 8:00 p.m. to reach their goal. When that last board clicked into place in the corner by the front door, a big cheer went up into the backyard.

We also began a big new project at Rosie’s, this one designed by Jack and Justin. In order to help Janice get in and out of the house more comfortably, they came up with the plan to build a ramp out the back door and into the carport. It is a BIG project, but with a crew this large we can make real progress pretty quickly. Many of us learned to mix and pour concrete and dig postholes right there on the spot. Jack kept track of every part of the job and we look forward to finishing this undertaking before we leave.

Happily, the company that donated siding to some of the neediest residents of New Orleans showed up over the last couple of days to replace aluminum siding on Rosie’s house. In other words, as we were fixing and transforming the interior of the house and the backyard, someone else was simultaneously improving the façade.

For those of us who were in the first wave of relief at Rosie’s when we arrived to clear her house in January 2006, the changes that have occurred there over the last few weeks are unbelievable. Her house will be very beautiful even in the next few days; by the end of April, it should be in the best condition it has achieved in the last 80 years.

At the end of the evening today, we gathered in Rosie’s backyard with our other Ninth Ward friends and had a big cookout. Different people brought different contributions and we all sat outside and had a lovely garden party. We celebrated the end of the flooring job, the beginning of the ramp job, and our overall joy at being in New Orleans again.

We still have a lot of work to do before we can leave satisfied. Because we are leaving on Saturday (to give ourselves the time to get to our families for Easter if we so choose), we must work very efficiently. We haven’t even talked about going to the French Quarter or any of the other normal tourist stuff. We will probably squeeze in a run to the Quarter, but it’s not our priority. Work is.

For those who are worried about the fact that we effectively surrendered our break this year, we want to reassure you that even though we are exhausted (and sore) we are rejuvenated. As we have said many times, we are happy to be together, we are happy to feel so productive, and we are happy to know that our community bond remains strong even when some of our beloved friends are not with us. Thanks to all of you New Orleans veterans for contributing to our strength this week . . .

_________________________________

Linzy and Lindsay teamed up to fix the soffit over the porch at a Habitat house in New Orleans East. They mastered the art of popping and locking the sheathing despite the errors in structure that they also had to correct.

Brianna works on a house in East New Orleans that needs quite a bit of damage control. Bree's job was to fix mistakes that had been made in installing the windows.

Jed and Lindsay participate in one of our many bucket brigades to transport the materials delivered from Home Depot today to the backyard at Rosie's.

The group begins to set things up for the evening cookout we had with our NOLA neighbors in the Ninth Ward.

The age-old entries to Rosie's house are not terribly accessible, so Jack and Justin designed a new back entry ramp from the carport. Here Matt and Jed help to establish the basic layout of the plan.

Shawny, Aaron, and Shane joined Chris, Jed, and Tommy to finish the new laminate floors in Rosie's house. Things were a bit out of skew in each of the rooms that they floored, meaning that the job has extended over parts of three days.

Jed, Jack, and Matt each do their part to raise the new access ramp at Rosie's so that her disabled roommate Janice can get in and out of the house on her walker.

Kate, Lindsay, Emily, and Lauren Trigo gather 'round the camera, as we had no campfire and only one lightbulb to light our cookout.

We got to end the day with a lovely cookout in the Ninth Ward planned by our wonderful friends the Trigos: Bruce, Lauren, and Lisa. We can't imagine trying to function in NOLA without these amazing friends.

BREAK WEEK: Day Five

2007-04-03T20:35:00.000-07:00

April 3: Day Five, Break 2007

No video today. We’re all very tired.

Before we go further, we want to address the concerns expressed by some of you back home about the news that several murders have occurred in New Orleans this week. Though we can make no absolute guarantees into the future, we can say with certainty that we have seen nothing alarming anywhere near where we are working. The murders all seem to be drug-related, with the exception of one that involved a teenager killing his mother's boyfriend (who wanted to kick the teenager out of the house in which the mother and he were living). We are keeping a close watch on everything around us and we are staying close together at all times. We primarily work on main streets in the areas where we are, with big crowds of people around us. We are doing everything we can to be safe.

But now back to our activities of the day. We had a long work day, starting at 8:00 a.m. and ending at 8:00 p.m. We spread ourselves out over a range of Habitat for Humanity sites during the early part of the day, then congregated back on our favorite blocks of the Ninth Ward in the afternoon and evening.

One group continued the roofing job that we started yesterday on Law St. As it turns out, we were a big hit at that site yesterday, as the staff person there had not expected an actual experienced roofing crew to show up. We scored the job in the first place just by saying who we were in yesterday’s vast sea of volunteers; the organizer for the day immediately recognized us as a well-known very productive group and offered us any job we wanted. Because our lead roofing expert, Shane, had just arrived, we chose that job.

Today, then, we sent a contingent of eight people to complete the setting of the trusses. They developed a new method for spacing the trusses that might help to correct an ongoing problem at Habitat houses. The normal way of doing things is to mark the tops of the wall framing so that it is clear where to place each truss. Unfortunately, people often mark the wall tops with no clear sense of the importance of their markings and they are therefore not as careful as we might hope they would be.

On the Law Street house, the markings were not symmetrical on the two walls, meaning that the roof would have been crooked if we had actually followed the lines. Instead, our group determined the distance that should separate the trusses and created a spacer board to place them and nail them. Things went so quickly that the site supervisor started taking notes on how to do this job more efficiently.

Many of us headed back to New Orleans East with our favorite staffer Alicia. She is in charge of all of the houses under construction in that neighborhood and the main office wants them all completed as soon as possible. Her supervisor hopes that now that “her crew” is back (that’s us), we will be able to fix the problems that other volunteers have caused.

We just learned today that many of the groups that come to help are not helpful at all. Alicia said that one college group (to remain nameless) spent their entire time dancing with each other and avoiding the tasks they were assigned. We mentioned having seen some of the high school students at our site yesterday sitting in the middle of the floor and hitting flies with their hammers as their way of passing the day. Alicia said that we had no idea how much we stand out or how well-regarded we are, even by the Habitat staffers who have never met us.

Thus, today we spent much of our time in New Orleans East taking things apart and trying to figure out how to put them back together. On one house, we discovered a two-inch tilt to the porch that made it nearly impossible to deal with the soffet over it in any normal way. We moved into problem-solving mode, realizing that we could not un-do all that had gone wrong on that porch and that it was just a matter of making decisions that were the best solutions based on what we faced. By tomorrow, that porch should be in much better shape.

Several of us worked on placing chain link fences, a move that is one of the last phases of any Habitat home’s construction. One of the fences that we laid out will help to guarantee that the home (Natasha’s purple house) will get a retaining wall that will help to prevent erosion on the low slope of her lot. We also put finishing touches on paint and trim jobs throughout the neighborhood, bringing a couple of the houses to completion in just a few short hours.

After a full Habitat work day, we again headed over to Rosie’s house. There we jumped on some of the jobs already in progress, including the placement of laminate flooring in the front room and both bedrooms of the house. We prepped the kitchen, bathroom and back entry for tile flooring that we think will be delivered tomorrow. We also got things ready to begin construction of a massive ramp out the back door and into the carport, so that Rosie’s roommate Janice will be able to get into and out of the house more easily while using her walker.

While we were at Rosie’s today, we were surprised to see more workers arrive. They had brought new siding for the exterior of Rosie’s house and they began to install it as soon as they arrived. Because of their work, Rosie is now the second house in the couple of blocks surrounding the intersection on which we normally work that has finally been liberated from the huge spray-painted “X” marked on the front of it by search and rescue teams back in September of 2005. As readers of our January blog already know, the first house to erase this symbol belongs to Sarah Mercadel, whose home we painted when we returned this January.

As we watched this huge transformation at Rosie’s house unfold right before our very eyes, many of us were quite overwhelmed. We clearly remember the first time that we walked into Rosie’s house on our first weekend in January 2006. We really couldn’t picture back then that the house would ever possibly look as beautiful as it looks now. Even when we were here two months ago, we completed mold abatement procedures on the decaying shell of her house and it seemed impossible to create something really nice from the skeleton that we were seeing back then.

But now things are really close to being better than ever at Rosie’s. We are eager to move as many things forward as we can in the next few days, before we head back to California at the end of our break. We imagine that she will be able to move into the house within the month. We just found out that her neighbor, Don, whose house we worked on in both of our Jan Term trips, will be moving in by April 30. Sarah, too, hopes to move into her house this month. Natasha should gain access to her new home in the month of April also.

We are very pleased to have played some small role in these families’ opportunity to reclaim their homes from the chaos of the storm. We are happy that their lives will soon brighten up. Still, we can see how many houses still look just like Rosie’s looked back in January 2006. We hope that the families whose houses those are can get the assistance that they need from local, state, and federal agencies. And we wonder what group of volunteers will come back again and again to some of those houses to make sure that progress is always being made. We wish it could be us. . .

____________

Justin, Brianna, Matt, Aaron and Soraya set to work raising and nailing trusses of the Habitat for Humanity house on Law Street.

The flock (including Habitat supervisor David in the green hat) descends upon a scrumptious treat...

. . . of crawfish! Down the road from the Law St. Habitat site there was a ribbon cutting ceremony for a construction company and as part of the celebration there was a crawfish boil. The organizers invited all of the Habitat for Humanity volunteers to dive in to a pile of shellfish and spices.

Overlooking the neighborhood around the Law St. site, Justin hammers down a truss.

Aaron intensely examines his work while contemplating his next move.

Combining forces with a group of framers from Maryland, the SMC bunch raises the sheathing for the gable.

Shane prepares to hammer in the sheer wall on the gable as Emily checks measurements to ensure that it is positioned properly.

Sarah takes a turn painting her security doors the same deep blue color that we painted her house trim back in January.

Soraya and Rosie share their love of art, smiling ear to ear.

Tommy drills down a piece of subflooring that will support a new tile floor in Rosie’s kitchen and bathroom.

Jed exhibits the harsh effect a 12-hour work day in the sun will have on one’s skin tone.

BREAK WEEK: Day Four

2007-04-02T21:11:00.000-07:00

April 2: Day Four, Break 2007

Yesterday's video never got posted. Here's one for both yesterday and today.

We finally have our entire crew today, as both Shane and Tommy have arrived. We hustled out early to get to Habitat for Humanity’s main headquarters at Musician’s Village in the Ninth Ward. There were hundreds of volunteers there, which was a beautiful sight to see. When our group first arrived in the Ninth Ward in January 2006, no one other than very needy returning evacuees was anywhere in sight. To now see a fully-developed structure for managing thousands of volunteers is a welcome change.

Our main Habitat contact, Alicia, doesn’t work on Mondays, so we went into the huge crowd and tried our luck at getting assigned to the numerous jobs being doled out today. At one point, we heard the announcer say that a roofing job was up for grabs and even though we could see that hundreds of volunteers were available, we knew we wanted that exact job. With a little fast-talking about our zeal and our experience, we got it.

Things moved slowly (for us, at least) as the staff at HH tried to get all of the volunteers steered to where they needed to go. As soon as we could, we kicked in our fabulous system of lifting trusses onto the house, with the assistance of some high school students from Cherry Hill, New Jersey. Once we got things going, we lifted 22 trusses onto a roof that was 18 or so feet off the ground in about an hour. The staffer at our site had predicted that this job would take most of the day.

We can’t quite explain why we love to work on roofs so much. Perhaps it’s the feeling that the roof is actually the part of the house that constitutes shelter, meaning that raising the roof makes the structure into an actual house. Perhaps it’s the gutsy set of moves it takes to walk the roofline, straddle the roof beams, and stand on tops of ladders holding and hoisting heavy loads. Whatever the explanation, this is a job that really calls out to our group.

Not all of our group could find such satisfying jobs at the Habitat site, so we split up and sent some of our people back to our favorite intersection in the Ninth Ward (Bartholomew and N. Claiborne). Both Sarah and Rosie have security bars on their homes, so we prepped and painted them today to renew their look.

We also started to lay down a brand new laminate floor in Rosie’s house. Once we got the hang of the job, it turned out that we were pretty good at it. The light started to fade before we could finish, but we are confident that we will finish on Tuesday.

Other jobs today included scrubbing the boxed possessions that we salvaged for Rosie back in January 2006 and prepping an outbuilding behind Red’s house for painting (his house is the one in which Rosie rode out the storm and the following week before being airlifted over the flood waters). Everyone just surveyed the situation and found a job that suited them to complete for the day.

The symbiosis of the group was really impressive. People shifted and changed throughout the day in the ways that the context demanded. Everyone’s spirits stayed high, even when someone was separated from the main group.

Tonight we cooked dinner in our volunteer housing home. We made tacos with all of the fixings, including a huge plate of very complex nachos that tasted even better because of the 11-hour day we put in today. We’ve been great at making everything click on our worksites, but we’ve been feeling a little weird away from work.

More specifically, we’ve had a strange relationship with this housing situation, because we have the happy dilemma of suffering from an abundance of personal space. We are so spread out in here and have so much ability to get away from immediate contact with each other that we are actually, truly, palpably uncomfortable with it. We spend all of our time when at “home” saying “Where is everybody?” and “What are we doing?”

Tonight, though, it was all of us gathered in and around the kitchen, sharing the jobs of cooking, eating, and cleaning up. We sat around for a long time and just told stories about today or other days. We got back into our best mode: “Everyone. All the time.”

We have felt lucky every day to be in New Orleans again, to have the time, energy, and ability to help, and to be able to say “yes” when our friends here ask for assistance. We see the light at the end of the tunnel for Rosie, Sarah, Don, and others we know and love here.

For the city itself, that light is still out of view. We wonder every day what will happen in the end. We believe that this city is worth saving and that no matter what official government agencies do or don’t do, this city will rise again. We have all gained so much here, learned so much here, loved so much here, and grown so much here that we can be certain that there is a special force that underpins the mysterious phenomenon that is the city of New Orleans.

May it rise . . . And soon.

__________________________________________

Lots and lots of volunteers were there when we arrived at Habitat for Humanity today. It's a nice thing to see, but we wonder what will happen when spring breaks are over.

For some reason, we are all getting dirtier than ever on this trip. Maybe it's because we're wearing shorts, maybe we are working harder than ever. No matter what the explanation, we are all helping each other; here, Matt takes action on Lindsay's dirty face.

Josh Verrips joins in with the group who went back to "our" neighborhood in the Ninth Ward.

Linzy focuses in on the job in Sarah's back yard.

Janeva takes the short cut inside the fence of the elementary school on whose steps we ate our lunch today.

Today we worked across the street from a school in the Ninth Ward. The condition of the school says a lot about the progress of the non-commercial parts of New Orleans.

Bitterness toward every government agency is often evident. This graffiti on an abandoned elementary school in the Ninth Ward comments on the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Debris removal crews deal with the massive pile from Rosie's second property.

Bree and Lisa Trigo work on the porch at Rosie's house to clean the salvaged items from January 2006.

Aaron, Shane, and Soraya survey the situation as they assist in the installation of Rosie's new laminate floors.

BREAK WEEK: Day Three

2007-04-01T21:12:00.000-07:00

April 1: Day Three, Break 2007

Lots and lots of hard work made up today the day (as usual). We worked so hard that we didn’t shoot a lot of video; still, we have something for you to watch so that you can get the hang of what we are doing. Click below to get the scoop.

Some of us started the day at Palm Sunday services at St. Stephen’s Church right across the street, while others got organized in our living quarters and/or went shopping for groceries. The availability of a refrigerator in our new place completely changes our NOLA diet from what we ate during January, as then all of our food had to be nonperishable. We bought bread and lunch meat and cheese and fruit and an actual gallon of milk!

We quickly headed out to the Ninth Ward when the chuchgoers returned because we knew that both Rosie and Sarah were waiting for us to arrive. At Rosie’s, we had already committed into gutting the second of her three consecutive houses on North Claiborne. Like some of our “clients” during January, Rosie fears that her properties will be seized by the government if she does not demonstrate progress in rebuilding them. Though no one really knows if this threat is real, enough people are concerned about it to increase the level of panic. Thus, with our labor today, Rosie believes that she has a credible case to protect her property if a real threat should arise.

We all feel like old pros at gutting now, so once we got our system going, we were a demolition machine. The January 2006 group had cleared this house, so the job today was to pull the walls and ceilings and bring the interior of the house down to the framing. Sledgehammers were flying, crowbars were swinging, and shovels were scooping almost all day long. By lunch the walls were completely gone so we took a quick break and then moved on to pull down the ceilings after we had eaten.

At the same time, Chris and Tim started today’s job at Sarah’s house, which involved sanding the wrought iron security doors and window coverings that she hopes we will repaint later this week. They flipped the doors in every possible direction and sanded and scraped them by hand, with power sanders, and with utility knives. After lunch, Kate also joined them as a full-time member of the sanding crew.

Sarah sat in her car right by the sanders all day long, talking, laughing, and telling them how much she has missed having all of us around. Sarah has a new haircut and color, so we all got to exclaim over the changes we could see.

Back at Rosie’s house, things started to slow down – not because the crew was working any less hard, but because we were getting to the finish work of pulling nails, sweeping even the spaces between the studs, and finishing the demolition of the edges of each room. We all even gathered around once the group decided to tear out a closet (even the framing of it) once we realized that it was not really supported by anything at the top. We gathered around because some of the women (Bree, Shawny, Emily, and Janeva) all got some sledgehammer lessons from Justin, Elijah, Jed, and others. We talked about all of the ways that one might hold and swing a sledgehammer and tested our theories by seeing which hits actually brought the studs to the ground.

Once we finished bringing out the closet, we had turned the entire space that had been a four-room house into one large room. Now Rosie and her contractors will have a much easier time completing the next steps: abating the mold in the house, replacing termite-damaged wood, bolstering the foundation, and then starting again to build walls, etc.

Even though we got back to our place somewhat late (after 7:00), we decided to get all of our energy together, take showers as quickly as we could, then head out to St. Bernard Parish to the Crawfish Festival. We left at about 8:00 knowing that the festival would close at 10:00. We sampled all kinds of crawfish foods, including our usual boiled crawfish, fried rice crawfish, eggplant with crawfish sauce, and crawfish beignets. We then walked the festival midway, which closely resembled a county fair.

We seriously hoped to find one of those sledgehammer challenges where you try to hit the button hard enough with a hammer to ring the bell at the top. With our strong crew, we expected that bell to ring and ring and ring. But, no luck: no such game at this festival. Elijah shot a few baskets at a couple of the booths and then a bunch of us paid a dollar each to see two-headed snakes and turtles, as well as albino versions of each. And even though we suspected that the feature attraction – a large two-headed rattlesnake – was no longer among the living (the other ones all clearly were alive), we had no regrets.

We had no regrets about spending a dollar on a crawly/slithery things freak show, none about hurrying madly to get to the Crawfish Festival, none about agreeing to gut Rosie’s next house on an otherwise sleepy Sunday, and none about spending our break week driving the streets of New Orleans again.

We’re happy here. We’re happy working. We’re happy together. And we’re happy to help. Lucky, lucky, lucky us.

_______________________________________________

Bryan gets a chance to reconnect with Sarah Mercadel and show off the grimy arms he earned while gutting a house around the corner in the Upper Ninth Ward.

Kate preps the sander for more work on Sarah's beautiful "Happy House."

Jack gets a chance to talk to Sarah Mercadel and catch up on all of the news of the Ninth Ward.

Chris and Tim headed up a contingent at Sarah's house that sanded her security bars and doors so that we can repaint them. Here the group gathers at the porch to check progress.

Three of the four Verrips men take a well-deserved break on Rosie's porch. Matt is sitting in for Justin in this shot.

Bryan helps to move some of Rosie's salvaged furniture back into the newly-emptied house.

Tim was sanding security doors at Sarah's house today. He got dirty too.

Tim got to reunite with some of his best NOLA friends: boiled crawfish!

Elijah took several turns trying to win prizes at the Crawfish Festival by shooting baskets. He didn't win any prizes.

BREAK WEEK: Day One/Two

2007-03-31T22:22:00.000-07:00

March 30/31: Day One/Two, Break 2007

We’re back! This trip marks SMC’s fourth trip to New Orleans since the storms of August 2005. Some of our group members (Chris, Justin, Jed, Elijah, and Shawny) have taken all four trips, meaning that they have spent over two full months in the last fourteen months (over 15% of their lives during that period!) in the hurricane-affected Gulf Coast region. Everyone else has been to New Orleans at least twice, many three times. Everyone on this trip was also here in January. We all feel like we just left New Orleans four days ago, though it has really been almost exactly two months. Bryan, Kate, and Matt agreed to head up a short video showing some of today’s events. Click below to watch what they produced.

We had a long day of traveling to get ourselves to New Orleans for our alternative spring break this year. Sixteen members of the group who spent Jan Term in New Orleans are here right now. We are fortunate to be joined by the Verrips brothers’ dad, Jack, and their younger brother Josh. On Sunday, another Jan Termer will join us, and on Monday, our final Jan Term traveler will arrive. Thus, we are a group of twenty.

The sixteen who are here right now left SMC at 8:30 on Friday morning to get to the San Jose airport (flights were cheaper from there than from San Francisco or Oakland). We then flew to Houston, where we loaded into two 12-passenger vans and drove six hours across to New Orleans, arriving at about 2:30 a.m. Flights to New Orleans were too heavily booked to accommodate a group of our size, so we had to find another way in.

We are lucky to have landed housing with Volunteers of America, who run a volunteer housing facility in the beautiful Uptown neighborhood. We have actual beds, all of which appear to be almost brand new. Some of us are sleeping in big rooms with seven people in them, while a few are in three person rooms. Unfortunately, we only got to spend about four hours in those beautiful new beds before we got up to head to our first day of work for this trip.

Happily, we got a call from our friend Alicia at Habitat for Humanity who told us that our assignment for the day was to return to a house where we worked during January. The house will soon be the home of our new friend Natasha Forthner and it is located in the very devastated area called New Orleans East.

As we drove toward Natasha’s house, we realized that it would almost be completed, as she expects to move into the home in April. When we saw a little patch of purple paint off in the distance down the road, we knew that we were getting close. Natasha had told us that she intended to paint her house purple and to find two purple chairs to place on the porch. Though the chairs are not yet on the porch (but they ARE purchased already), the house is almost ready for move-in.

It looks great inside, and we are all amazed that it seems even bigger with its sheetrocked walls than it did when it was just a framed-out structure of 2x4s. We got to see the roof that we raised now covered in shingles, we got to see the doors, windows, trim, and siding that we helped to install painted and finished, and we got a chance to work on some parts of the project that we hadn’t even imagined yet when we were here before.

All of the Verrips men got a particularly tough assignment: re-install doors that had already been framed out, as – quite unfortunately – there was a break-in at Natasha’s house-in-progress and all of the previously installed doors were stolen. Hanging doors is a pain-in-the-neck no matter what the circumstances, but it is really hard to put a new door into a casing that did not come with it originally. Of course, Jack, Chris, Justin, and Josh accomplished the task in record time.

Others were finishing paintjobs that were partially completed while still others worked on various parts of the trim in and around the house. Some folks went down the street and solved some paint problems at another Habitat house down the block. Another group went with our beloved long-term Habitat volunteer staffer Keith to put up a fence. In general, we were visiting almost all of the nine new homes in New Orleans East to do whatever we could to bring those jobs to completion.

It was a great treat for all of us to get to return to the scenes of some of our work two months ago. Still, the Habitat for Humanity work day ends before 3:00. Considering the levels of labor to which we have grown accustomed, working for a mere seven hours seems quite inadequate to us. So when we finished our jobs out in New Orleans East, we headed down to the Ninth Ward to do some more work for our friend Rosie, whose house was our first gutting job ever back in January 2006. We hope to visit the Ninth Ward every day, whether we work at Habitat on that particular day or not.

Today, we decided to pull down a very old and dilapidated shed behind the double lot that Rosie owns. It was full of lots of the kinds of things that one might store in a back shed, including tons of bottles, jars, and jugs, a small amount of furniture, a lot of low-tech appliances that hadn’t functioned for quite a few years, and a few oversized storage closets that were pretty big and sturdy. Another important item that the shed contained was a HUGE nest of HUGE spiders (allegedly harmless ones), the sight of which could send our most macho group members squealing and high-stepping across the yard running for their lives.

Once we had emptied one side of the shed of its contents (with Jack Verrips leading the charge), we decided that it was rickety enough for us to pull it down by hand. Though some of the structure was still sturdier than it seemed (requiring serious blows from the sledgehammer to disassemble it), we were right that we could tear the thing apart with our bare hands.

Every one of us joined into the system that included demolition, gathering of debris, and then an elaborate “bucket brigade” that stretched the length of the lot to deliver the contents of the destroyed building to the front curb. We were all sweating, some of us were bleeding (we’re all fine, though), and we could feel the collective energy flow through our group so that we functioned in almost total synchronicity. The whole experience was so exhilarating that we barely noticed the gathering thunderclouds that eventually dropped a downpour onto us just as we were about to finish clearing the entire yard.

We all scrambled onto the porch, watched the rain pour down, and smelled that unmistakable smell that comes off of hot pavement when it is hit with rain for the first time in weeks. We exclaimed over our great strength and unity and over our virtually tool-free triumph over the large outbuilding in Rosie’s yard. Rosie joined us and told us stories about the neighborhood, including the vision of a passing stranger (who looked like a “prophet,” according to Rosie) of a buried treasure beneath the very shed that we had just brought to the ground.

Once the rain abated, we realized that we were really tired. Too tired, in fact, to go to the crawfish festival that we had planned to attend this evening. Instead, we went to our place in Uptown, showered, and drove back to our January neighborhood: Algiers Point on the West Bank. There, we had dinner at The Dry Dock, our friendly neighborhood pub that served as our sanctuary on the rainiest days of January.

We worked for nine and a half hours today, having only had four hours of sleep last night. Strangely, we are ecstatic. In fact, we expect to work ten, eleven, or twelve hour days for the rest of the week, especially because we just realized that if we push ourselves to the absolute limit, we will manage to reach a collective 10,000 hours of direct hurricane relief labor over the course of all four of SMC’s trips.

Our only sadness is that we miss our other NOLA veterans. Whether you went in January 2006, January 2007, or break 2006, we have definitely talked about you and/or thought about you quite a bit since we arrived. We really, really, really, wish you were here. . .
____________________________________

We stretched our sixteen person contingent across two 12-passenger vans as we drove across to New Orleans from Houston, Texas. Here Bryan and Brianna make the most of the ride.

We were thrilled to return to the nearly-completed house that started one week before our arrival in New Orleans in January. The purple house in this shot is the one for which we raised the roof two months ago.

Emily and Matt help mix and pour concrete to support a chainlink fence at one of the nine Habitat for Humanity houses nearing completion in New Orleans East.

Emily sets the post for the new fence.

Soraya is joined by two neighborhood kids who wanted to help build the fence.

Kate and Janeva focus their attention on the front windows at Natasha's house, which will need to be resealed and repainted. They removed and replaced the old caulking to improve the quality of the paint job on the trim.

Natasha, the new homeowner of this Habitat for Humanity house, assists in the painting of the doors today.

Jack Verrips, the father of our infamous fellow travelers Chris and Justin, has volunteered his expertise for the during our our break week. He is smart enough to stay in a hotel instead of in our group living situation.

Rosie tells us stories on her porch as we wait out the end of the rain today.

Rosie's back shed was full of old glassware including jugs, jars, and these cool old green glass Coke bottles with "New Orleans" on the bottom.

Day Twenty-Two

2007-01-31T09:53:00.002-08:00

The Transformers documented our last day in NOLA. Click below to watch us as we go from our beloved New Orleans home to our California homes.

The sky looked threatening this morning, which worried us because we needed to pack up everything, tear down the tents, and get the Verrips brothers, Courtney, the truck and the trailer on the road by noon. We got up early and got right to work. Courtney and Emily got up even earlier and made their way to Café du Monde for beignets for all of us. Even before they arrived back home, we had already pulled down the walls of the tents and had started to pack away pots and pans, tools and first aid supplies. We all struggled as we watched our world dissolve away into an empty lot again. We might have had even more trouble, but we were forced to hurry to beat the rain.

As we bid the truck crew farewell (just before noon, as we planned), the rain started to fall. There were still a few random items floating out in the field, so we scurried madly to tuck them away. We have leftover food to our friend Jean’s Girl Scout troop and to the New Home Ministries church that we visited last Sunday. We gave extra tools and hard hats to Catholic Charities to help them to stock up for the rebuilding efforts that are beginning in earnest right now. (They will store them in the new building that will go up next week in the space where we demolished the dilapidated food bank.)

We took one more spin through the French Quarter, mostly trying to grab our last bites of crawfish or alligator and seeking souvenirs for ourselves and for some of you who are reading this page. We were pretty quiet in the bus as we approached the airport, as we knew that it was all coming to an end. We said goodbye to Leo and sent him off on his fourteen or so hour trip back to Indiana.

While on the plane, we worked on our last journal entries or sat with group members and sorted out plans for our final projects. Each group will produce three, with one for public presentation on February 15th at 7:00 in the Soda Center at Saint Mary’s College. (Please join us!) The others will be posted on this website some time after that.

As we flew, we had a chance to review the stats of our trip. It seems that we completed about 3,800 hours of manual labor, with 15 of our 22 days plagued by rain. We worked on a total of 15 houses, and different people in the group performed the following tasks over the course of the month: roofing, siding, walls, windows, doors, framing, drywall/texturing, floor refinishing, metal restoration, dryrot repair, painting, trim work, mold remediation, salvage work, gutting, demolition, landscape work, and pressure washing. We also restored two garden spaces, including one full-scale permaculture site. At the gardens, we cleared brush, removed limbs, removed debris, dredged a bioswale, planted trees, transplanted vegetation, turned compost, and laid pathways. (We also wrestled in the mud, but that doesn’t count toward our service hours . . .)

We are tired. We need sleep. But we are also rejuvenated. And we will always remember that the most important work we can still do is to spread the word about how great the need in New Orleans still is, even though seventeen months have passed since the storm. If you know one of us, help us to readjust. Listen to our stories, watch our videos, give us hugs, and give us a break if we don’t own any more clean socks. More than anything, remember the people of New Orleans and the rest of the Gulf Coast. Thanks for listening.

Day Twenty-One

2007-01-29T17:07:00.000-08:00

The ONEders kept track of things today, our last work day in NOLA. The video takes a look at the memories and experiences made over the last three weeks. Click below to see what they captured.

Shane tried to start a movement to say that we should get up late today (7:00!) instead of 6:00. We thought we needed to move out early no matter what, as we HAD to finish painting Sarah’s Happy House today. We had decided to arrive at Sarah’s at 8:00 a.m. so that we could definitely, definitely get the job done. Jed was our appointed supervisor on this last day, so he set our time table. Shane tried to get us to agree to move faster than our usual two-hour ramp-up time so that we could sleep later. No one joined his movement, because people actually WANTED to spend two hours getting ready to go.

Shawny got up at 6:00 and found a clear day awaiting us, with only one small catch: it was 28 degrees out! She woke up Jed and pointed out that it was going to be too cold to paint at 8:00, so they decided to let people sleep for at least another hour. An hour later, things had changed. The temperature was 28.5 degrees. We were worried.

Still, the sun was starting to shine through and we assumed that things would warm up. Even at almost 9:00 it was still only 36 degrees, but we forged ahead anyway. Shawny’s sister had left us a bunch of hand and foot warmers, and today was the day to use them. We arrived in the Ninth Ward to discover that there was not quite enough paint left for each of us to take what we needed. Thus, we were at an immediate standstill.

Sarah was right there waiting and agreed to run after more paint. Instead, Chris and Shane went, and we all waited patiently for the paint and for the warm-up. Both arrived at about the same time. We tore into the job madly at that moment with Sarah standing by doing quality control. We discovered that we had been quite sloppy in a number of places, making the touch-up job very daunting. We actually got out tiny little water color brushes to get the details just right on all of the lines between the walls and trim. Jed ran around madly trying to keep the job flowing efficiently. (He succeeded.)

When we broke for lunch, Sarah had a surprise for us. Not only had she made barbecued chicken and green peas for us, but also she made a new team favorite: sweet potato pie. Her son had a tow truck parked in front of her house, so we used it to hold our first-ever flatbed picnic. By then, the sun was shining, and even though the temperatures were still pretty chilly, we felt great.

We kicked back in after lunch, sharing ladders to reach the high parts, laughing hysterically even when things weren’t hilariously funny, and paying close attention to every little detail on the paint job. We knew that good enough wasn’t good enough, so we really tried to get it perfect. We got close.

It took us all the way up to dusk to get the whole job done. Sarah was so thrilled that it practically lifted us off the ground. To boost our spirits even more, Sarah us a delicious batch of Pralines, which was a wonderful surprise. Different people took pictures with Sarah in front of the house, including group shots of most of the teams.

We all looked at the house when it was completely painted and noticed something for the first time. Sarah’s was the only house in sight that no longer had the markings of the search and rescue teams from September 2005 spray-painted on its front. Everyone’s house has a series of symbols on it, telling who searched it, when, and -- in barely-decipherable and somewhat eerie numbers -- what they found. Sarah’s house was marked when we arrived, but our presence and our efforts helped her to turn that corner and to start a new era for her Bartholomew Street home. We hadn’t really noticed how important this change is (or how prominent those markings on the other houses are) until we were done.

Sarah is incredibly proud of her “new” house, especially of the colors that she chose. Some of us told her that our mothers or other supporters had praised her house and she went through and asked us one by one what our mothers had said about it. Different neighbors came from all over the area to tell us that they would miss us when we go. Most of them were people we had met over the course of the month, but others were brand new to us. Even though we hadn’t been introduced, they had been following our progress and they knew that we were “those California college kids” who were working in the Ninth.

We forgot to mention yesterday that when we were painting, a tour bus came by that was taking visitors through the disaster zone. They slowed down as they approached Sarah’s house (and us) and the whole group moved to the windows on our side and started taking pictures. We had long discussions about what we thought of those tours/tourists, with mixed emotions about what good they might be doing. Today we noticed several more such buses, so maybe they have been passing all month long without us really noticing.

At the end of the evening, we painted Sarah’frontporch mailbox in the colors of her house and Kate did a beautiful job of repainting the house number on it. She stood and held it and even had us take pictures of her with it. We’re very proud that Sarah’s house is now marked by people who love her and that all it tells passersby is her address.

Tonight we all went into the French Quarter together for a wonderful dinner at The Chartres House. We talked about going into town and just taking time for ourselves, but we all agreed that we wanted to stay together. Even when we finished dinner, we decided to move as one through the Quarter. We have an early morning tomorrow, as the Verrips brothers need to start their long drive home. Courtney has decided to join them to help them with the trip. Knowing all of this, we gave up on our night on the town, in favor of being back at our NOLA “home.”

Packing up will be a long process, but we are ready to head for home. We miss the people who are reading these pages and we are eager to get some serious sleep. We are leaving some ruined clothes behind, but we are bringing lifelong memories and lifelong friendships home in their place.

We invite you again to join us on Thursday, February 15th for our multimedia presentations on the Saint Mary’s College campus in the Soda Center at 7:00 p.m. We’ll write tomorrow about our trip home, then maybe one more time about our reflections on our experience. Thanks again for your interest and support.

Soraya finds herself in a tight spot as she finishes up painting. She spent most of the day on the roof committed to making it look like a professional had done it.

Emily and Justin spent much of their time on the roof adding the finishing touches to Sarah's house!

Elijah was the first visitor to the "Pee, Pee, Tee, Pee Salon" where he got his hair "did" by the fabulous Shawny Anderson.

As we commute from Algiers Point to the Ninth Ward we pass the Superdome, and we remember the history that took place at the dome and its significance to the city.

Chris and Emily take a quick break from lunch to smile for the camera.

Vince and Linzy paint below the colorful rainbow at Sarah’s beautiful home in the upper ninth ward.

Lisa and Lauren joined us for most of the afternoon. Don also came over to say goodbye and lend a hand.

Kelly, Vince, and Linzy prepare our assortment of lunchtime treats. Today we had barbequed chicken made by Sarah, MRE’s, macaroni, and homemade sweet potato pie.

Linzy and Feke meticulously paint the details on the garage. At the end of the day such careful attention to all the details of the house paid off.

Soraya paints on her back (Michelangelo style) while Megan, Juan, and Kate work on perfecting the front porch.

The final job we completed at Sarah's house was painting the mailbox. Here we see Kate painting the mailbox the same bright colors as the house!

At the end of the day, the Knucklebusters pause for a photo with Sarah Mercadell. It has been a pleasure, blessing, and honor to be able to work on her house during our trip.

At the end of the day the Transformers pose with Sarah and her neighbor from across the street, Red. We will miss both of them and wish them all the best with their rebuilding.

The group poses for one last shot in front of Sarah's house! After three weeks of hard work, it was a good feeling to celebrate the completion of Sarah's newly painted home.

Day Twenty

2007-01-28T22:28:00.000-08:00

The Knucklebusters had the camera today. Click below to see how our Sunday went.

We woke up to an overcast morning with big dark clouds on the horizon threatening more rain. We had plans to go to our neighborhood southern Baptist Church, having been invited by Miss Nikki, whom Courtney met at the Laundromat around the corner. Miss Nikki has two daughters who are WNBA players, one of whom is in California, so when she heard about the group from California for whom Courtney was washing clothes, she wanted to learn more. She invited us to come to her church this morning at either 8:00 a.m. or 10:00 a.m. We decided last night that if it looked like a clear day, we would go to the 8:00 service so that we could get to work on Sarah’s paint job. If it looked like rain, we decided that we would stay in bed and get a later start on the day. Shawny and Courtney got up early and decided that it looked like rain.

We all started moving around at about 8:00 and found that Tim had already been up for an hour peeling shrimp that was left over from last night. He was imagining shrimp omelets for breakfast, but he had forgotten that we are out of dehydrated eggs. Thus, Shawny and Justin made a run for eggs (with a lot of king cake on the side). When they went into the grocery store, the sky was dark and foreboding. When they came out a few minutes later, the sky was blue and clear. The blue sky held for the rest of the day.

We gorged on eggs, king cake, and orange drink (pronounced “drenk”) and still made it to the 10:00 service at New Home Ministries. When we entered the church, we were immediately hugged and greeted warmly by each person we encountered. The music was already jamming, with a choir rocking out at the front of the sanctuary. We got two whole rows of seats about ten rows back and we hardly noticed at first that the entire large room filled to the brim just a few minutes later.

The music flowed from one piece to another, one soloist to another, one speaker to another, with all of us on our feet clapping, swaying, and singing (when we could figure out the words). The singing was incredible, as was the flow of the accompaniment, including electric bass, keyboards, and percussion. Every once in awhile it seemed clear that a saxophone, trumpet, or clarinet had joined in, though there was no such instrument in the room. One tentative soloist began slightly out of key, and the congregation cheered and lauded him, effectively drawing a better solo from him by the end.

Joy flowed in the room, especially through the jubilant harmonies of the congregation and the choir. People jumped up and cheered during songs and during the sermon, so much so that an observer might have thought that an athletic event was unfolding in front of a very well-dressed set of sports fans. And these people WERE well-dressed. Many women wore hats with feathers, fur, satin ribbons, rhinestones, or silver accessories on them and all of the men wore sharp suits in an array of colors. We looked pretty goofy in the midst of them in our jeans and camp shoes, but they never let us feel out of place.

At one point in the service, Miss Nikki (her last name is Johnson, just for the record) whispered into the pastor’s ear and he called Courtney to the front of the church. She joined him at the altar and he asked her to describe our group. She told them that we were college students doing relief work and she talked briefly about the fact that many of us had been there last January as well. She told them that we felt very honored and privileged to be asked to join them in worship, and they responded with a big long standing ovation for us all.

Once the service ended, it took awhile for us to leave because so many people wanted to hug us, thank us, tell us how beautiful we are, offer us food, etc. We felt pretty rejuvenated as we walked in the sunshine back to camp. A few people had stayed behind and we were thrilled to learn that they had washed the muddy and wet clothes from our last two gardening excursions AND they had cleaned out the bus. We sorted laundry out on our finally-dry lawn and headed off to the Ninth Ward to finish some jobs for Rosie, Sarah, and Don. We have been thwarted in finishing most of these jobs by the rain and continuing cold weather so we were eager to make some progress.

One crew finished Don’s floors and did some trim work. One crew sanded Rosie’s security bars so that they can be repainted soon. Everyone else worked on Sarah’s paint job. We discovered a few sloppy places on Sarah’s house that we needed to re-do, and there are a few random places that haven’t seen any of the new paint yet. Monday, our last day on the job in NOLA, we will start early on Sarah’s house and we won’t leave until it is finished.

Tonight we had a special dinner treat (again!). We went out to Lisa Trigo’s house in Destrehan where Rosie had left us four gallons of gumbo, a dozen or so loaves of French bread, bottle upon bottle of our beloved crème soda (known as “red drink”) and a really great king cake. They also had guests from the bayou – two sisters who were born and raised in the real live bayou about 35 miles southeast of New Orleans. Annette Bourgeois and Julie Sapia run “heritage tours” in Cajun country called “Angel Tours, Etc.” They helped us to understand some of the finer points of Louisiana culture, geography, and topography, including the fact that our course title (“Bringing Back the Bayou”) is totally illogical, as we have been nowhere near a bayou in any of our actual work. They told us some Cajun jokes like the ones that Lisa has been posting to our list every night so we felt like we were really in the know on that particular part of local culture.

We stayed later than we should have, partially because groups were doing last-minute interviews with Lisa and other guests at the house and partially because the Trigos are just plain nice people that we like to be around. They sent us home with leftover French bread and a box of grits that we can make for breakfast.

We feel very fortunate to have so many people in our Louisiana family. Along with the Trigos, we have a couple of blocks on North Claiborne and Bartholomew where we know someone in every house. We have our Chalmette and Violet friends, though we might now have to start calling them our Slidell friends. We have Courtney’s actual family members. We have Parkway Partners and Catholic Charities. We have Natasha and Alicia, both of whom we met through Habitat for Humanity. We have Yvette and her mother Sandra. We have Macon, our favorite gardener. We have our neighbors in Algiers and the members of the New Home Ministries congregation. We have the students and administrators of the Algiers Charter Schools and we have the owner of the land on which we set up our NOLA world: Eddie Conrad of Riverbarge Excursions.

We will miss Louisiana when we leave, and we have every reason to believe that Louisiana will miss us – and our beautiful funky bus – too.

Rachel and Linzy sand the security bars on Rosie’s windows so they can eventually be resurfaced and repainted. This job resulted in most of the sanders having brown rust freckles.

As the end of our time in NOLA draws near, we took a moment to appreciate our moving home while parked near our favorite neighborhood in the Upper Ninth.

Emily also helps in the sanding by tackling the intricate bars on the front door. The sign on the door indicates that Catholic Charities has provided assistance in the rebuilding of Rosie’s house. These signs are sporadic throughout the city, but are nonetheless a sign of hope.

The bright colors of Sarah and her neighbor’s house rub off on Bryan as he gets excited to finish.

Most of us had never seen the above grown cemeteries we’ve grown so accustomed to in New Orleans. Tonight we learned that the tombs are placed above ground not only because the city is below sea level but also as a tradition carried on from France.

The state of our bus this morning. Not to worry parents, we do clean up occasionally. As some chose to attend a Southern Baptist church service, others stayed and cleaned up so that the bus looked almost as good as new…almost.

Laundry time! Special thanks to Kellie and Rachel for doing our muddy, rain-soaked laundry from the last couple of messy jobs. You rock our socks! (Pants, shirts, jackets and unmentionables too!)

Linzy, Lindsay, and Janeva all meticulously sand the iron burglar bars of Rosie’s house to prepare them for some freshening up. These three used small rectangles of sandpaper to smooth out the bars.

Here’s a good look at the contrast between a corroded portion of ironwork on the left and the sanded down portion on the right.

Tim sits down with Julie Sapia, a genuine Cajun from the LaFourche Bayou. She and her sister Annette Bourgeois joined us at Lisa’s house for shrimp gumbo and gave a fascinating presentation on Cajun history and culture in traditional dress complete with bonnets made from their grandmother’s patterns. They can trace their Bourgeois family history back to the 1700s and an ancestor who immigrated from France to Nova Scotia, Canada to Louisiana.

Soraya receives more blue paint from Jed, who holds her ladder attentively. Soraya has become quite the expert painter, especially since height does not phase her skills.

Look at that color and new blue trim! The crew tries to complete Sarah’s house as quickly as possible, but we’ll be returning tomorrow. Can you find Tommy?

This fabulous duo are in the process of painting Sarah’s rafters.

Feke shows off Emily’s new makeover: blue paint lipstick. As you can see, Emily doesn’t mind the taste. Work it girl!

Everyone all the time can be seen here. We had a late start on Sarah’s house but we got to work right away. At the end of the day we were all rewarded with homemade pralines. Everyone enjoyed the special treat.

Before we came to NOLA Shawny emphasized the importance of perfection that should go into someone’s home. Today we lived by that standard. Bree, along with others used small ½ “ paint brushes to touch up all of the small blemishes.

Shawny assisted us with the painting today. The majority of the group had the common goal of finishing the painting job at Sarah’s house. There are still a few touch ups that need to be done tomorrow.

J. Fed holds the ladder as Soraya paints the upper trim of the house.

Today, Kellie, Janeva, Linzey Rachel, and Tommy did over 100 lbs of laundry while the rest of the group enjoyed the morning at a local church. Sorting the laundry was more difficult than the wash, drying, and folding process. This was the first time that everyone’s everything was washed together. It was a race to the finish, who could grab their clothes first. Kellie was the winner by 1 hour. Those who did not claim their clothes will have to dig through the trash at the end of the evening.