BREAK WEEK: Day Three

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

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

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

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

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.