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. . .
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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.
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 . . .
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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.
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. . .
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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.
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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
From January 8-29, 2008, 25 students, 3 alums, one professor, and one brave bus driver will live and work in New Orleans, Louisiana, providing direct hurricane relief to people affected by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita and the floods that followed. Check in daily for: quick video notebooks, still photos of what we are seeing and doing, and written accounts of what's it like to be in the hurricane-affected areas.
