My Mississippi Trip
Here is something of a blow-by-blow of my trip to Mississippi, for those of you who were curious about how it went. It's pretty long, and by "pretty," I mean "even Kristen would use a cut." In fact, let me know if you read through the whole thing because it'll make me feel good. The trip was definitely a mixed bag, but read and find out for yourself.
Day 1- Friday, 16 December 2005
We left around 11 or so in the morning, an ice storm having prevented us from leaving at the original 8 am time. For those of us who procrastinate a lot, this was a blessing. The trip was sponsored by Tau Beta Pi, the engineering honor fraternity, and the person heading it up was this guy Cengiz (pronounced Jengis), who is the service chair. We had, at our peak, around 65 people, and drove down in six vans. Cengiz decided to go all cutesy on us and split up people he knew knew each other, meaning that Sherri and I were put in seperate vans. However, the trip down was 15 hours, so it gave plenty of time to make friends (or enemies) with the people in your van. I was in van four, we got along really well. I would say the highlight of the trip was when I really needed to use the restroom, so I went on one of the walkie talkies and said, "This is Sherri Cook in Van 5, and we need to take a bathroom break." Sherri responded, "Very funny, Corianne in Van 4." Of course, no one knew who we were at that point, but I was still really embarassed that I stopped all 60 of us for me. So, we all pulled into this really sketchy gas station in Alabama. The driver of our van at the time, Mike, pulled up ahead of everyone so that I could get to the bathroom first. I didn't want anyone to be able to see me, so I pulled up the hood of my solid black hoodie and took off running for the bathroom. However, I hate it when I look like I'm only going into a gas station to use the bathroom, so when I got to the door, I casually walked around the back of the store. At that point, Sherri came sprinting in from HER van to beat me to the bathroom, so I RAN to the bathroom and we fought over it, and I won. The gas station guy seemed a little ticked off when we were followed by 58 other college students, so I went and bought some candy, at which point I realized that his cash register was behind BULLET PROOF GLASS. When I got outside, I took a look outside and realized how sketchy this place really was, at which point a police car pulled up. Oops. We are all pretty sure they thought I was going to rob the gas station. I'm pretty sure that is the point where people began to figure out who Sherri and I were. We arrived at around three in the morning. Through some bizarre connection involving a Baptist priest and a VT alumnus, we were staying at the Keesler Air Force Base in some of the new dorms. Roommates were random, and mine was not there. I found out later she would be coming Sunday night.
Day 2- Saturday, 17 December 2005
We met at 7 AM to go to the Baptist church which would be providing our meals for the week. Our job for the day was in the town of Bay Saint Louis, about 45 minutes away. We were going to help rebuild a playground. When we had arrived earlier that morning, it was dark, so there wasn't much to see. One thing I noticed was that as you approached the Southern Gulf area, there were lots full of trailers and pre-fab houses for sale. Sure enough, with daylight, we could see that the pre-fabricated house industry definitely recieved a boost from Katrina. For the most part, the Gulf Port/Biloxi area is up and running. Most businesses have reopened, and people have come back, but everything still bears the mark of the hurricane. This was one of the cases where there was literally a "wrong side of the tracks." When the gulf came up with the storm surge, houses on the gulf side of the railroad tracks going through town were flooded, while those on the other side were "safe." The tracks were just high enough to break the flood. So, on side you had homes with blue tarps for roofs and fallen trees, while on the other side you had piles of rubble. Anyway, BSL. A company called Kaboom was undertaking a mission to rebuild all the playgrounds in the areas affected by Katrina. BSL was the first county seat in Miss., so it is a very pretty, fairly well-off (read: white) town. Almost the entire community had turned out to help rebuild the playground, along with other volunteers from all over. There was even a choir that came down from New York to sing carols to the volunteers. Kaboom. (Slight sidebar: I'm sorry, but that was really pointless. They should have just sent volunteers down. Sure songs boost morale, but so many of these people don't need songs. They need major help. It's heartbreaking. But enough of that.) They had cameramen out there and everything, and we had delicious jumbalaya (excuse my spelling) that the mayor had made. Overall, a heartwarming event. Of course, my inner cynic was wondering why we were working on a playground when there were homes falling down, but you help where you can. I am proud to say that the onslaught of Tech students helped them to finish well ahead of schedule, so we packed into our vans with the promise of more work in Forest Heights, where we were to be working for the majority of the week. Well, they weren't expecting us until Monday, so no one was really ready for us. We pretty much sat in the vans for two hours while it rained outside. The most memorable part of this was an radio promo for the station- "[station name and call number here], rocking FEMA trailers all along the southern Gulf coast." We were shocked, but really it reflects the general attitude towards the hurricane. People have begun to see the hurricane as more of a pesky inconvenience (oh that silly hurricane! blew away my house, that pest!) than a life-destroying horror. I think they had to have that attitude, but you know how it goes. It's a defense mechanism. Anyhoo, after that we went to one of the social workers' for dinner and then headed to Wal Mart, which was full of adventures in itself. Ah Wal Mart. How I love thee.
Day 3- Sunday, 18 December 2005
Sunday in the Deep South is definitely a day of rest, so we had the day to hang around and get to know each other better. The church had invited us to a service, but (and don't tell my parents!) I didn't go. Baptist services go on for like six hours, and I can barely make it through a one hour service. I don't know the Lord's Prayer, so I always feel awkward just mumbling it, and I figure six hours of that was more than I could handle. The bunch of us who didn't go went off in search of breakfast, and ended up getting lunch. We called ourselves the "Heathen Breakfast Van." After that, we lounged around waiting for the church crew to get back. I rendered myself useless for the next day by chasing the vans as they pulled into the parking lot and then playing football. My roommate showed up that night, with this guy that Sherri and I recognized as an amazing guitar player from the weekly blues jam. They weren't "together" but they were together and seemed "together." My roommate was really sweet though. She woke up really early and put on makeup every morning. I'm not sure if I admire her or despise her for that.
Day 4- Monday, 19 December 2005
Monday was our first day of "real" work. We were divided into three groups. One went back to BSL, one went to help clean up the beach (pointless), and the third (mine) to Forest Heights. Now, here are two critical background facts.
1) Forest Heights is a very poor black community. It was the first place in Miss (maybe the US?) where African Americans could buy their own homes. At one time it was prospherous, but went downhill in the 70s/80s. Several social workers and community leaders are trying to bring it back to what it once was, using the hurricane (and the hurrican volunteers) as a way to clean it up better than it was before. It was flooded with about four feet of water all the way through, so most structures were standing.
2) We were highly unorganized. We had way too many people for the amount of work, and we had way too much downtime. For this reason, a lot of people were left being "on call" at the church, or going to "clean up the beach." I think Cengiz was able to plan things better as the week progressed, but many of us were asking, "How the hell is he an engineer?"
The first thing we were sent to do was to clean up trash along side the road and the railroad tracks. There was an overwhelming amount of trash, not all of it from the hurricane. In fact, I would say that most of it had nothing to do with the hurricane, and as one person pointed out, we were probably lucky that the hurricane had come through and washed away most of it. Most of the trash was alcohol bottles. They called out a camera and crew to film us picked up trash. At this point, Sherri and I got very, very skeptical. I know this sounds cynical, and maybe we are just jaded people, but we felt like we were being used for the community cause. I don't mind this too much, it's just that I went down there to help with hurricane stuff, not to be used for some political deal. And yes, it's very political. The town has wanted to develope Forest Heights and Turkey Creek (more on that later) as well as the surrounding wetlands for more commercial/industrial use, so several people have been working hard to make that as difficult as possible. Ergo, we were being used as political pawns for the conservation of the neighborhood. I don't have a problem with this, I just have a problem that no one ever openly admitted it. But yeah, maybe I'm just cynical. After this, we went to an old woman's house where we pushed some boxes under a table for her (so the drywallers could get in) and raked her yard all while avoiding her psycho dog. It was at this point that I requested that everyone call me Miss Allocated-Resource. Then, we were sent to another home to sort the rubble pile of an old woman with Alzheimer's. A note on rubble piles: Every yard had a pile of debris, drywall, clothes, broken branches, branches, boards, dishes, etc. to be picked up by the state. We went ahead and sorted the piles and moved them to the edge of the road, out of the yard, to facilitate pickup. We probably had 20 bags of trash when we found out that the state would not pick up anything that was bagged. The social worker said she'd take care of it, but who knows what that means. After this, we broke for lunch, where we found out they needed help in a neighborhood called Turkey Creek. Like Forest Heights, it's a traditionally black community, very historical and very poor, only more flooded. Five of us went over there, forming our core group of Sherri, Thomas, Jordan, Kyle, and myself. Our community liason was a man named Derrick who is on sabbatical from teaching at Boston College, where he teaches the history of civil rights or something like that. He's a very savvy guy. And holy cow my fingers are falling off here. I'm assuming your eyeballs are falling out. At any rate, the funniest part of this is that all the guys kept calling Sherri and me "girls" until Sherri shouted at them to cut it out, so they started calling us ladies and I told them we weren't ladies. We told them to call us comrades, so we all call each other comrade, which stuck the whole week.
Day 5- Tuesday, 20 December 2005
We went back to the same house where we were before, except with the additions of Sade (pronounced Char-day), Ebony (called E-bone), and Andrew (and his chainsaw), plus this guy Devon who is the son of one of the social workers. Devon was really annoying because he would hack anything with the chainsaw and insisted on carrying really heavy things by himself. We called Sade "Chardonnay" because she whined so much and she left halfway through the day. We spend the entire day working at the house. A large tree branch (about the size of a normal tree) had fallen, so we cut up some of that. We also cleaned out a lot of stuff from their yard which had been there already. We worked entirely through Derrick, and never really met the people who lived there (they mostly stayed in their FEMA trailer). This is another case where I have mixed feelings. I'm happy to have helped these people, but I went down for hurricane relief, not yardwork. So much of the junk we were clearing out of the yard was there before, but what else were we to do? It's hypocritical to deny help, but can't they care for their own lawn? I have to admit this trip was good at popping my suburbian bubble.
Day 6- Wednesday, 21 December 2005
We found out in the morning that Kyle and Ebony had been switched out and Leah, Sade, Shao, and Aaron had been switched in. The running joke was that our van had the highest turnover rate of any other van (mainly because we were the smalled work group, so we noticed such switches). The first part of the morning was spent cleaning the yard of a historical building that was to become the new community center. We spent most of the day at Derrick's mother's house. We sorted her rubble pile and did more yard work. Like before, a lot of the yard stuff was there before the hurricane. Sade spent about an hour sitting around on her cell phone. Later in the day she informed us that she didn't come to do "yard work" and that she would be asking to transfer groups. There were some volunteers from Mary Wash next door, that was pretty cool. I was getting frustrated again for not doing "hurricane" work, when Derrick's mother, Miss Lettie, called us all over and tearfully thanked us for all we had done. She and her 92 year-old husband had been flooded up to their chests when a neighbor rowed them to safety on an inflatable mattress. Her husband had a stroke, and had to be taken to Florida. He died a few weeks later of pneumonia. She had lost her home, her posessions, and her husband all in a few months, so us cleaning out her yard for her "helped her back on her feet" as she said. She said she'd never forget us, and that's probably the only time on the trip that I felt that maybe I had made a difference.
Day 7- Thursday, 22 December 2005
Sade was out and Ebony was in. We spent a good part of the day making fun of Chardonnay and her wine. Sorry, we were an immature bunch. Initially we moved some stuff around Derrick's house to make it easier for him to renovate. He took us inside and showed us his office(s), where all of his plans for the community vitalization were. It was at this point that it hit me that I wasn't as cynical as I thought--it really was a highly political operation that we were involved in. The main tactic that he was using was to get as many homes as possible on the historic register, making it harder to rezone. Another thing he was doing was buying houses, refurbishing them, and then donating them back to the community. This guy is incredibly savvy and knowledgeable...we definitely underrated him. This is one of those gray areas where I am not sure what I think about the whole thing. I'm happy to help rebuild their community, but I didn't come down to do that. There's a line between their goals and hurricane relief, and they did their best to drag us over it or simply blur it out--I can't tell which. Anyway, he had us partially demolishing/salavaging an old house. We came to find out that a) it had been abandoned for some time, b) he didn't own it, and c) what we were doing was very illegal. Part a) ticks me off because there is really no way you could twist that around to hurricane relief. It was blatantly over the line. Parts b) and c) tick me off because he was probably planning to buy it, so we were directly aiding him, and he specifically said that if we got caught, we were on our own. Of course, all the idealistic morons in our group did not pick up on that, and Sherri and I were mildly freaked out. The discovery of asbestos somewhat dampened the ardor of the group, and all of the girls in the group went across the street and started (gasp) picking up trash. Much to our relief, we had to meet at one for a "Trash Blitz." The idea of the Trash Blitz is that all 65 of us would show up at these apartment projects and pick up the literal blanket of trash covering the area. When we got there, there were about 6 people there, one of whom we gleefully noted was Sade. We got started on the playground. Everything was covered in shingles because the roofs had been blown off during the storm. What wasn't covered in shingles was covered in broken glass--from alcohol bottles. The story of the complex was that no one brought them food or water for several days after the storm. Finally they hijacked a bread truck, so the government sent them food. Then the landloard informed them that they weren't being evicted, but had to leave. The landlord was taken away/run off, and there were about 65 people left living there. The other group left pretty soon after our arrival, so it was down to eight of us trying to clean a mile square of shingles, glass, clothes, drywall, and other trash. We probably had a hundred trash bags, and only got about three quarters of one courtyard and the playground finished. One old drunk man called Mr. Gene came out and helped us for a bit, and towards the end Ebony made friends with some little kids, and she encouraged them to take the initiative to clean up some on their own. Overall, it was very disheartening, especially when we drove back along the road we had worked so hard to clean the first day and it was already covered in trash. This was one of those times where it seemed that all we had done was pointless.
Day 8- Friday, 23 December 2005
We met at the vans at 5:45 AM to drive back. We went back in our original vans. The nice part was, since we knew everyone in the vans, it wasn't awkward if we fell asleep on each others' shoulders. We got back to Tech about midnight. Sherri and I left for her house in Winchester shortly thereafter, and got there at 4 AM. We slept until 2 in the afternoon, and my rather disgruntled dad came and picked me up, and I was dragged along for his last minute Christmas shopping so I got home close to 7 PM.
This is incredibly long, and I didn't cover so many things. There is so much more to the story, I hardly told about the people, or even the jobs. I can hardly describe the destruction that I saw, or explain the weird juxtaposition of normal life and devastation. Basically, ask me and I will tell. As for now, that is that.
Day 1- Friday, 16 December 2005
We left around 11 or so in the morning, an ice storm having prevented us from leaving at the original 8 am time. For those of us who procrastinate a lot, this was a blessing. The trip was sponsored by Tau Beta Pi, the engineering honor fraternity, and the person heading it up was this guy Cengiz (pronounced Jengis), who is the service chair. We had, at our peak, around 65 people, and drove down in six vans. Cengiz decided to go all cutesy on us and split up people he knew knew each other, meaning that Sherri and I were put in seperate vans. However, the trip down was 15 hours, so it gave plenty of time to make friends (or enemies) with the people in your van. I was in van four, we got along really well. I would say the highlight of the trip was when I really needed to use the restroom, so I went on one of the walkie talkies and said, "This is Sherri Cook in Van 5, and we need to take a bathroom break." Sherri responded, "Very funny, Corianne in Van 4." Of course, no one knew who we were at that point, but I was still really embarassed that I stopped all 60 of us for me. So, we all pulled into this really sketchy gas station in Alabama. The driver of our van at the time, Mike, pulled up ahead of everyone so that I could get to the bathroom first. I didn't want anyone to be able to see me, so I pulled up the hood of my solid black hoodie and took off running for the bathroom. However, I hate it when I look like I'm only going into a gas station to use the bathroom, so when I got to the door, I casually walked around the back of the store. At that point, Sherri came sprinting in from HER van to beat me to the bathroom, so I RAN to the bathroom and we fought over it, and I won. The gas station guy seemed a little ticked off when we were followed by 58 other college students, so I went and bought some candy, at which point I realized that his cash register was behind BULLET PROOF GLASS. When I got outside, I took a look outside and realized how sketchy this place really was, at which point a police car pulled up. Oops. We are all pretty sure they thought I was going to rob the gas station. I'm pretty sure that is the point where people began to figure out who Sherri and I were. We arrived at around three in the morning. Through some bizarre connection involving a Baptist priest and a VT alumnus, we were staying at the Keesler Air Force Base in some of the new dorms. Roommates were random, and mine was not there. I found out later she would be coming Sunday night.
Day 2- Saturday, 17 December 2005
We met at 7 AM to go to the Baptist church which would be providing our meals for the week. Our job for the day was in the town of Bay Saint Louis, about 45 minutes away. We were going to help rebuild a playground. When we had arrived earlier that morning, it was dark, so there wasn't much to see. One thing I noticed was that as you approached the Southern Gulf area, there were lots full of trailers and pre-fab houses for sale. Sure enough, with daylight, we could see that the pre-fabricated house industry definitely recieved a boost from Katrina. For the most part, the Gulf Port/Biloxi area is up and running. Most businesses have reopened, and people have come back, but everything still bears the mark of the hurricane. This was one of the cases where there was literally a "wrong side of the tracks." When the gulf came up with the storm surge, houses on the gulf side of the railroad tracks going through town were flooded, while those on the other side were "safe." The tracks were just high enough to break the flood. So, on side you had homes with blue tarps for roofs and fallen trees, while on the other side you had piles of rubble. Anyway, BSL. A company called Kaboom was undertaking a mission to rebuild all the playgrounds in the areas affected by Katrina. BSL was the first county seat in Miss., so it is a very pretty, fairly well-off (read: white) town. Almost the entire community had turned out to help rebuild the playground, along with other volunteers from all over. There was even a choir that came down from New York to sing carols to the volunteers. Kaboom. (Slight sidebar: I'm sorry, but that was really pointless. They should have just sent volunteers down. Sure songs boost morale, but so many of these people don't need songs. They need major help. It's heartbreaking. But enough of that.) They had cameramen out there and everything, and we had delicious jumbalaya (excuse my spelling) that the mayor had made. Overall, a heartwarming event. Of course, my inner cynic was wondering why we were working on a playground when there were homes falling down, but you help where you can. I am proud to say that the onslaught of Tech students helped them to finish well ahead of schedule, so we packed into our vans with the promise of more work in Forest Heights, where we were to be working for the majority of the week. Well, they weren't expecting us until Monday, so no one was really ready for us. We pretty much sat in the vans for two hours while it rained outside. The most memorable part of this was an radio promo for the station- "[station name and call number here], rocking FEMA trailers all along the southern Gulf coast." We were shocked, but really it reflects the general attitude towards the hurricane. People have begun to see the hurricane as more of a pesky inconvenience (oh that silly hurricane! blew away my house, that pest!) than a life-destroying horror. I think they had to have that attitude, but you know how it goes. It's a defense mechanism. Anyhoo, after that we went to one of the social workers' for dinner and then headed to Wal Mart, which was full of adventures in itself. Ah Wal Mart. How I love thee.
Day 3- Sunday, 18 December 2005
Sunday in the Deep South is definitely a day of rest, so we had the day to hang around and get to know each other better. The church had invited us to a service, but (and don't tell my parents!) I didn't go. Baptist services go on for like six hours, and I can barely make it through a one hour service. I don't know the Lord's Prayer, so I always feel awkward just mumbling it, and I figure six hours of that was more than I could handle. The bunch of us who didn't go went off in search of breakfast, and ended up getting lunch. We called ourselves the "Heathen Breakfast Van." After that, we lounged around waiting for the church crew to get back. I rendered myself useless for the next day by chasing the vans as they pulled into the parking lot and then playing football. My roommate showed up that night, with this guy that Sherri and I recognized as an amazing guitar player from the weekly blues jam. They weren't "together" but they were together and seemed "together." My roommate was really sweet though. She woke up really early and put on makeup every morning. I'm not sure if I admire her or despise her for that.
Day 4- Monday, 19 December 2005
Monday was our first day of "real" work. We were divided into three groups. One went back to BSL, one went to help clean up the beach (pointless), and the third (mine) to Forest Heights. Now, here are two critical background facts.
1) Forest Heights is a very poor black community. It was the first place in Miss (maybe the US?) where African Americans could buy their own homes. At one time it was prospherous, but went downhill in the 70s/80s. Several social workers and community leaders are trying to bring it back to what it once was, using the hurricane (and the hurrican volunteers) as a way to clean it up better than it was before. It was flooded with about four feet of water all the way through, so most structures were standing.
2) We were highly unorganized. We had way too many people for the amount of work, and we had way too much downtime. For this reason, a lot of people were left being "on call" at the church, or going to "clean up the beach." I think Cengiz was able to plan things better as the week progressed, but many of us were asking, "How the hell is he an engineer?"
The first thing we were sent to do was to clean up trash along side the road and the railroad tracks. There was an overwhelming amount of trash, not all of it from the hurricane. In fact, I would say that most of it had nothing to do with the hurricane, and as one person pointed out, we were probably lucky that the hurricane had come through and washed away most of it. Most of the trash was alcohol bottles. They called out a camera and crew to film us picked up trash. At this point, Sherri and I got very, very skeptical. I know this sounds cynical, and maybe we are just jaded people, but we felt like we were being used for the community cause. I don't mind this too much, it's just that I went down there to help with hurricane stuff, not to be used for some political deal. And yes, it's very political. The town has wanted to develope Forest Heights and Turkey Creek (more on that later) as well as the surrounding wetlands for more commercial/industrial use, so several people have been working hard to make that as difficult as possible. Ergo, we were being used as political pawns for the conservation of the neighborhood. I don't have a problem with this, I just have a problem that no one ever openly admitted it. But yeah, maybe I'm just cynical. After this, we went to an old woman's house where we pushed some boxes under a table for her (so the drywallers could get in) and raked her yard all while avoiding her psycho dog. It was at this point that I requested that everyone call me Miss Allocated-Resource. Then, we were sent to another home to sort the rubble pile of an old woman with Alzheimer's. A note on rubble piles: Every yard had a pile of debris, drywall, clothes, broken branches, branches, boards, dishes, etc. to be picked up by the state. We went ahead and sorted the piles and moved them to the edge of the road, out of the yard, to facilitate pickup. We probably had 20 bags of trash when we found out that the state would not pick up anything that was bagged. The social worker said she'd take care of it, but who knows what that means. After this, we broke for lunch, where we found out they needed help in a neighborhood called Turkey Creek. Like Forest Heights, it's a traditionally black community, very historical and very poor, only more flooded. Five of us went over there, forming our core group of Sherri, Thomas, Jordan, Kyle, and myself. Our community liason was a man named Derrick who is on sabbatical from teaching at Boston College, where he teaches the history of civil rights or something like that. He's a very savvy guy. And holy cow my fingers are falling off here. I'm assuming your eyeballs are falling out. At any rate, the funniest part of this is that all the guys kept calling Sherri and me "girls" until Sherri shouted at them to cut it out, so they started calling us ladies and I told them we weren't ladies. We told them to call us comrades, so we all call each other comrade, which stuck the whole week.
Day 5- Tuesday, 20 December 2005
We went back to the same house where we were before, except with the additions of Sade (pronounced Char-day), Ebony (called E-bone), and Andrew (and his chainsaw), plus this guy Devon who is the son of one of the social workers. Devon was really annoying because he would hack anything with the chainsaw and insisted on carrying really heavy things by himself. We called Sade "Chardonnay" because she whined so much and she left halfway through the day. We spend the entire day working at the house. A large tree branch (about the size of a normal tree) had fallen, so we cut up some of that. We also cleaned out a lot of stuff from their yard which had been there already. We worked entirely through Derrick, and never really met the people who lived there (they mostly stayed in their FEMA trailer). This is another case where I have mixed feelings. I'm happy to have helped these people, but I went down for hurricane relief, not yardwork. So much of the junk we were clearing out of the yard was there before, but what else were we to do? It's hypocritical to deny help, but can't they care for their own lawn? I have to admit this trip was good at popping my suburbian bubble.
Day 6- Wednesday, 21 December 2005
We found out in the morning that Kyle and Ebony had been switched out and Leah, Sade, Shao, and Aaron had been switched in. The running joke was that our van had the highest turnover rate of any other van (mainly because we were the smalled work group, so we noticed such switches). The first part of the morning was spent cleaning the yard of a historical building that was to become the new community center. We spent most of the day at Derrick's mother's house. We sorted her rubble pile and did more yard work. Like before, a lot of the yard stuff was there before the hurricane. Sade spent about an hour sitting around on her cell phone. Later in the day she informed us that she didn't come to do "yard work" and that she would be asking to transfer groups. There were some volunteers from Mary Wash next door, that was pretty cool. I was getting frustrated again for not doing "hurricane" work, when Derrick's mother, Miss Lettie, called us all over and tearfully thanked us for all we had done. She and her 92 year-old husband had been flooded up to their chests when a neighbor rowed them to safety on an inflatable mattress. Her husband had a stroke, and had to be taken to Florida. He died a few weeks later of pneumonia. She had lost her home, her posessions, and her husband all in a few months, so us cleaning out her yard for her "helped her back on her feet" as she said. She said she'd never forget us, and that's probably the only time on the trip that I felt that maybe I had made a difference.
Day 7- Thursday, 22 December 2005
Sade was out and Ebony was in. We spent a good part of the day making fun of Chardonnay and her wine. Sorry, we were an immature bunch. Initially we moved some stuff around Derrick's house to make it easier for him to renovate. He took us inside and showed us his office(s), where all of his plans for the community vitalization were. It was at this point that it hit me that I wasn't as cynical as I thought--it really was a highly political operation that we were involved in. The main tactic that he was using was to get as many homes as possible on the historic register, making it harder to rezone. Another thing he was doing was buying houses, refurbishing them, and then donating them back to the community. This guy is incredibly savvy and knowledgeable...we definitely underrated him. This is one of those gray areas where I am not sure what I think about the whole thing. I'm happy to help rebuild their community, but I didn't come down to do that. There's a line between their goals and hurricane relief, and they did their best to drag us over it or simply blur it out--I can't tell which. Anyway, he had us partially demolishing/salavaging an old house. We came to find out that a) it had been abandoned for some time, b) he didn't own it, and c) what we were doing was very illegal. Part a) ticks me off because there is really no way you could twist that around to hurricane relief. It was blatantly over the line. Parts b) and c) tick me off because he was probably planning to buy it, so we were directly aiding him, and he specifically said that if we got caught, we were on our own. Of course, all the idealistic morons in our group did not pick up on that, and Sherri and I were mildly freaked out. The discovery of asbestos somewhat dampened the ardor of the group, and all of the girls in the group went across the street and started (gasp) picking up trash. Much to our relief, we had to meet at one for a "Trash Blitz." The idea of the Trash Blitz is that all 65 of us would show up at these apartment projects and pick up the literal blanket of trash covering the area. When we got there, there were about 6 people there, one of whom we gleefully noted was Sade. We got started on the playground. Everything was covered in shingles because the roofs had been blown off during the storm. What wasn't covered in shingles was covered in broken glass--from alcohol bottles. The story of the complex was that no one brought them food or water for several days after the storm. Finally they hijacked a bread truck, so the government sent them food. Then the landloard informed them that they weren't being evicted, but had to leave. The landlord was taken away/run off, and there were about 65 people left living there. The other group left pretty soon after our arrival, so it was down to eight of us trying to clean a mile square of shingles, glass, clothes, drywall, and other trash. We probably had a hundred trash bags, and only got about three quarters of one courtyard and the playground finished. One old drunk man called Mr. Gene came out and helped us for a bit, and towards the end Ebony made friends with some little kids, and she encouraged them to take the initiative to clean up some on their own. Overall, it was very disheartening, especially when we drove back along the road we had worked so hard to clean the first day and it was already covered in trash. This was one of those times where it seemed that all we had done was pointless.
Day 8- Friday, 23 December 2005
We met at the vans at 5:45 AM to drive back. We went back in our original vans. The nice part was, since we knew everyone in the vans, it wasn't awkward if we fell asleep on each others' shoulders. We got back to Tech about midnight. Sherri and I left for her house in Winchester shortly thereafter, and got there at 4 AM. We slept until 2 in the afternoon, and my rather disgruntled dad came and picked me up, and I was dragged along for his last minute Christmas shopping so I got home close to 7 PM.
This is incredibly long, and I didn't cover so many things. There is so much more to the story, I hardly told about the people, or even the jobs. I can hardly describe the destruction that I saw, or explain the weird juxtaposition of normal life and devastation. Basically, ask me and I will tell. As for now, that is that.