Lots to tell...
This past week I've been on a service trip with my church to New Orleans, and it certainly was interesting. There's still a ton of destruction down there, and in certain parts of the city it really is like a ghost town - no one is living there. Most of those houses have stuff spray painted on the side, whether just the standard x-thing of the inspectors that tells the date of the inspection and how many people and animals were found inside to various other messages left by them or the people who came back. The worst type was a very blunt "Dead dog." How would you like to come home for the first time and have that be the first thing you see of your house? That would be down right horrible. Then there are other messages like "we've gone to Tennessee" or "congress, etc., I'm back and I'm p***ed and you can kiss my" (it actually did end there). There's such a marked contrast to the French Quarter (we didn't do any work on Sunday so we got to tour the city some), where it's just business as usual. You'd think it was a wholly different city.
As for work we actually did, on Monday we got to this house where we had to pull everything out of it - it was going to be bulldozed so we didn't have to tear down the dry wall or anything. But we got inside and the water level had reached the ceiling, so that disintegrated and the insulation all fell to the floor and everything was covered in a layer of yellow, moldy insulation. It was sort of unreal walking through the house for the first time. Stuff was just everywhere - you would find unopened pop cans laying around, an American flag was in one corner. It's very strange to pick apart and throw out the shreds of another person's life. But the homeowner (she was there) felt so much better once we were done; she said that she felt as if she could move on now. On Tuesday we got to a different house and that one actually needed to be stripped to the frame because it was going to be renovated, but we only had enough time to get all the stuff out. The other group that we were with was going to have to finish it.
But other than that, it was a whole lot of fun. 12-hour car rides each way - definite plus. We played a game called Polish 20 questions, which is exactly the same except each person gets a thing that they have to put on their forehead and ask everyone else questions about who they are. I think the best moment had to be my cousin Nathan coming at the correct answer of "Am I a pregnancy test?" Also funny was in the famous people category Kyle got stuck forever on Moses. Definitely a good game. Then while we were down there there was a lot of room in the camp (we stayed in tents) for running around and playing games, and we met some other kids who were down there (especially these two guys, Mike and Jules - they were a lot of fun. It was amazing how similar Jules was to our youth leader Les... like they were twins or something. Crazy), and at night we played tag or capture the flag or volleyball. It was a lot of fun, suffice it to say.
Dumb things I did: I did not bring flip-flops, shorts, or a CD player.
On a separate note, I was really happy on Wednesday night to find "The Giver" in the ongoing book sale at my library. I had a coupon thing to get a free book because I volunteered there last summer and had never found a book I wanted to get, but "The Giver" is possibly one of my favorite books. (And it's not the large print edition that I see everywhere... :D)
As for work we actually did, on Monday we got to this house where we had to pull everything out of it - it was going to be bulldozed so we didn't have to tear down the dry wall or anything. But we got inside and the water level had reached the ceiling, so that disintegrated and the insulation all fell to the floor and everything was covered in a layer of yellow, moldy insulation. It was sort of unreal walking through the house for the first time. Stuff was just everywhere - you would find unopened pop cans laying around, an American flag was in one corner. It's very strange to pick apart and throw out the shreds of another person's life. But the homeowner (she was there) felt so much better once we were done; she said that she felt as if she could move on now. On Tuesday we got to a different house and that one actually needed to be stripped to the frame because it was going to be renovated, but we only had enough time to get all the stuff out. The other group that we were with was going to have to finish it.
But other than that, it was a whole lot of fun. 12-hour car rides each way - definite plus. We played a game called Polish 20 questions, which is exactly the same except each person gets a thing that they have to put on their forehead and ask everyone else questions about who they are. I think the best moment had to be my cousin Nathan coming at the correct answer of "Am I a pregnancy test?" Also funny was in the famous people category Kyle got stuck forever on Moses. Definitely a good game. Then while we were down there there was a lot of room in the camp (we stayed in tents) for running around and playing games, and we met some other kids who were down there (especially these two guys, Mike and Jules - they were a lot of fun. It was amazing how similar Jules was to our youth leader Les... like they were twins or something. Crazy), and at night we played tag or capture the flag or volleyball. It was a lot of fun, suffice it to say.
Dumb things I did: I did not bring flip-flops, shorts, or a CD player.
On a separate note, I was really happy on Wednesday night to find "The Giver" in the ongoing book sale at my library. I had a coupon thing to get a free book because I volunteered there last summer and had never found a book I wanted to get, but "The Giver" is possibly one of my favorite books. (And it's not the large print edition that I see everywhere... :D)