Mother Theresa said it all...
Back from New Orleans on Saturday evening. I've been miserable ever since. Hopefully this is just temporary with the shock of returning to snow and freezing temps coming from beautiful weather. I am not sure how I feel about the experience thus far, I think I am still processesing everything still. There were really good parts and really fustrating bad parts, but I guess such is life. The group dynamic was a little odd luckily one of my housemates went on the trip as well, so that made it a little more bareable. For the most part though, while I was down there, I remember cetching myself smiling in the sun and thinking how happy I was. It was nice to do something different to break up the monotone office life that I now live. I was aprehensive to go on the trip not knowing what to expect but it was a wonderful experience, there is still so much work to be done down there. I would totally go back. I think one of the most fustrating parts of the trip was how unorganized Habitat was. Honestly I wasn't expecting everything to go totally smoothly, but there was just no guidence or direction from Habitat. For an organization that big that recieves so many donations in product, money and voulenteers it was suprising and infuriating to see how poorly run it was. True that things down there are still basically a clusterfuck, but if your organization can't handle to have that many voulenteers at that time then don't accept them in to that program. Then again being on the logistical side now voulenteers = money. To be able to say to another buissness or organization that you are wokring with : " You should donate to us because we had x amount of voulenteers this week!" is so powerful. And to turn away voulenteers essentially means turning away money. Who cares if those voulenteers are standing on top of eachother with "nothing" to do. There's always something to do obviously, but when you've never worked on a house it can be difficult to just jump in. Friday was probably the best day that we had down there. Thursday afternoon we met up with this very small grassroots org. called "St Bernard Rebuilds". They hooked us up with this giant distibution center in the middle of the Parish to assist in sorting out donations to be distributed the following morning. So we ended up having a really good end to a not so happy unproductive day ( thursady it rained all day and habitat couldn't come up with any other suggesstions for work that we could do down there) we sorted clothes tried them on and took all sorts of crazy pictures. We agreed to come back the following day to help with the actuall distibution part. The next day there were so many people there, I was working the food distribution part with another person on our trip while everyone else was helping with the clothing. We met so many amazing people. Although these people have had their whole lives destroyed they are still the most positive pleasent people I have ever met. They were all so appreciative of us being down there. So many people were willing even in the smallest sense to share a part of their story with us. Which is acctually how we found work for the afternoon. Talking to people we found 2 residents that needed a fair amount of yarn work done. Apparently lawnmowers are pretty hard to come by. So we packed up from the dis. center and headed to this gentalman's house named Charlie. Clearing out his backyard which was still full of debris and garbarge. Basically what had happend is after the storm no one cleared it out for him so new grass and everything grew over all the debris. But it was so awesome to be out there working in the sun watching your progress as it happend. And then myself and another girl on the trip headed over to another woman's house named Sharon with a lawnmower we borrowed from Charlie. She is an amazing woman. She was also luckier than most. Her house is brick so structurally she didn't sustain that much damage, but her house did need to be totally gutted since there was 14 feet of water that sat in it for the weeks following the flood. She took the both of us all through the house and showed us where the water line was, it was incredible and so hard to envision that much water sitting there. Wow. So we did her lawn for her as well as her neighbor, it was an incredible day. Then we had a nice evening out in the french quater. Which is just a totally different world from where we were staying. But seriously, I highly encourage anyone to go down there. They still need so much help, but be ready to find people and projects on your own.