Next Stop....

...Pass Christian, Mississippi!




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Here it is. It's tiny, not too many people live there... partially because it was mostly wiped off the map by Katrina. And from what I hear, you pronounce the name Pass Chriss-chi-ann or Pass Chris-CHAN. Or, when in Rome, just shorten it to "The Pass", and do as the Romans do.

We're going to be working with a rebuilding organization called the Grey Hut. We don't know too much about what we'll be doing or where we'll be living, but I do know that coordinating volunteers and living in tents are both involved in the equation.

More to come when I know about it...

From a coffeeshop on Chimes Street

Apologies for the lapse in updates, faithful readers. Work has been keeping us all rather busy, these days. So, let me provide you with a little recap on the events of the past 2 weeks or so...

Things I have made/moved/done...
-played with one super cute stray puppy and convinced one volunteer to bring her home and adopt her
-painted one house 'Wild Falcon' brown... covering over one perfectly good coat of pastel yellow paint. Not a very fun job to replace a pretty, spring color with a layer of boring, old khaki brown.
-installed sheathing and roof decking material with spring breakers from Oklahoma and Iowa... was called ma'am once.
-moved tons and tons of heavy shingles, tools, boards, pre-build components, trash, and teammates
-saw Beach House and The Papercuts live
-lead volunteers, including one group of super-cute but not so bright LSU gymnasts. (Funny story... one of my teammates was leading a group of gymnasts in framing the walls of a new house and told them to lay out the studs between the top plate and the bottom plate, gesturing and explaining to make sure her directions were clear. [We, after all, also had no clue what we were doing when this construction project started.] One girl picks up a nail and says, 'So, this is a stud?')
-framed one house on LSU's campus, right between the tiger and the baseball field and the big, big stadium. Clearly, no family is going to be moving into a house situated in this location, so we get to break down the frames on Tuesday and move it a few miles to its final location. (Sounds like moving holes, huh Dad?)
-asked by one eight-year-old if I was in the army
-found that my nose contained a plethora of black boogers after working in the ReStore, Habitat's recycled and new building materials store
-chatted with numerous sweet, Southern people who tell me that I sure don't have a Southern accent

Things that I am looking forward to...
-Spring break and a trip to Arizona!
-learning where my next project will take me to and what we'll be doing there (we're leaving in one week and don't know where we're going next... I'm getting antsy.)
-job interviews
-planning a little mini trip back to lovely Maryland, once it defrosts.

If I had a hammer, I'd hammer in the morning...

Just a little pictorial evidence of my hard work....

Presenting...the Habitat houses!

This is the latest house that we've built. The house is being built in honor of a very nice man with a very funny comb-over. His name is Ron and he volunteers for the Habitat ReStore, a recycled building materials store.

Three houses that are all finished! They're just waiting for grass and trees and the last few finishing touches. There's a tree foundation that's planning on planting three or four trees per Habitat house yard. It'll be so nice for the new families to move in to a home with some soon-to-be big and shady trees sprucing up the yard...


The framing and trusses and OSB are put up on this house already. I'm not sure, but I think this is the house that Crystal and her 3 kids are going to move into soon. We worked with the homeowner on Saturday and got to hear about her babies, how she has been eagerly awaiting her house for 2 years, and has the colors picked out already.






Check out our fancy shades. Mike, who's standing behind me, and I are big fans. The Louisiana sun gets going quite well, even for February and March.

Laissez les bons temps rouler

Tuesdays are usually spent working with Habitat, building, painting, or drilling away at the houses we build at a break-neck pace. But today, there's a big, staff-wide meeting that will take up all of the time of our kind supervisors. Since there's no one to make sure that we don't get into trouble playing with the tools, we've got the day off!

It's the perfect day for relaxing, too. The team and I spent the weekend in New Orleans, seeing some sights, listening to the awesome live music that seems to be everywhere, and spending our normal off-day working for an organization called the St. Bernard Project. Both this organization and Habitat for Humanity have a similar mission-- to provide simple, decent housing for the community. But the St. Bernard Project is different in that it renovates the homes that were inundated by the hurricanes' wind and rain. Most of the houses in and around New Orleans that sustained flooding and other damage have been gutted by now. All that's left are these empty shells that have tell-tale spray paint on them, showing who searched the houses after the storm, how many people (both dead and alive) were found inside the structure, as well as noting other hazards that might have been found. On this house, the markings are on the second story, right above the steps.





The mission of the St. Bernard Project is to fix up houses like these and get the homeowners living in their neighborhoods again. Mold has to be abated, new chunks of framing has to be installed, flooring and drywall have to be put in, and oftentimes, exterior work needs to be completed too. Two NCCC teams work with the Project right now, and Silver 6 spent our Monday teamed up with some of our NCCC peers. We got to help them out and see how another community based organization works to help the Gulf Coast area and its residents get back to normal.

Saturday night and Sunday were an opportunity for me to see other sides of New Orleans with the very capable guides, Jesse and Caitlin. These two lovely folks went to school with me and have spent the last year and a half running a women's shelter in the 9th Ward. Round of applause for them. We listened to some fantastic live music and spent a good portion of Sunday afternoon navigating the bayous outside of New Orleans in a great, big canoe. We saw a copperhead up close and personal, several small-ish alligators, a beautiful owl, and hilarious little frogs that made tiny screamy noises when startled. The bayou is one of the most beautiful places that I've had the chance to explore. Tall, tall cypress trees, with beards of Spanish moss clinging to them punctuate the swamps and waterways that are full of life. It's pretty easy to forget about the devastation that the area went through and is continuing to recover from when you're surrounded by the expensive, mostly white and touristy French Quarter or the beautiful wildlife out in the bayou. The different sides of the city can seem very incongruous at times and it would be easy for to think that the city is entirely back on its feet, if you saw it with an untrained eye.

Dear Gentle Readers

Some updates on my time here in Baton Rouge...

-I can use a variety of tools with ever-increasing proficiency, know a good bit more about construction, and have gotten very good at moving heavy stuff from point A to Point B. The patient and funny Habitat construction staff has taught us how to use nail guns, staple guns, the air compressors, a chop saw, the good old-fashioned hammer, and chalk lines, among other things. I can read a tape measure better than a former NFL pro-football player. I am learning how to lay out plans on a concrete slab, find the crown in a 2x4, frame walls, pre-build all kinds of pieces for a house, demolish a slab mold, toe nail in a board, attach OSB to the roof of a house, and many of ther useful little skills.

-I shower considerably less often than I used to. We have one shower here at University Presbyterian Church to accomodate 13 stinky, hard-working, frequently dirty and gross people. On average, we clean up once every 3 days. My theory is that if we're all stinky, we won't be able to pinpoint any offending funk, and therefore glide under the non-showering radar.

-I have been in close proximity to several other illustrious figures. I have to admit that I was certainly the most excited about meeting the honorable Governor Arnold "My Muscles have their own Zip Code" Schwartzennegger, but these other people were nice, too. CNN was taping a special episode while I was at Camp Hope, so I got to see Anderson Cooper. (Camp Hope is a former middle school that has been converted into a living space for Katrina relief volunteers by Habitat for Humanity. It's located in a particularly desolate spot in the St. Bernard Parish, outside of New Orleans. From the little that I saw, it appears that the rebuilding process continues to be a slow one.) Other famous people included NBA players Dwayne Wade and Allen Iverson. I really couldn't tell you a whole lot about them, vexcept that Dwayne Wade had a posse with them that wore matching, customized tee-shirts.

-I have come to an even greater appreciation of the word, "y'all." It's so very useful when talking to a group of people. I haven't come to embrace "fixin'" yet, as in, "When I finish eating lunch, I'm fixin' to walk over to the lake," but there's still time.

"There's no place like college..."

...unless you take a quick look at this picture of our front yard and imagine that you're back on the beautiful St. Mary's River, swimming with the jellyfish.

Raising the walls

When we started work this morning at 6:15, there was only a concrete slab where Talia's house would soon stand. But by the time the work day was over, 35 or so volunteers had framed, raised and added plywood to the walls of the house! Quite an accomplishment for us... especially since a large majority of us have never done construction before. We Americorps, as the grey-shirted herd are referred to by most everyone in Louisiana, learned a lot. We took the pre-build doors and windows and added studs and learned how to drill into the cement slab and nail things together and measure and cut and the importance of measuring twice and cutting once and the additional importance of cutting one's nails short. It's a grueling workschedule for us, currently speaking, since we aren't used to the early mornings yet. 8:30 in the evening rolls around and I am ready to fall into bed, but feeling unwilling to do so because of all of the fun, college-y activities that are going on just a few blocks away. Most of the time, I've just given into the sleepiness and appreciated my good judgement in the morning. I'll just have to go to grad school for that college fix that I've been craving/