Work, Work, Work

Written August 2, 2011

Our second day of service is coming to a close, and it's hard to believe it's only been two days. Mission trips are always tiring, but working a full day in the heat of New Orleans takes the cake. We wake up hot, work in the heat, collapse in front of the air conditioner at lunch, work in the heat, and spend the night sleeping on top of the sheets because the thinnest covering makes it impossible to sleep. This morning, they told us that to avoid heat exhaustion, we should drink water every time we notice ourselves sweating. We've been drinking bottles each day, taking water breaks from our painting or debris clearing or wood stripping every five minutes, but if we stopped every time we started sweating, I don't think we'd get much work done.

Unlike a lot of mission trips where the team works together on one site, our 80-person group is split into many different groups, and us Linfielders are spread all over the place. McKenna and Libby are with a team that is clearing debris and doing yard work, and Linnaea spent the day painting the inside of a house for an elderly woman who can't do it by herself. Lisa and Dan, two advisors, and Fran and Evy, two students, are stripping the exterior of a house, preparing it to (eventually) be painted. The woman who owns the house originally requested a team for only two days, because she wasn't sure she could handle them for longer. But their team has had a blast playing music on the side of the house with the rhythms from the scrapers and the boards and their slapping hands, and they've gotten to know the owner, so she has requested that they come back again tomorrow!

I'm working with Chap Massey to paint the exterior of a house with a group of students from Puerto Rico, Kansas (I think...), and Oklahoma. The owner is a woman we haven't met, but her nephew, Curtis, has been on site every day. We haven't had a chance to ask his story yet, but I'm really hoping to hear that tomorrow. The woman's granddaughter drove past today, and she stopped to tell us how thankful she is that we are helping her grandma get back into her house at last.

The stories we've heard from the ten-sh homeowners our large group as worked with are heartbreaking. So many people lost so much during Katrina, the levee floods, and Rita (the hurricane that hit a month after Katrina and added salt to the wounds of an already devastated city.) This was the largest disaster to hit New Orleans, and the city government didn't really know how to respond. Their uncertainty, although rather warranted, led to a mandatory evacuation that was issued too late and hundreds of people trapped in their homes. Levees were breached, and water flooded homes all through the city. One of the counties, St. Bernard's Parish, is the only county in the United States to ever be completely destroyed by a natural disaster (according to that oh-so-reliable source, Wikipedia...) and as we drive around, six years later, we can see the destruction.

We've heard about homeowners who can't get insurance money because the floods were man-made, not natural disasters. About people who don't have the deeds to their homes because the houses have been passed down from generation to generation for so long. About residents who want to come back but can't justify returning to a place without grocery stories, enough schools, or close healthcare (Libby stepped on a nail at the site yesterday, and they had to drive about 20 minutes to Tulane Hospital to get to an ER.) About churches and homes and stores that were 10-12 feet underwater for SIX WEEKS; we stand in a room and think that the water would have been four feet deeper than the tallest person.

New Orleans is coming back, but boy does she have a lot to come back from. The people here talk constantly about how much it means to have us coming here and helping, but it's hard to see the impact we are having when it takes a whole day just to caulk a house. When we think, though, that five days will let us finish painting and caulking, that we aren't the only team working, that those five days aren't the only work week... the impact suddenly grows. It may be hot and tiring and draining, but the work we are doing is worth it.