Seth Gardner (director of volunteer services) picked us up from the Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport Sunday evening, his third trip of the day collecting volunteers. There are (not surprising) more female volunteers than male.
We sleep dormitory style:
As I was arranging my things, Norm, a fellow about my age across the aisle from me and I began to talk… (I introduced myself). He grew up in Newark, NJ. I asked if he had attended “Prinz’s shul”. He volunteered that he and Debbie M. Prinz used to sit in the back and “cut up”. So we got to talking… small world. He’s lived in Nashville, TN since college days. I’m pleasantly surprised to see a number of people my age and older.
Wake-up was sometime around 5:30, though I awoke a bit earlier. Breakfast was served at 6:45. We were divided into teams of about 15 people each. After doing a bit of “camp” site cleanup we shipped out to our house. Nechama (which means “Comfort”) gets its houses from a number of lists. They try to do the homes of “first responders” first, and, after 15 months (!) many of these (and thousands more) have not been done.
What does “done” mean? Our house
(a small duplex which belongs to a policeman… you can vaguely see the waterline on the middle set of the window panes) had been “gutted”; another group had been there before us. They had removed the rotten food from the fridge, the rotten furniture, most of what would cause the house to smell.
We drove about 30 minutes to our site at the corner of Hammond and Bonita. The weather was overcast and cool… good weather for our task. We had to remove all the sheet-rock and the fiberglass insulation material
as well as everything that was broken around the yard.
Removing the sheet-rock also means removing all the nails that hold the sheet-rock to the studs and then clean up all the debris that falls.
We broke for lunches of MREs sometime around noon
and then got back to work. By the end of our day at 4:00 we had pretty much cleaned the house
and the local refuse crew came by to pick up what we had removed from the house.
Back to the “camp” for showers, dinner and a quiet evening for us… though many were able to work out a way to get into town.
Our team (not all of whom are pictured here) is a neat collection of people.
I hope to include their stories soon.
There were a variety of interesting signs… this one was special:
And even among all this… flowers bloom:
