Well, the skies opened up last night and graced us with about 5 inches of rain. Yea…muchos rain… And it didn’t stop. So no gutting today. After doing a small amount of inventorying early this morning, we’re just kinda hanging around, trying to occupy ourselves. Lauren had a fantastic idea this morning to go play football outside, so the bold members of our group braved the torrential rains and played a rousing game of football for the ages. Other than that we’ve been playing Dutch Blitz, reading, talking, and anything else we can find to pass the time. The rain is coming down so hard that we often need to scream just to hear one another. Hopefully our roof stays on!

Continue reading "Matt - 12/21/2006" »

Today we woke up to pouring rain outside! Everyone was pretty tired from the night before. We went to the French Quarter to go to a concert by Chris Thomas King at St. Louis cathedral in Jackson Square. He played some Christmas songs for about an hour. I went to eat at a Lebanese restaurant called Mona’s Café with a few of the other girls. The rest of the group went to eat at a Mexican restaurant and then came home after I had already fallen asleep because I was exhausted!

Continue reading "Mina - 12/21/2006" »

Today was a disappointing day for the team. It started raining late last night and continued all day. Because of the weather we couldn't go out to the worksite. All of us had hopes of finishing this enormous house before we had to return to Bucknell tomorrow. By far this is the largest house we have tried to gut. Even though we didn't get a chance to finish the house the strides we made yesterday are remarkable. One room in particular was used as a workout area. Not only were the furniture and belongings thrown about by the water, undernearth it all was a huge treadmill. What a great sense of satisfaction in completing that room. Then on to the next one. The most difficult part of this house was the long narrow hallway. It was only wide enough to fit a wheelbarrow. The wheelbarrow would be filled then backed out the hallway to be dumped outside. Another obstacle was trying to condense the huge pile of debris in the front yard. The guys constructed a ramp made of doors in order to pile the debris. My guess would be that we had gutted a 0% house, one that had never been cleaned since the flooding, to 75%. What an accomplishment for a team that most of us have never dealt with such a disaster.

Continue reading "Barb - 12/21/2006" »

Yesterday we went to another new house that had not been touched yet, called a “zero percent house.” It was a larger house than the other ones, but it was still one story. We worked hard to get all the furniture and rubble and tons and tons of mud out of the house. The house had pretty high ceilings so we had to get up there and take off the drywall on the ceiling and the insulation up there as well. It was also a pretty hot day so everyone was getting really hot and tired. We started early, when it was still a little foggy, and that kind of reflected the house when we arrived. It was full of muddy, dirty belongings and debris covering the floor; it was pretty dark and gloomy inside. Yet the more we worked, the nicer the day got too!
Each time we got rid of debris or knocked down a new wall, the house seemed brighter and happier. And by the time we had to leave, we had pretty much finished gutting the house (minus the attic, which I think is pretty impressive!), and the sun was streaming into the clean house. It’s just remarkable, each time I go into a house, I look around and just feel so overwhelmed by what’s in there, but as a group we manage to work together and get things done. It’s funny because even though I know we can gut the house, I always have that same feeling like it’s just too much to be able to accomplish.

Continue reading "Mina - 12/20/2006" »

Our group leader today was a young architect from New York named Mike. After taking a three week paid work leave to come work here at Camp Hope, Mike promptly quit his job and came back. He told us that he couldn't stand sitting at his comfy desk while so many people needed help down here. How true did that ring for my own life. In about six months I'm supposed to enter the "real world" and find a "real job."

Continue reading "Matt - 12/19/2006" »

Today we came back and finished the house in the morning. Quickly we moved on to our new house. We were supposed to work at a home but half the front wall was caved in and it was unsafe to work at, so we worked in a house down the street. The neighborhood was desolate, with gutted house after gutted house sitting there. Very few FEMA trailers were there, which means not many residents are moving back. The house we started work on was a two story house, and it was huge. The inside was a mess and we had to shovel out a mix of the owner's possessions and mud. This was the hardest work of the trip and by the end of the day we had only cleared half of the house. It’s frustrating that we can't do more, but we are all working as hard as we can.

Continue reading "Chris - 12/19/2006" »

Hello from Violet, LA!

Today was a great day. We got to finish our house this morning! It is so rewarding to start with a house that was 0% and finish it completely. What I mean by 0% is that the house had nothing done to it since Katrina. Yesterday some of the girls on my team discovered pictures and mementos of the family that gave us some idea about them. Today Hillary was able to call them with the good news that their house was cleaned up. Unfortunately she got their voice mail. I can only imagine how relieved the family was knowing that their home was ready to be rebuilt. Later this morning we moved on to our 3rd house. This house is going to be a challenge. It is a huge house with two stories. Again it's a house that is 0%. Water marks are still evident on the walls. This home had 10' of water inside. Now it has 6" of mud inside. The mud is caked on the floors like bricks. Our team had to use a pitch fork to loosen it. We were all amazed at the end of the day at how much progress we had made. Already we have 2 of the biggest rooms cleared and tomorrow we'll start the other rooms.

On the bright side it's warm and sunny here!

Hello from Louisiana. The Bucknell volunteers had a good day today although we got off to a late start. Although our group was ready to go to work gutting more homes in St. Bernard Parish at 7:15, we had been left off the Camp Hope schedule by mistake. Because we arrived on Thursday, not the usual arrival of Saturday, we got left out of the weekend conversion of work assignments. With over 200 volunteers here, and the Americorps staff on their break, it was easy to understand how things could fall through the cracks. The volunteer operation has a good organizational system in place, but you can imagine how difficult a task this could be - to organize teams of 12-14 people to get to a variety of locations with the proper tools, paperwork, and training needed to gut lots of homes. Already Habitat for Humanity and Camp Hope volunteers have gutted over 3,000 homes since June.

Continue reading "Janice - 12/19/2006" »

Another day down, another 2 houses gutted!!

After a rocky start this morning (we were apparently forgotten about and weren't scheduled a house to work at, so instead we watched some of Talladegan Nights), we worked extremely hard for the rest of the day and tore through a couple houses. The work was very similar to what we did on Friday. The house I was at probably wasn't touched for the past 16 months so we had our work cut out for us. The homeowners weren't there and the person from Camp Hope helped the other group, so we were on our own! But no matter, we knew our task and set to work.

Continue reading "Matt - 12/18/2006" »

The past two days we have been back to gutting houses. Yesterday we started on a zero percent house. This means that nothing has been done to the house and its still how it was right after the hurricane hit. This was the first house like this that I have done. We walked in before starting to work to inspect and the sight was unbelievable. The water picks up all of the items in the house and then drops them randomly when the water diminishes. Everything was thrown about. To us it was all stuff, but to the owner it’s all of her possessions. The work was hard and it took all day to almost finish the house. We even stayed a hour late. At lunch we had the chance to talk to a few residents in the neighborhood. Our talk was very interesting. They said that almost their entire neighborhood was moving back in, unlike most. Also, there was a woman, her son, and her grandson that lived in the house we were working on and they had not been seen since the storm. The most surprising thing was that they were surprised we weren't getting paid and thought we were crazy to be down there.