Greetings all. We've made it safely to St. Bernard Parish and are settling in at Camp Hope. Everyone is pretty fried because our connecting flight from Atlanta was delayed for over two hours (after a scheduled two hour layover and several gate changes). We tried to deal with the situation as best we could and considered that many Hurricane Katrina victims had been stranded in much worse circumstances for a much longer period of time after the storm.
We arrived here after an eerie drive through fog. There are parts of this area that seem very desolate with abandoned damaged homes, no stores or street lights. Along the St. Bernard Highway which parallels the Mississippi River are also a lot of industrial plants, an industrial shipping terminal, as well as oil and sugar refineries which look very dramatic with their steel structures and billowing smoke towering against the night sky.
Camp Hope opened in June of this year. It is a former elementary school that was flooded with 7 feet of water and had parts of its roof ripped away in the hurricane. It's been gutted and now is a temporary home for lots of helpful volunteers. The operation has toilets, showers, hot meals, and we're each assigned a cot in one of the old classrooms. There are coin-operated washers and dryers a couple of tvs and computers for us to use.
We are having breakfast at 6 am and our safety orientation at 6:30 before we head out at 7:15 am to begin gutting houses. The Habitat for Humanity group is working to clear debris from the homes of elderly and disabled residents. They would like to perform this volunteer service for as many folks as possible this month because after December, FEMA will no longer haul away debris taken to the curb. People who have lost so much and have so little resources will then be required to hire contractors to take away the trash.
The students are all in good spirits and excited to be here with about 175 other volunteers, some from Americorps who are doing long-term stints of several months or a year. Tomorrow we will get our hands dirty and let you know how that goes. In the evening we'll be taking a shuttle bus over to New Orleans French Quarter to find good eats and some good music.
That's all for now.
Janice Butler
Director of Service-Learning
