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.
It’s such a unique feeling to go into someone’s devastated house for the first time. You get a complete snapshot of a day in the homeowner's life. When we walked in today, there were still dishes in the drying racks on the kitchen counter. They must have washed dishes shortly before fleeing the storm. You also get an extraordinary understanding of who the homeowners are. By digging through their demolished possessions, you learn about their hobbies, their careers, their personalities. It is as if we develop intimate relationships with each family member without ever meeting them. For example, we learned that a woman lived in the house and worked as a nurse. We also learned that the homeowners had a deep love for movies, as DVD’s and VHS's were scattered all about the house. I like to take a particular room and work primarily in that room during the clearing process and try to guess that person's role in the family and develop a characterization of that person. For example, today I cleared out someone's room who appeared to be a recent college graduate. There was a closet filled with books and I found a diploma from the University of Louisiana. There were also random other things in the room like car care supplies and children’s toys. Being a dormitory inhabitant, I know that a college student's room can become used as a storage room which I am guessing is the case here.
Of course, we always wonder if the people will come back to live in their house after all the repairs are made. We talked with the neighbors across the street who told us that they don't know if the woman whose house we're working on will come back, but most of the people in the neighborhood already have returned. In fact, the house we were working on is one of the last two or three that needs to be gutted. It was extremely hopeful to talk and laugh with these two men, whose spirits were clearly extremely high despite such a tragedy. I am constantly amazed by how hopeful these people are even though they lost almost everything.
We middle and upper class college kids are realizing that possessions are not what is truly important in life. The people down here are showing us that you can lose everything, everything, and still be happy. You can lose everything and still be the same person and not be any worse because of it. One person in our group, Sherri, told us today that she lost her purse for about 15 minutes, and wasn't at all upset about it!! She said that she could have gone without or replaced everything in it. What if American society taught us that our possessions, our material goods, aren't what define us? What if society didn't tell us that we're nothing without our possessions? If this were so, we would be living in a far different, and undeniably a far better country.
Finally, I'm starting to understand how Christmas works down here. These people don't need weather cold enough to give you frostbite or freeze the wet hair on your head to get into the Christmas spirit. They simply need to be given a slight chill when they walk outside in their shorts and t-shirts. I experienced this on the way to doing my laundry today. And on the way back, I put on my sweatshirt fresh from the dryer and honestly felt like I’d just won the lottery. Then I went back to the room, put on my Christmas CD, draped a warm t-shirt over my legs, folded my laundry, and all was well in the world.
