Bucknell Katrina Recovery Team

Well, apparently the end of classes and exams does not coincide with the end of my procrastination habits. This is why I'm writing my first blog entry 3 and a half hours before we'll be boarding the bus for the Baltimore airport. Despite lack of sleep, however, I am so excited for this trip. I remember being shocked last year in Waveland, MS at how little work seemed to have been done since Katrina ripped through the Gulf Coast. I am hoping that a year later, much more will have been done.

Wow! Already two days down!!

We were up bright and early on Friday at 6 am to receive a brief orientation and then head out to work. We split up into two groups. Each group had a house to gut. "Gutting" is a term that basically means turn the house into a shell. Everything is pulled out, including cabinets, refrigerators, stoves, and the walls. Last year when we worked at Waveland, MS, only about an hour away, we were doing the exact same work. It really hit home to me the mind-blowing amount of work that needs to be done here. The house that we worked at Monday probably wasn't touched since the storm. That's a year and a half. How many hundreds of other homes still haven't been touched?? How many more years will it take to not only clear out all the houses, but also rebuild??

Well, no more houses gutted, but plenty more memories. We had a day off of work today and spent the day exploring the French Quarter.

There is a museum here that we went to that had a photo exhibit on Katrina. My favorite part was a section that had photos from a group of high schoolers. They were involved in a photography project that aimed to tell the story of the tragedy from youth. And they told some powerful stories with their photos. One caption read, "After we evacuated, I remember staying up with my sister on a school night in our cold bedroom in a house on the bayou. We would laugh so hard, even though the challenges we were going through were so difficult."

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.

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."

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!