NOLA Habitat for Humanity, Week 2

Alright, another week down, and it was another busy one.  We'll start with a pretty picture:

Work these last few weeks has been great.  We’re working with Habitat for Humanity, building houses for low income families.  For anybody who doesn’t know what Habitat does (like Amish maybe?  Or mermaids?), they build houses with volunteer labor and sell them (for the cost of materials) to families who qualify.  The families are also given no-interest loans, so all in all, it’s a pretty cheap way to get into a new house.  We’ve been working outside, which is a great, and it’s really cool to see tangible change each day when we leave.

It really is amazing to see how fast the houses go up.  From start to finish, it takes three months to finish a Habitat house, but in the first two weeks we’ve been here, we’ve seen one house go from a 2 X 4 skeleton:

…to a full on house, with a roof, siding, windows and doors:

We’ve also gone out four or five days to make repairs on existing houses.  We replaced a lot of window trim. We also spent one day removing insulation, which meant rolling around in cat piss and itchy fiberglass under a house for three hours.  The best part of doing repairs has been seeing different parts of the city.  We got to see St Bernard parish, the West Bank, and, closer to home, Musicians Village:

The city commissioned Habitat to build forty or so houses all next to each other, and sold them to musicians. The houses are all new since 2005 and account for every building for a quarter mile in the Upper Ninth Ward. It’s only a few blocks from our house, and I had no idea it was there until earlier this week.  It is a really neat little community and a positive reminder of what we’re here working for. 

Habitat work is exhausting.  I go to bed at 9:00 PM sharp now, but we have made time on the weekends to go downtown.  There is so much in New Orleans to rave about, with the live music, the po-boy sandwiches, the bars, the street performers, getting to wear a t-shirt in January, more live music, etc. etc.

There’s like infinity fun things here! Maybe twofinity!

Last week we fixed window trim for a guy named Chip in Musician’s Village who plays a lot downtown. On Saturday, a few of us went to the French Quarter to watch him play.  His set was really fun, and he gave us some CDs after, which was really nice of him. Then we got some to-go beers.  This city rules. 

Lagniappe (a little something extra):

I’ll end with a brief mention of something very childish: Code Blue.  What is Code Blue you ask? Nathan told me about it.  It’s part holiday (supposedly, its Jan 29 every year), part “Avatar” homage (get those 3D glasses ready for some blue crap!), and all synchronized BM.  There are four steps to a successful Code Blue Day:

1: Tell your friends

2: For the next six days, eat as much blue food coloring as you can handle

3: On Code Blue day (January 29) take a blue poop in a public toilet. 

4: Don’t flush and enjoy knowing that you confused the hell out of someone.  (You BLUE their mind! Get it? HaHa! Somebody hi-five me!)

Happy Holiday! 

NOLA Habitat for Humanity, Week 1

What a week, what a week. Living down here and starting fresh with a new job in a new city has been profound, intense and exhausting.  New Orleans has a lot to offer, and it’s a lot to take in.   

While we’re here, we’ll be staying in a Habitat house in the Upper Ninth Ward. The same kind we build at work.  They look like this:

3 bedroom, 1 bath, 10 people.  It’s a little claustrophobic compared to the freedoms we had in the Denver dorm (but we do get BUNK BEDS!!).  I’m actually enjoying our house quite a bit so far. It’s more of the Americorps experience that I’d been expecting than we had living in Denver.

It has been plenty challenging though. We didn’t get water until late Thursday night, and no hot water until Friday night, so that meant four days of driving to do our dishes or take showers.  Americorps is going to give me an ulcer. They gave us keys to another Habitat house a mile away that we used to clean our dishes and ourselves.  Our first night in town, after a long day driving in from Texas, we went to shower only to find the shower house flooding.  We think that when they turned on the water to the house, they didn’t go inside, because both of the washing machine intakes were wide open and spraying water all over the laundry room. When we got there, there was a good half inch of water on the floor throughout the entire back half of the house.  Americorps is going to give my ulcer an ulcer (like Russian nesting dolls.  Russian nesting ulcers!).

We got in Monday night, and Tuesday they had us at the build sites, working with the Habitat crews.  I’m going to save any talk of the actual work until next week.  With a week as busy as this one has been, my actual job got put on the J.V. blog (along with a sorta funny poop joke and a breakdown of my 5 favorite kinds of Grapefruit (Did Ruby Red make the list?!?)).

Tuesday night, Megan and I went to the House of Blues in the French Quarter to see a Girl Talk concert. 

The show was crazy.  He danced around on stage behind a wall of laptops, while two guys ran around on stage shooting water and toilet paper into the crowd.  He also had a giant video screen, big confetti filled balloons, and a bunch of people on the stage dancing. It was pretty awesome.

Reminders from 2005 are everywhere.  We’re living in the Ninth ward, which is home to many of the New Orleans projects, and only a mile or two from the levees. Our neighborhood is mostly black (99%) and even more mostly vacant (The silence at night is a little unsettling).  Even six years after the hurricane hit, it seems like every other house is in shambles; falling apart and boarded up.  The lived-in houses on our block are the ones that stand out from the rest.  All the boarded up houses, and even a bunch of the lived in ones still have the spray paint from the search crews that checked the houses right after the hurricane.

The top is the date the house was checked, the left and right show if the place has power gas or other hazards, and the bottom is how many dead bodies they found inside.  As a newcomer to the city, it’s really a lot to take in. Over 1800 people died. The scariest part is that the city is no more prepared for a hurricane than it was in 2005.  The levees were built back almost exactly as they were before Katrina hit, so another hurricane would easily flood the city all over again. 

Having said all that, there has been rebuilding done.  It’s just the scale of the whole thing.  There is so much work that needs to be done to bring the city back, it seems daunting.  But it’s absolutely worth it.  Downtown is so vibrant- full of music and friendly people- that it deserves to be built back.  It’s just- how do you weigh the vitality of a city against the possibility of another calamity? 

Oh well, these heavy thoughts are above my pay grade anyway.  I hit shit with a hammer.  

NOLA Habitat for Humanity, Prologue

So, who’s been to the Quality Inn in Amarillo Texas? We’re on the first day of our road trip to New Orleans, and that’s where we’re staying tonight.  Which means one thing: another check mark on my bucket list!  Woo Hoo!

After a pretty awesome Christmas break, I flew back to Denver for a week of briefing/ debriefing before our next round of projects in starts up.  As I mentioned a while back, we're going to New Orleans to work with Habitat for Humanity building houses. It was all I could do to stay patient through all our meetings, presentations and sitting.  We recapped our last project and planned/ packed for the upcoming one, but my mind was in the bayou.

Between meetings this last week, few of us accompanied my roommate Erik to a bar called Crocs to watch the Sugar Bowl. Crocs is an Ohio State bar, and Erik is a Buckeye alum, so he taught us all of the cheers while Ohio State was beating Arkansas.  If you talk enough shit about Michigan it’s really easy to fit in with Buckeye fans.  After a few beers, the two of us ended up signing up for the halftime hot-wing eating contest.  Right after signing up I got cold feet and wanted to leave, but then I remembered that’s what some pussy Michigan fan would do. We stayed, and somehow I won.  We had to put back seven hot wings and a beer, and I had a come-from-behind victory to win $20 in bar money.  I practice eating every day, and it turns out I’m starting to get good at it. Erik got fourth, so all he won was some fiery discomfort and a hi-five from an eating champion.

Saturday, we left Denver in our big van, and we’ll be on the road until late Monday night.  We travel to all the non-Denver projects by 15 passenger van.  Here’s a picture of Guvvie Lovie, our green chariot, and my home until Monday:

Like I mentioned at the top, we’re in Amarillo tonight, and we’ll be in Tyler TX tomorrow, before getting to NOLA on Monday night.  Christracker has a breakdown of the trip:

The trip is going well so far, but we’ll see how I’m feeling about it after another two days of van naps, ipod games and rubik's cube.  When it's actually my turn to drive, there's alot to remember because driving government vehicles for Americorps has an ass-ton of rules (less than a shit-ton, more than a normal ton).  In addition to the usual “wear seatbelts” and “no meth” driving rules, we have lots of others. Here are but a few:

1. No driver can drive for more than 2 hours
2. Nobody can ride shotgun for more than 2 hours
3. No more than 8 total hours of driving in a day
4. No drive-thru’s
5. No Parking Garages
6. No driving faster than 65mph, even if the speed limit is higher.
7. No running yellow lights. Or green lights.
8. The driver can’t talk or blink

Those last two aren’t real, but still; Uncle Sam takes his shit seriously.

This coming week will be exciting. We’ll be finishing our roadtrip, starting work, seeing a Girl Talk concert, and getting to know New Orleans.  CANNOT WAIT!  I went on Google Maps yesterday to see where we’re living, and this is what came up.  

Veloceraptors live in the yard.  Hopefully they’ve fixed it up at least a little bit since this picture was taken. Or at least taken the boards off the doors and windows so we can get inside.

Giddy-up Guvvie Lovie! On to N’awlins!