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.