Round Three (an update long-overdue)

Hellooooo! Sorry I've been AWOL for so long! Wow, there is so much to tell. Seeing as I haven't even talked at all about shuffle round (third round), maybe I'll start there. So, my team and I went to Lafayette, Louisiana from March 15-May 4, to work with Habitat for Humanity Lafayette, a Habitat affiliate. The purpose of shuffle round, which is something only the Denver campus does, is to give everyone a break from their permanent teams as well as letting them get to know other people in the unit. My team was only partially shuffled (that's just how it ended up) so Terrence was still my team leader and Beth, Abe and Jess were still on my team. The new members of Water 3 Shuffle (Pat, Leia, Bryan, Ashley and Brittney) were awesome. This team was so laid back, and we discovered so many new things and explored so many new places together. They were really open to anything, and Leia and Brittney had also done the project before, so we were able to do a lot of fun stuff during the round. Leia in particular was friends with a lot of the University of Louisiana Americorps who worked with us sometimes, so she was able to tell us about various events and good places to go in the area. Lafayette is such an awesome place! The music has to be what I enjoyed the most, and it just so happened that we were there for a 4-day long FREE music festival called Festival International. It was totally bilingual, and all the French came first, in announcements onstage and in the artists' explanations of their work. It was wonderful and I miss it a lot! Our project sponsors/supervisors were great too. The three we worked with everyday were the construction manager Justin and the construction assistants Neil and JC. We definitely jumped in fast, arriving on a Wednesday and immediately being set with the task of getting three houses ready for closing and dedication on the following Saturday. This mostly just involved cleaning, and some last-minute painting and caulking. It was absolutely wonderful to be able to attend the dedication, although it did feel strange to be the "poster-team" for these houses that we hadn't really even worked on that much. The teams that came before us, Water 4 and Water 2, really deserved the thanks and appreciation given by the homeowners. But it was great to see these people, who had been waiting so long for homes of their own, to finally get the key and be able to move in! What an amazing thing!
Most of the families being helped by Habitat Lafayette are people whose houses were destroyed by Katrina and who were either evacuated to Lafayette or chose to come there to get away from the hurricane risks associated with living in New Orleans. This predicament was driven home to us on one night in particular. We were cleaning up from dinner, when all of a sudden a frantic knock sounds on our door. We open it to find a woman standing there looking panicked. She told us that she lived two doors down from us (in one of the other Habitat houses on our street) and that she'd come home to find about 4 inches of water covering her floor. She asked us if we could help, since she knew we were affiliated with Habitat. It ended up that almost our whole team, along with Neil, JC, and Eddie (who works for Habitat part-time) went over to her house armed with mops, towels and buckets, and worked for about an hour, along with the woman and her daughter, to clean up the flood. During this process, we could see she was pretty traumatized by what was happening, even though she was simultaneously extremely hospitable to us and thanked us over and over for our help. At one point she said, "I thought I came here to get away from this! If that water had been two inches deeper I think I would have passed out". That really drove home, at least for me, the impact of something like a hurricane on someone who has lost all her possessions to flood and wind damage. The trauma of that experience really never leaves you. I think we never got to see that in Orange, and I'm not sure why. Maybe it was because they were so used to having volunteers and other people from the Fuller Center around that they didn't let it show, but now I really regret not having asked them more about their hurricane experiences.

After the dedication, we worked just down the street from our house which, by the way, looks like this:


Down the street, we did everything from getting to raise the walls of a new house to installing quarter-round at the bottom of the baseboard. It was especially nice to get to work down the street from our house since it meant we could go home each day for lunch.

There were multiple excellent things about this project round for me. Highlights of this round:
We volunteered at a community and CSA garden/farm called EarthShare and at an afterschool program in the neighborhood called Bridge Ministries. Both were great experiences and were organizations that benefited the community in really good ways.
Pat and I found very cheap, good bikes at a used bike store downtown.
Festival International! Plus, we got to ride said bikes downtown everyday after work to go see/hear the shows.
We went canoeing one day at Lake Fausse Pointe State Park, part of the Louisiana State Park system. Some of us saw an alligator, and subsequently scared it off for the rest of us.
Pat, Leia and I stood by the side of the swamp on the UL campus watching a gator eat a turtle for about 45 minutes. It was a fascinating process which involved periods of rest followed by violent whacking of the turtle against a tree trunk. Eventually the head was consumed, and we thought that was enough progress for one day so we left.
We went Cajun swing-dancing almost every Sunday at Randol's Cajun Dance Hall.My parents came to visit! We got great fried-oyster poboys at the Old Tyme Grocery, which is near the University of Louisiana, and went dancing at Randols later. We ended up going on a Monday and the scene was much different (and more geriatric) than on Sundays, when there are tons of university students and the band plays more Zydeco music than Cajun. Monday was more of a slow, waltzing-in-a-circle night, but I tried to teach my parents a little bit of swing dance just to give them an idea of what it was like for us usually.

I was really sad to leave this awesome place, but I definitely plan to be back someday, maybe for Festival next year!