Saturday, July 24, 2010
Home Stretch
Well, I guess I kind of failed at posting pictures while we were still in New Orleans, but this will have to do. We're back on campus in Denver now, and we graduate from NCCC on Tuesday. My parents arrived today, and I'm waiting for them to get to campus as I write. It's beyond amazing to me that these 10 months are over already. NOLA was great. There is so much to do there and no sooner had I scratched the surface, we had to leave. It was wonderful to have the bikes down there, and Pat and I rode around the French Quarter quite a bit, as well as the Marigny, which is closer to our neighborhood. We also took a great ride to Audubon Park, in the Garden District. That was particularly cool since the route took us through all the major sections of the city. It never ceased to amaze me how stark the differences are between those sections. We rode through St. Roch (our neighborhood) into the Marigny, then into the Central Business District (Canal St., etc.) then into Uptown and finally into the Garden District, which is spectacularly beautiful and opulent, and not just in comparison to other parts of the city. I'm definitely going back to New Orleans soon.
Monday, June 21, 2010
23° 26'
Happy Summer Solstice! It feels like it's been summer in New Orleans for ages already though. This round has been marked by sweat, itchiness, and various household pests who have all paid us a visit at some point so far (roaches, termites, fruit flies, etc). However, it's also been full of great things, too. We have another Water unit team down here with us, Water One, who works with us at Rebuilding Together, an organization that rebuilds houses for low-income families. So far, all of the houses we're working on were damaged by Hurricane Katrina, and most are in fairly low-income neighborhoods (Hollygrove, Broadmoor, Holy Cross). The coolest thing by far about this project is getting to learn a lot about the architecture of New Orleans, the details of which Rebuilding Together tries to preserve when they rehab houses. More to come, with pictures, but I just wanted to get this up while there are slightly more than three weeks left in the round!
Saturday, May 29, 2010
Photographic evidence that we helped build a house!
Tuesday, May 25, 2010
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!
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!
Monday, February 22, 2010
PICTURES!
So, pictures! This is where we lived. The mural was painted by a previous NCCC team who actually built the partition. On the left is the guys' side and on the right is our side. There were eight of us living in bunks that look like...
this!
This is a picture of four out of six of the awesome interns from the University of Cincinnatti who work at the Fuller Center. They are, left to right, Gabe, Jackie, Caroline and John. Troy Maria are the other two who didn't come to Baton Rouge with us.
The next one down is of my team in Baton Rouge for the Mardi Gras ball. We are, left to right: me, Jess, Kelly, Beth, Ashley, Michelle, Mary and Nicole. In front are Paul and Ben. Missing is Abe, who didn't come with us that weekend.
Well, I hope to post more soon, once I get back to Denver, but this is a small visual aid to accompany my descriptions. I'll try to get some pictures up of some of the work we've done too!
this!This is a picture of four out of six of the awesome interns from the University of Cincinnatti who work at the Fuller Center. They are, left to right, Gabe, Jackie, Caroline and John. Troy Maria are the other two who didn't come to Baton Rouge with us.
The next one down is of my team in Baton Rouge for the Mardi Gras ball. We are, left to right: me, Jess, Kelly, Beth, Ashley, Michelle, Mary and Nicole. In front are Paul and Ben. Missing is Abe, who didn't come with us that weekend.
Well, I hope to post more soon, once I get back to Denver, but this is a small visual aid to accompany my descriptions. I'll try to get some pictures up of some of the work we've done too!
Friday, February 12, 2010
This is from about three weeks ago! I forgot I'd written it, but it provides a glimpse into the part of our lives here that I haven't talked about at all yet.
"It's Friday evening in Orange. Kelly, Michelle, Jess, Mary, Ben and I are hanging out at the church, waiting for our frozen pizza to be ready for dinner. Beth, Abe, Nicole and Buts (Paul) just walked out the door on the way to a movie. This weekend is Mardi Gras (well, really next Tuesday is Mardi Gras, but for our purposes, Saturday night will have to do) and a lot of us are going to New Orleans for the occasion. We've taken weekend trips a lot while we've been here, once to Baton Rouge for a Mardi Gras ball put on by a group at LSU, last weekend to Galveston for multiple people's birthdays, and then this weekend to New Orleans. It's been great to be so close to so many interesting places, and also nice to have such a relaxing home base to hang out in too. After being in Arkansas with only ourselves to hang out with, and with only Mena, in all its splendor, to "get away" to, living on the Gulf Coast has been absolutely awesome! Beaumont is our nearest city, with a population of about 114,000. It has a mall (*gasp*) and tons of smaller shopping centers, as well as a really nice main street, Crockett Street, which has been modeled after Bourbon St. as a pedestrian-friendly place to hang out. We ended up going there to watch the Superbowl (Go Saints!) last Sunday.
On Wednesday night, about 30 high schoolers arrived to volunteer at the Fuller Center. It's been pretty quiet for the last two weeks, so it was quite shocking to walk into breakfast this morning and find myself in the midst of a giant crowd of people all vying for a place at the sandwich table. Now that we've been here for five weeks, I feel like the Fuller Center has started to become our territory a little bit. Therefore, when it's inundated with new-comers, I start to feel a little protective. But really, they're all great workers and really positive about being here. More volunteers are always a good thing!
Every evening at the end of dinner, it's a Fuller Center tradition to do "shout-outs". If you've noticed something particularly impressive that someone did that day, this is the time to share it. Last night the high school group was so into it! It was great to see them being so vocal about their appreciation for each other and everyone they worked with.
For the past two weeks, my team has been digging a drainage ditch in the back yard of a house right on the bayou. It needs to be graded just right, so that a pipe can be laid in it and the water will drain into the bayou and away from the house. At first it was a lot of really hard digging just to get it to its minimum depth, but for the past week, it's been mostly measuring and then shaving off slight amounts to make it exactly perfect. We use this thing called a transit to sight the exact depth in various places. It's basically a magnifying glass that can be made perfectly level in order to sight the height of something relative to another point. It really just allows you to see a measuring tape from a fixed point, far away, but I feel pretty awesome and professional when I use it."
So, we're nearly done with the trench now. It's almost all filled in and drains very well. A lot of the houses we've been working on have come really far since we got here, and it's really gratifying to see the progress that's been made. I'll put up pictures next post, I promise!
NOTE: I thought this blog would be an easy way to record my impressions of this year, but it's actually proven to be quite hard to keep up with! I'm sorry for the disjointed nature of my posts, and I'll really try to post more often so I can put more thought into what I'm writing. This has been an absolutely wonderful experience so far and I cannot believe it's almost half over! Next round (shuffle round) I'll be heading to Lafayette with Terrence as my team leader and four other people from my permanent team, as well as four new people from other Water teams. We'll be working with Habitat for Humanity on some new builds as well as finishing some projects that Water 2, who had the project this round, were working on. I'm really looking forward to experiencing the Gulf in full blown spring, and really excited about still being able to eat things like poboys and gumbo and crawfish and yummm...
We're leaving Orange on Thursday, and I'm really excited to be going back to Denver to see people and hear about everyone's projects and see the mountains and hopefully hang out in the city a little.
Keep an eye out for the pictures...they're really coming soon!
"It's Friday evening in Orange. Kelly, Michelle, Jess, Mary, Ben and I are hanging out at the church, waiting for our frozen pizza to be ready for dinner. Beth, Abe, Nicole and Buts (Paul) just walked out the door on the way to a movie. This weekend is Mardi Gras (well, really next Tuesday is Mardi Gras, but for our purposes, Saturday night will have to do) and a lot of us are going to New Orleans for the occasion. We've taken weekend trips a lot while we've been here, once to Baton Rouge for a Mardi Gras ball put on by a group at LSU, last weekend to Galveston for multiple people's birthdays, and then this weekend to New Orleans. It's been great to be so close to so many interesting places, and also nice to have such a relaxing home base to hang out in too. After being in Arkansas with only ourselves to hang out with, and with only Mena, in all its splendor, to "get away" to, living on the Gulf Coast has been absolutely awesome! Beaumont is our nearest city, with a population of about 114,000. It has a mall (*gasp*) and tons of smaller shopping centers, as well as a really nice main street, Crockett Street, which has been modeled after Bourbon St. as a pedestrian-friendly place to hang out. We ended up going there to watch the Superbowl (Go Saints!) last Sunday.
On Wednesday night, about 30 high schoolers arrived to volunteer at the Fuller Center. It's been pretty quiet for the last two weeks, so it was quite shocking to walk into breakfast this morning and find myself in the midst of a giant crowd of people all vying for a place at the sandwich table. Now that we've been here for five weeks, I feel like the Fuller Center has started to become our territory a little bit. Therefore, when it's inundated with new-comers, I start to feel a little protective. But really, they're all great workers and really positive about being here. More volunteers are always a good thing!
Every evening at the end of dinner, it's a Fuller Center tradition to do "shout-outs". If you've noticed something particularly impressive that someone did that day, this is the time to share it. Last night the high school group was so into it! It was great to see them being so vocal about their appreciation for each other and everyone they worked with.
For the past two weeks, my team has been digging a drainage ditch in the back yard of a house right on the bayou. It needs to be graded just right, so that a pipe can be laid in it and the water will drain into the bayou and away from the house. At first it was a lot of really hard digging just to get it to its minimum depth, but for the past week, it's been mostly measuring and then shaving off slight amounts to make it exactly perfect. We use this thing called a transit to sight the exact depth in various places. It's basically a magnifying glass that can be made perfectly level in order to sight the height of something relative to another point. It really just allows you to see a measuring tape from a fixed point, far away, but I feel pretty awesome and professional when I use it."
So, we're nearly done with the trench now. It's almost all filled in and drains very well. A lot of the houses we've been working on have come really far since we got here, and it's really gratifying to see the progress that's been made. I'll put up pictures next post, I promise!
NOTE: I thought this blog would be an easy way to record my impressions of this year, but it's actually proven to be quite hard to keep up with! I'm sorry for the disjointed nature of my posts, and I'll really try to post more often so I can put more thought into what I'm writing. This has been an absolutely wonderful experience so far and I cannot believe it's almost half over! Next round (shuffle round) I'll be heading to Lafayette with Terrence as my team leader and four other people from my permanent team, as well as four new people from other Water teams. We'll be working with Habitat for Humanity on some new builds as well as finishing some projects that Water 2, who had the project this round, were working on. I'm really looking forward to experiencing the Gulf in full blown spring, and really excited about still being able to eat things like poboys and gumbo and crawfish and yummm...
We're leaving Orange on Thursday, and I'm really excited to be going back to Denver to see people and hear about everyone's projects and see the mountains and hopefully hang out in the city a little.
Keep an eye out for the pictures...they're really coming soon!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
