It’s Been Awhile…

For those of you who may or may not have thought that I was dead in a ditch somewhere, or had run off and joined a Creole band, let me reassure you that neither of those things are the case. Life here in NOLA has been super busy and this is about one of the first opportunities I’ve had some time to catch my breath. That being said, there’s so much to fill you in on, so prepare yourself, it’s gonna be a long one…

Last week we had our first group, and they were nothing short of awesome. It was a group of high school students from a church in Atlanta- for a few of them, this was their first mission trip, but for most of them, a summer mission trip was just part of their summer routine. The days typically went like this: get up pre-six o’ clock (in the morning), have a quick breakfast, make our lunches, then depart for the worksites, break for lunch, work a few more hours, pack up and head back to our housing site, clean up, eat dinner, have a little bit of time to chill, then we would finish our night with an evening devotion- led by the group. Each night as a part of their evening devotion they debriefed the day by doing something they called “joy, junk, and Jesus”. This gave everyone an opportunity to talk about their joys of the day, the stuff that wasn’t so joyful, and the ways that they saw Jesus and God at work. It was so cool to hear everyone talk through their days in such an interesting and unique way.

Now that I’ve given you the general overview of last week, let’s get into the nitty, gritty, details of it all.
The group arrived on Sunday evening, and we started our week at a housing site called Camp Hope- it was a great setup, it was an old school that had been abandoned after the storm so they did some renovations and turned it into a housing site for volunteers. They took all of the classrooms on the second floor and turned one side of the hallway into boys’ rooms, and the other side into girls’ rooms. Then on each side of the hallway they created walkways into each of the rooms so they were all connected. We were able to have all the girls stay in one room, and the guys in one room (each on their respective side of the hallway, of course). What was also great about Camp Hope was the fact that they provided all of our meals, so we didn’t need to worry about cooking- all we had to worry about was making sure we arrived to dinner on time. Things were going really well, until Tuesday afternoon when I get a frantic call from the group leader because she had been informed by Camp Hope that they had to move out immediately. Do what now?!!? Longer story a little shorter- Camp Hope had been bought out by BP to house their clean up crew from the oil spill so now we were being displaced. So, we found another place to stay. It was an old Methodist church that had also been renovated into volunteer housing- called Camp Noah. There was already another group staying there, so they had enough rooms to house either the boys or the girls, but not both. They also had a huge warehouse area that had previously been the sanctuary, that was not occupied. So the girls bit the bullet, and took one for the team and slept in the warehouse on cots, while the boys got to live the high life in rooms of about 8, in bunk beds. We moved in Wednesday afternoon, once we had completed our days work. This also meant that we were now responsible for cooking meals, so we had to make a grocery store run on Wednesday while the group was at the worksite. The rest of the week went off without a hitch. The group took a half day on Friday to take in some of the culture of New Orleans, ride a street car, eat beignets, walk around the French Quarter, and then we went to dinner at Acme Oysterhouse, where I enjoyed a sampler platter of many New Orleans’ delicacies, including: jambalaya, gumbo, and red beans and rice. During the course of the week I also consumed a “snowball”- which is basically an awesome snowcone. I had a tootsie roll flavored snowball with condensed milk on top. What I learned from that experience is in order to fake the taste of a tootsie roll you combine grape and chocolate. It sounds gross, but it definitely tasted like a tootsie roll! =)

Last week included a few little projects and one large project. For the little projects we split the groups up and part of the group went to a gentleman’s house to install windows and help him with some renovations and the other part of the group went to an area of NOLA called “Broadmore” in which they helped to clear out some empty lots that had been overrun by weeds, grass, ivy, and trees. The reason we did this is because lots that are overrun will be cleared out by the state, but the owner of the property will be charged $400 for this service, and if they don’t pay (which many of the people can’t- either because they can’t afford it, or because they were displaced after the storm and haven’t returned home) then a lien is put on the property and after so long the state then takes ownership of the property. By cleaning up these lots we are helping to keep the neighborhood look nice, as well as helping these people who might be in need for whatever reason. The larger project we worked on is at a hospital called the Lindy Boggs Memorial Hospital. There is a really cool story that goes behind this hospital, but due to the length of this blog, already, we’ll save it for another time.

I’ll try to update this blog more than once every couple of weeks, but life has been a lot busier and harder than I thought it would be. I’d appreciate your continued prayers throughout the remainder of the summer. I love you all and I miss you lots!