Day 5 - Being the Body

I woke up with aches all over my body, and shuffled down the hall to the bathroom. As I went, I said "ow!" whenever I took a step. I felt good that I had helped yesterday, but today, I was feeling the after effects. I tried my best to keep moving, and by the time I shuffled out to the Cafeteria, I had loosened up a bit.

We headed out to the next assignment. I was told that we do not typically get re-assigned to the same house, so we weren't finishing the house from Tuesday. Instead, we took a few more wrong turns trying to find the house we were to do today. We stopped for directions once, and some people had a chance to see a fully gutted house before we had to get back in the van.

The home owner told us how the ceiling in their house had caved in after the storm surge drained away. The floor was covered in the first real "muck" that I saw. It was a mixture of ceiling, debris and belongings from the house, and insulation. The home owner also told us that when oil leaked from a tank at the refinery, it had also gotten into this house.

We faced the problem of having to get the big items out of the house, while also having to deal with the junk on the floor to make it easy to carry out the big items. We worked in groups, shoveling up junk until we made it to the refrigerator. As we had done yesterday, we all evacuated while two people carted it out of the house. The smell of rotten food mixed with oil and storm water is literally the worst smell anybody could ever smell. Yesterday, I had a dry heave, from all the way across the street, upwind of the refrigerator that got taken out of the house.

We found a couple of crucifixes, a couple of small rosaries, and some paper weights for the home owner.

Though it was hard work, we got to stop early today, because we were going to see New Orleans. We still prayed for a "power hour" as we got close to our time to leave. There was a lot done, but a lot more left to be done as we packed our tools up and headed back to Hilltop Rescue.