Day 7 - Ohio

In the morning, some of the people from the church we stayed at prepared scrambled eggs, bacon, toast, and biscuits with gravy for breakfast. We ate and talked with the people from the church. They were interested in Servants Unite and they were interested in helping in Louisiana.

The weather was cold, and we even saw snowflakes in the sky in Kentucky. Spring had given way to a second winter. Fortunately, the snow wasn't accumulating and there really wasn't much of it before we got through. After playing some "cell phone tag," the group leader figured out what we would have for lunch.

North of Cincinnati, we took an exit and drove along until we reached a place called La Rosas Pizza. There, tables and chairs were moved to make one big table for all of the volunteers in our trip. The group ordered vegetarian pizza (there were two vegetarians in the group), the works, and a pepperoni and sausage pizza for the people who liked meat. We enjoyed the meal and the chance to hang out one last time before we headed back to Ohio.

We stopped in Grove City to drop off most of the teens. Then we stopped in Columbus and I was asked to give directions to get to my house. Then I was dropped off, and the group leader helped me get my luggage into the house. I was home at the end of my fourth trip to Louisiana. We would be going out of town to spend time with family on Easter Sunday, but we decided to put that off until after church tomorrow.

Day 6 - On The Road

On the trip home, I got to ride shotgun in the van for part of the trip. It was after dark that I got to have a conversation with our group leader, John McGuire. He asked me how I had come to Christ, and how I had gotten involved in disaster relief for Servants Unite. I told John my story...

Both my brother and I were baptized on the same day in 1994, on the last night of Summit, youth rally that started in Columbus that year. As a 15-year old and as a new Christian in 1994, I was so full of energy. I thought I could go out there and change the world for God, but I had trouble even overcoming my own temptations and my own addictions. I struggled for years, and became so jaded that I could not see the damage that sin was doing to my life, my relationships, and even my belief in God.

Then came 9/11. My first motivation was to go and help, but I heard over the news how they no longer needed volunteers. Some people from Ohio had gone, but the need was over, and besides, Autumn Quarter classes at Ohio State University were about to start. I felt like I had missed a chance to do something.

Then came 8/29/05, a hurricane that nobody believed would hit New Orleans turned north and hit New Orleans. The news was full of the situation surrounding Hurricanes Katrina and Rita for weeks. Maybe I was listening on all the wrong channels, but I never heard about anybody going to help. Then some churches in Ohio gathered supplies and put them on trucks bound for Louisiana.

This is where John's story connects: he drove one of the trucks and thought up the idea of Servants Unite on the trip to deliver the supplies.

I heard rumors of Servants Unite a few weeks after that first truck load was sent. But the 2005 Ohio State Buckeyes football season had started. Where I work, football season and Christmas are the busiest times of the whole year, and it is almost impossible to spare a single employee until January.

Then my church's youth minister Adam Metz said that the youth group would try to go to Louisiana in the summer of 2006. I asked if there was an age limit and he said "no." I took my first trip with some of the teens from my church and some of the teens from another church.

That week transformed me. It is the reason why I went back for more trips to Louisiana, and it is the reason why you can see about it on this blog.

Anyway, John and I talked about a lot of other things, including how the American Dream has become materialistic, and how different all of our things look after we've seen a disaster zone. He played Switchfoot's latest CD for me, which includes their take on the American Dream.

We stopped in Tennessee, north of Nashville. There, in the church's gymnasium, we rolled out our sleeping bags and air mattresses, and spent the night. It was the same church we had stayed in on my first trip.

Day 6 - Memorial

We packed up to leave today, and made sure everybody had an "overnight" bag packed with all the essentials for our scheduled stop in Tennessee. We were going to stay at a church on the way back, so we wouldn't get so tired on the trip back to Ohio.

But before we left, we had to pick up two Ohio volunteers who wanted to work just a bit more in the morning. They got to work at the women's shelter, and they got to work with the California crew again. So we got to meet the California crew again and hang out for a few minutes while our two volunteers finished up what they were doing and gathered up their tools. We took them back to the trailers and they got cleaned up to do some sight seeing.

When we headed out of Chalmette, we drove past some landmarks that I remembered from my third trip. We drove farther, and passed woodlands and bayous on our way to a landmark in St. Bernard Parish. It was where Hurricane Katrina made landfall in the Parish. There is a stone monument with the names of St. Bernard Parish residents who died in the disaster. We took group pictures there, and we took pictures of the memorial, the names on it, and the metal cross that was placed slightly offshore. The metal cross has a cutout of the face of Jesus on it, and the famous initials "INRI." It is also part of the memorial.

Another visitor to the memorial was a Baptist minister who knew one of the people who died. He told us that we were on the shore of the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, the infamous MR-GO. He also told us that the foundations of the cross offshore lie on privately owned land that was covered by MR-GO as erosion changed its boundaries. St. Bernard Parish had to face a scuffle with the ACLU about the setup of the memorial because of the cross and the fact that the MR-GO is a public waterway, but the Parish must have won for now.

The Baptist minister joined us for a prayer for a safe trip to Tennessee and then to Ohio. After that, we headed back to Chalmette. There, we ate at the restaurant that let us watch the Buckeyes game. We had lunch there, and I had shrimp stew which tasted very good. After we filled up our stomachs with lunch, we filled up the vehicles with gas and headed for Tennessee.

Day 5 - New Orleans Again

Some of our Ohio group had helped a man two days ago. He had promised us that he would catch fish to make us dinner while we were here. When we got back to the trailers, he was there as promised, with his wife helping out. They fried fresh fish for us, served us dirty rice, salad, and hush puppies. Some of us went back for second, third, and fourth helpings of fish because it was so good and there was so much of it. Even when we stopped eating it, the man finished frying the fish and gave it to us wrapped up in foil. The leftover fish got stashed in the refrigerator of one of the FEMA trailers and people snacked on it later.

Then some of us decided to go back to New Orleans. We detached the tool trailer from the van and headed back into town. We did a lot of window shopping and sight seeing, and I bought souvenir key chains for people at work, along with a couple of postcards and a book about reconstruction after Hurricane Katrina. On Decatur Street, we decided to split into two groups and see different sights. Before we separated, we arranged to meet back at the Cafe du Monde.

We either traveled on Royal Street or Bourbon Street until we reached Canal Street. A block or two from Canal Street, we saw an interesting painted wooden sign in an art and craft shop:

Not everything in life should be about money. Love is always found in the things we do that don’t always make sense. We were put in this world to get to know each other, share each other’s food, and say it is good.

This reminded me of dinner last night, so I tried my best to memorize the message. We returned to Decatur Street and headed toward Cafe du Monde, where the other part of our group would meet up with us again. Before we went inside the cafe, we saw a Vietnamese man come and shout a greeting to us. He was one of the people from California, and the rest of the crew from California was in the Cafe eating. The California group invited us to join them, and started rearranging chairs and tables to make a big circle for us all to sit with them.

We ordered more coffee and beignets and sat and talked with the Californians for a while. Before I said goodbye to the Californians, I shared the quote I saw with them. They thought it was a good message also, and they told all of us that we all were some of the nicest people they had ever met.

I was glad to have met the California crew again. I think they're some of the nicest people I've ever met.

Day 5 - Half and Half

The morning was cool and partly cloudy. I woke up with aches all over from mucking. We had moved a (filled) water heater yesterday, so we could take away the debris behind it, as well as a lot of wheelbarrow loads of debris, so every move I made today made me aware of the work I helped do yesterday.

I spent most of this morning doing the strangest thing I've ever done in Louisiana. It wasn't mucking, it wasn't reconstruction, it was watching a warehouse. Actually, this warehouse was a gymnasium, complete with basketball hoops. It was part of the park outside, which had baseball fields, picnic pavilions, and a playground that was built by Extreme Makeover.

The person who usually watched the warehouse had gotten sick and needed to see a doctor, so there I was doing practically nothing. When people came to take cases of bottled water, I made sure they signed the guestbook and wrote down how many cases of water they took. I was told not to let anybody leave with anything but bottled water. A couple people came to get things that I wasn't authorized to let them take, so I had to call the volunteer coordinator.

The volunteer coordinator came to lock up the warehouse and take me to one of the places where work was being done. I got dropped off at a house where some people were doing drywall, so I joined the work there.

I helped cut some drywall, including cutting out a hole for an electrical outlet, I helped hold the drywall up so that people could put in drywall screws, and I helped move drywall into the room where the work was being done. We had a puzzle to solve at one point: how to get the whole sheet of drywall into the room, when we were closing up the spaces between the studs. Another volunteer found that we could slide the drywall diagonally, past the closed wall and through one of the open walls, into the room where we needed it.

I stayed to help do drywall for the rest of the day, so I spent the first half the day standing around watching the warehouse, and the second half the day working on drywall.

Day 4 - Where I Saw Jesus

We ate with the group from California. After everybody had eaten, the Buddhist priest shared an interesting custom with us, explaining the Vietnamese tradition of greeting other people by clasping hands and bowing...

The Lotus flower is the most beautiful flower to Buddhists. The Lotus flower grows practically anywhere, from beautiful gardens to refuse heaps, to manure piles. It grows and the buds are oval-shaped, like two hands close together (the way people pray). The tradition of greeting people is to make hands like the Lotus blossom, to recognize the beauty of the Lotus. No matter what kind of person you greet, you are looking at them through the Lotus shape of your hands. This is to remind you that all people are beautiful inside, no matter who they are, no matter where you meet them.

A little while later, the California group returned to their trailers and we stayed behind at the tables where we ate. Our group leader started a devotional about "Where I Saw Jesus." This is a devotional that was started early after Christian volunteer groups started showing up. There was even a blog about Where I Saw Jesus, though it hasn't been used in a long time. Each volunteer from our group thought of where we had seen Jesus this week, or elsewhere, to share with the other people in the group.

So here we were, a few adults and a bunch of teenagers who wanted to give up Spring Break to God. This is where our group leader said he saw Jesus. We had another day of work but a lot of the volunteers kept singing praise to God even after the devotional ended, and the group leader went to bed.

Day 4 - Mucking?!?

I asked a fellow volunteer to drive me to the Winn-Dixie in the morning because I had been doing two days of work without using work gloves. I decided safety was important enough, especially if I was going to work at either of the two open assignments we had scheduled today. The painting crew still had work to do but they didn't need anybody extra. If we went to the women's shelter again, I'd probably wind up helping to hang drywall, and at the newest assignment there was drywall hanging to do there also.

So I wanted to protect my fingers from hammer blows and cuts from hand saws or utility knives. So I was surprised when we were told that there was a house that needed mucking done. I wound up in the mucking crew with one other person from our Ohio group. She and I would help a crew from California clean the house. After the other groups were dropped off, we got dropped off with the Californians (who were Vietnamese immigrants) in front of the house. The grass had been stripped away, and when I went inside to inspect the house, it was partly gutted also. It looked like the crew that had been here before had taken away most of the furniture and then knocked out the walls.

But the floor hadn't been cleared off, and it was loaded with debris and fragments of drywall and other muck. We started cleaning up and then got rained on. The debris turned out to include sand and old oil. That meant that this was one of the houses where oil from a nearby refinery had leaked in. It finally hit me: sand or gravel and oil make asphalt. The floor was like pavement in some places because of that mix of sand and oil.

We met firemen from the house next door, where they were off-duty and still at work helping a fellow fireman with his roof. They gave us their leftover donuts and we all came out to meet them. We also met the Buddhist priest who came with the crew from California. Later in the day, as the pile of debris outside got taller and taller, a removal crew pulled up out front with a dump truck, a backhoe, and a bobcat. A few minutes later, the debris pile we had built up was gone.

The other house next door hadn't been touched since Hurricane Katrina. The day was a mix of signs of progress with signs that there's still a lot of work to be done.

When we got back to the trailers and got cleaned up, we found out that the California crew had sent somebody back to prepare Vietnamese food for dinner. They had made enough for all of us Ohioans too! The food was delicious, but there turned out to be too much of it for all of us!

Day 3 - Recreation

In New Orleans, our volunteer group split up into a couple of different groups. There were some people who wanted to window shop and see the sights before eating, and there were some people who just wanted to eat. I joined the latter group, and both groups chose Cafe du Monde as a good meeting place before we left the city. With a couple of hours of free time, we headed up Decatur Street.

We stopped to eat at a restaurant on the corner of Decatur Street and St. Philip Street. The group leader ordered fried alligator tail as an appetizer and shared it with us. I asked him if this was revenge for last night, when the Ohio State Buckeyes lost to the Florida Gators. The restaurant had a live musician who played blues and jazz while we ate, and I enjoyed the red beans and rice that I ordered.

After dinner, we went back up Decatur Street and did some window shopping of our own. One thing we noticed was how cool the weather had gotten. Thankfully, that could be cured by the caffeine and sugar fix we got when we went inside Cafe du Monde. Once our beignets were finished, we headed back to the van and then back to the trailers for bed.

Day 3 - Rebuild!

We got to go back to the women's shelter, and the painting crew got to go back to where they had been yesterday. At the women's shelter, I found that the old insulation was still hanging in the ceiling. Then I thought twice about that. If it was left up there when a crew first mucked and gutted in the building, then it might still be moldy. If it was still moldy, it might cause problems after the building got finished. I went looking for a ladder tall enough for me to reach up there and take the insulation down. I found a ladder sitting in a different part of the women's shelter. On my way back to the insulation, I spotted more of it in a different place. It took me only a few minutes to tear out all the old insulation.

While I was looking around for other jobs to do, I almost stepped on a rusty nail. I went to look for a magnet and then went and collected all the rusty nails I could find. I helped in other odd jobs before we stopped for lunch. I had a sandwich in the cooler this time, so I didn't have to eat grilled cheese today.

After that, a rented tile remover was brought to the women's shelter and one volunteer started using it to clear off old linoleum tiles from the slab floors inside. I helped him by putting the scraped tiles and bits of tile into a wheelbarrow. Sometimes we traded places and he did the shoveling while I operated the tile remover. Some other volunteers came and we took turns using the tile remover. We got more efficient like this: we could send one volunteer to the trash pile with a wheelbarrow full of scraped tiles while we filled up another wheelbarrow with scraped tiles. We also had manual tile scrapers and we used these to get in the areas where the tile remover wasn't easy to operate.

There were actual construction workers also on contract at the women's shelter, and they jackhammered part of the slab floor to make way for new plumbing. We got to help unload the rubble from that operation. Then our group leader went to buy more drywall. He used the tool trailer to hold all of it, so when he arrived at the women's shelter, we all helped unload.

Once the work day was over, we headed back to the FEMA trailers to clean up. Then we got ready to go to New Orleans.

Day 2 - Unsuspecting

After we cleaned up for the day, we headed back to where we were staying in FEMA trailers. We had hamburgers and hot dogs for dessert. Because we're all from Ohio, we were curious about how the Buckeyes would be doing, and we hunted for a place that would let us watch the 2007 NCAA National Championship Basketball Game.

We found a nice place with big screen TVs on the walls and got to hang out. Unfortunately, the Buckeyes didn't do very well in the game. This was my first year trying to follow the brackets for the Buckeyes Men's Basketball team. I was hoping the Florida Gators wouldn't make it to the Championship, but they did.

Just like the 2007 BCS National Championship Game, the Buckeyes started out ahead of the Gators. But then the Gators made a quick comeback and stayed ahead for the rest of the game. We went back to the trailers with bruised egos and three more workdays.

Day 2 - Reconstruct!

Our group got split up into two distinct groups. One group handled painting while the other handled some construction work at a women's shelter that was being rebuilt. I thought a lot of today's work was like the tail end of gutting. I helped remove drop ceiling hangers and bits of wire from the ceiling in some rooms where a drywall ceiling was to be installed.

The drop ceiling hangers were little eyelets with wire wrapped through them to hold up the crossbeams of the tile ceiling. It took a lot of effort to stay balanced atop a ladder while twisting the eyelets until they completely unscrewed. Then one of the workers there told me if I hammered against the eyelet in one direction, it would bend. If I hammered it back the other direction, it would just snap off.

Once I started using a hammer on the eyelets, it was a lot easier to take them out. After that, most of the work was in getting lined up beneath one, then untangling the wire that was tied through the loop of the eyelet.

Our group leader used a concrete saw to cut some cinder blocks in the wall on one side of the building. I was curious to see what was happening there. It turned out that the plan for rebuilding the women's shelter called for a door where the blocks had gotten cut. I got to have a turn helping to sledge-hammer the wall until there was a door. At least two other people took turns, so we never got overexerted.

I got to watch a volunteer help open a door through a brick wall that was cut for a door also. He took a flying leap and drop-kicked the wall, and at least two thirds of it fell out. Brick walls don't have rebar inside them, so I think this is why the brick wall fell so quickly.

At lunch, I realized that I forgot to put my sandwich in the cooler we had brought. Since it had sat in the van, the cheese had melted. Another volunteer called it "grilled cheese the Louisiana way!" It tasted good.

In the afternoon, I went back to helping remove hooks from the ceiling in different rooms at the women's shelter. Since there was a deadline on getting the ceiling finished, another volunteer started helping me take away hooks. He showed me how I could use the side of the hammer to hit the eyelets. That made it much easier to swing and hit them. We worked like that for a while, but then I noticed something up in the higher part of the ceiling.

There was old insulation up there, and then I saw an ice cube tray jammed up underneath that. There was only one way an ice cube tray could be stuck there like that I thought. It had to be up there because Hurricane Katrina left it up there when the storm surge came through.

I didn't worry about what I saw. For a while, I helped some of the volunteers hang drywall in the upstairs part of the women's shelter. Then we got ready to end our work day and clean up.

There was bad news though--our group leader had gone to help somebody fix a truck engine. There was an accident with the winch used to lift the engine out of the vehicle body, and our group leader broke his finger because of it!

Day 1 - Pathfinder

Dad dropped me off in Grove City, after we decided not to try to go to Westerville to join the trip. I recognized somebody from the trip in December--one of the wannabe muckers from the Third Trip. After a short round of introductions, we prayed for a safe and successful trip to help rebuild in Louisiana. Our group consisted of a 15-passenger church van and two SUVs. We left Grove City in a light rain, and before we left Ohio, the rain stopped. The sunlight was beautiful and I enjoyed talking to the people I rode with.

We listened to some good music and a Christian comedian I hadn't heard of before. The driver also shared a story about a Christian rapper who has set up a church in the ghetto. It sounds very different from the typical mostly-Caucasian church I'm used to as a suburbanite, but it also sounds like it's a good idea. The rap we listened to was about the Crucifixion. It was a powerful contemporary view on the heart of what we believe as Christians.

As we traveled through Nashville, we wondered whether we would be pulled over by a police cruiser that started its sirens. Instead, the police passed us and got off the Interstate at a different exit.

In Mississippi, we stopped for refueling and restroom breaks, and met a person who stayed at his house when Hurricane Katrina came through Mississippi. He told us his story of the hurricane and the damage that followed it. Another person at the same gas station asked for information about Servants Unite, and John gave him a business card with contact information.

With the exception of an April Fool's Day joke, and stops to get gas, use bathrooms, or switch drivers, the rest of the trip to Louisiana was uneventful. After a brief introduction to our accommodations (a group of FEMA trailers allocated to a volunteer organization), we had a devotional and then went to bed. This was the 24th Servants Unite team to go to the Gulf Coast. The rest of my week would show me a mix of progress and the continuing need for volunteer assistance in rebuilding.

Prologue

I sent a question about a post at Servants Unite and got an answer from John. The email also included an invitation to join another volunteer crew going to Louisiana in the first week of April.

Up until this time, I hadn't ever really been sent an "invitation" to volunteer, although I felt it was the right thing to do. After checking on the details, I got permission to take another volunteer trip to Louisiana.

Day 7 - The Voyage Home

In the morning, our group leader took a vote: "do we eat breakfast first, and then hit the road, or do we hit the road and eat breakfast somewhere on the way?" The vote was taken to hit the road first, and find breakfast food on the way. We took off like a flash, and headed for Tennessee. We would stop for breakfast somewhere on the way. As we drove through Alabama, morning sun light began to burn off the thick fog in the lower-lying areas. When we reached the Alabama-Tennessee border, most of the fog was gone. North of Nashville, we pulled into a McDonalds and enjoyed another chance to hang out while we ate breakfast.

But we stayed on schedule also, breezing along the interstates on New Year's Day 2007. On the way home, one of the wannabe muckers said that even though he hadn't been in a team involved in mucking and gutting a house, he had enjoyed the trip. That was good to hear, because I had thought the same thing. Most of the trip home, we listened to music that the group leader had ripped to his laptop's hard drive on the Windows Media Player. We stopped in Kentucky for refueling and bathroom breaks, and then hit the road again. As the afternoon wore on into evening, we crossed back into Ohio and reached Columbus at about 6:00pm. We formed a circle for a final prayer, and afterward, said our goodbyes.

Dad drove me home, and I got to enjoy a belated 2006 Christmas with the family at the end of the long trip.