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.