Back from the bayou

There is no way that this post is going to be complete. But it'll have a bunch of pictures, I'll tell some stories, and eventually I'll get a website put together with more pictures and stuff from the trip. If I make it through all the exams, assignments, quizzes, and visitors that I'm swamped with this week.

Sometime in the neighbourhood of ten o'clock on Saturday morning, March 4th, 62 Penn State students and State College community members gathered in the parking lot of the State College Presbyterian Church. After taking the better part of an hour to load ourselves into five big white 15-passenger vans, and our luggage into a big blue van, we finally made it out of the parking lot, only to stop an hour later because somebody "needed to go potty". We made the brilliant tactical decision of stopping at a gas station with one washroom, so the rest stop only took an hour or so...

After that initial faux pas, we managed a more orderly drive the rest of the way, and rolled into New Orleans about lunchtime on Sunday, after devouring many bags of gorp, having entirely too much fun with the walkie-talkies, and somehow only getting separated once, despite the best efforts of Vans #1 and #2 to weave through the interstate traffic quickly enough to leave the rest of us poor fools coughing in the dust.

New Orleans was an eye-opener. The city is still in shambles - just because the news cameras leave doesn't mean the disaster's over. We saw cars overturned under the highway, rows upon rows of them; empty parking lots filled with debris next to gutted-out buildings; vast panoramas of brokenness in which there was no sign of life, of movement, of a continued human presence. One iconic image came nearly immediately, as we passed one such garbage-covered parking lot, with no sign of life anywhere around, save for one lonely figure walking through the debris slowly filling a trash bag, slowly carrying out his Sisyphean task.

One (very) little bit of a silver lining, though - at least for me. There's something incredibly satisfying about seeing a gutted-out and ruined Wal-Mart, the shattered remnants of a McDonald's, and knowing that at least some of the cancer was torn away with the flesh. But this will sidetrack me very quickly, and deserves a whole post of its own some other time - and in any case, the main point is the larger devastation that we saw.

At the main MDS (Mennonite Disaster Service) site in New Orleans, the group split into three smaller groups of about twenty each. One remained in New Orleans, one went on to Houma, a native reservation about an hour southwest of the city, and the third, which I was in, went to New Iberia, two hours west. In New Iberia we were met by Big Mike, the coordinator of the MDS site there, who welcomed us and then warned us about the fire ants, alligators, poisonous spiders, and drug dealers that surrounded the site where we stayed. Suitably intimidated, we all went off to bed relatively quickly, and slept the sleep of twenty college students who have just spent thirty-some odd hours in a van with each other.

The next morning was Monday, and we got down to work - we split up into five smaller teams, each of which went to a different work site. I spent the first three days working with Justin, Dave, and occasionally Spud and Mike, under the supervision of a crazy German guy named Fete (top left corner of the picture) who called everyone "señorita", putting floors in at Jeremy Brussard's house. When we first saw the place, it didn't look much like a liveable house - a house with no floors isn't much of a house. Three days and many hours with a nail gun later, the majority of it had a floor, and we were in the process of putting up doors and baseboards. It's amazing how much of a difference can come over a house in just a few days.

By Thursday morning, the work at the Brussard house was slowing down enough that I was switched to another team, and went to work at Mike Prince's house. The Princes' house had been flooded by Hurricane Rita, after which they had been forced to have a crane come and move it from its original location to some higher ground, where it now stands on top of some concrete pylons - its floor is now eight feet about sea level. They are currently living in a school bus in the front yard, with tie-dyed shirts hanging in the windows, and a chicken coop out back. The chickens would occasionally wander into the house while we worked - hence the picture at the beginning of this post.

When we got there, about half of the house had no floor to speak of, and several of the walls were rotted out - check out the before and after pictures (those are of the same room) to see the difference between Wednesday morning and Friday afternoon. In between, we got to play with lots of power tools, and managed to do so without any injuries, serious or otherwise. Unless you count the injury to Spud's pride when he found out that the baby alligator he found in one of the walls was really just a gecko...

But of course, just as we were really starting to enjoy ourselves, bond together as a group, and banish from our minds all thought of ever returning to school, it was Saturday morning, and time to drive again. So at 5:15 in the blessed a.m., we all piled into the vans and headed for New Orleans, where we joined the other groups, spent a few hours walking around the French Quarter, and then headed for home, and at suppertime on Sunday, rolled back into State College and all promptly fell asleep. After showering, of course.

This account has been woefully incomplete, as it was bound to be - no mention of our amazing group leaders, Erica and Lois; no mention of the long-term MDS volunteers we met down in New Iberia; no mention of the chaos of trying to get six 15-passenger vans into the proper order while driving in convoy down the interstate; no mention of the gigantic crawfish and shrimp dinner the family whose house we were working on cooked on Wednesday night; no mention of the enormous pot of gumbo they served us on Friday for lunch (for those of you who have seen me cook, this was several order of magnitude larger than anything I've ever done), which contained what were definitely entire crab claws, shell and all; no mention of the running gags of the week (WHAT are you DOING?!? Don't you know the BUILDING is on FIRE?!?); no mention of The Regulator; and so on and so forth. Those will have to come out with the fullness of time... in the meantime, suffice it to say that this past week has been by far the best week I've had so far for community, for friends, for hanging out, for just general good times, since I left Grebel last year. Maybe I need to drop out of school and go join MDS...