Day 2

We arrived at the home we were assigned after a two hour drive--the traffic on Interstate 10 is terrible, like a bad day on the Southeast Expressway. It should have taken us 30 minutes. The traffic is a "good" sign because one of the people from the church (5 men from Iowa) who are also volunteering this week, and according to one of them who came in May, there was little traffic. Apparently much of the traffic comes from poeple communting from Baton Rouge where a lot of displaced people moved.

Like the owners of the house we are tearing apart. Fran and Fred who are now renting in Baton Rouge near one of their daughters, lived in this house for 53 years before Hurricane Katrina. Fred will be 78 next month and Fran is 74. They both greeted us warmly as we pulled up to their house. They are so thankful that we are helping them--we overheard them several times on their cell phones talking with friends and family and mentioning that people from Boston were helping them clean up. Fran brouught a trunkful of food and soda and was constantly offering it to us.

We were told that their house was "prisitine", an irony of the highest order if you were to walk in and look at it. "Pristine" means that it had been entered already and the furnishings had been taken out. The team from the other church was "first entry" into their house down the road. That means that no one had entered it for 13 months--pictures still on the walls and the furnishings strewn all over.

In any case, it was bracing to walk into a house that had been devastated by hurricane and flood. The walls are green with mildew and mold, and the odor isn't particularly pleasant either. We started sweeping the debris out first for safety. Then some started tearing out carpets and taking them out to the debris heap, others began attacking the kitchen, others the the lower finished basement level. Fred and Fran are fortunate because the water rose only to about 8 feet and their second floor was spared.

One of the more touching moments was watching Fran and Fred who were sitting outside on the driveway as Fran who had recovered an old receipe container was slowly going through them reminiscing about different meals she had made through the years. When they had evacuated before Katrina in the rush they had forgotten to bring all of the old photo albums, so they were all lost.

All eleven of us worked hard, taking short breaks every 45 minutes or so to hydrate ourselves. Fortunately, a front had gone through on Sunday night and the humidity had gone down, so the weather was beautiful. At the end of the day, there was a gigantic pile of debris in the front lawn that was picked up by a truck dedicated to picking up debris.

One of the most striking things about our experience yesterday was the neighborhood--it is like a ghost town. There is almost no one living in the neighborhood and across their street and down a little way from their house there is an empty school. We ate lunch at baseball park where no one was playing baseball, and which, in fact, had just been cleaned up two days before.

As for prayer requests, please keep Fred and Fran in your prayers. Fran was having a difficult time yesterday afernoon. Also pray for us that we will work well and safely together again.