New Orleans Part 2

3/6/06
This morning we rode a greyhound to our work site. The first group got off the bus at their stop . It was a one story(as most are) and in the front yard was a tall medium build blonde on her cell phone. As the kids(most are 17-21) piled off the bus, the woman stared in disbelief. They old her they were there to clean out(gut) her house. She dropped her cell phone. She started to cry. She was not crying because of the tragedy that was losing her home and all of her possessions, she cried because we were there. She cried because we cared and because the emotional stess of throwing out her ruined belongings was no longer hers to carry alone. I was so moved that I could not restrain myself from crying. I sat staring at her and cried. I could not stop it from coming out of me.I shook and sobbed silently in my seat. Heath patted my shoulder.
And then we got to our stop. I understood on a whole new level now why it was so important, what we are doing.I couldn't help but think how I would feel if this were my home, if I had to stand outside my front door and witness what we were seeing. Noone had stepped foot into our house since Hurricane Katrina six and a half months ago. Even the pictures I took( it was hard to find pictures taht where appropriate plus I felt guilty) did not accurately depict the atrocity of this event, the horror that 20 feet of water could cause.I wanted to get to work.
We could barely get the front door open. When we did, mud spilled out in congealed chunks. Furniture was upside down. A wedding dress hung from a door frame. There was not an inch of clear floor. The room was a pile...literally a pile of mud and stuff.It looked like a mountain that we could never conquer. We thought to ourselves, "this will take us all week."
So we began, grabbing the shoes and clothes, bottles of cleaning solution, mud mud and more mud, dishes, appliances, tv's and stereos, cabinets, beds, all covered in mud. All covered in mold, covered in mud, stuck in the mud. It looked nothing like a home.For that matter the town doesnt look anything like a town.It doesnt seem like people should be here, or that they have been here for ages. It seems that this just happened yesterday, yet it seems that people havent been here for years. It's a ghost town with random looters in the streets. A house here or there will have a sullen man or woman with a shovel, a rake, slowly but steadily removing the rubble, the caked mud, the backed up sewege, the destroyed photographs.
I still haven't seen any children.
All day we dug out the kitchen and the livingroom, stopping only for lunch or to catch some air that didn't wreak of mold or rotten food. In the kitchen the pots in the cupboards were filled with six month old mud water spilled onto my pants and shoes and cracked glass jars of pickles rolled out from under the fridge. We had duct taped the fridge to save ourselves the stench of the rotting meat in the freezer, but the stagnant meat water drained out when we turned the frige upright anyhow.
We found all sorts of animals in the house. Crawfish, minnows in the bath tub, frogs and cockroaches.Giant black spiders waited behind every column of insulation. It was very difficult to breathe with the N95 mask on, but they are the only one's approved for working in black mold which apparently is very dangerous. My back began to ache around noon. The repetitious shovelling of the mud proved too much for my poor back. But I kept working. I felt a reverence, a respect for the people who had lost everything. Even the frequent panic attacks from the claustrophobic masks did not deter me from working because I felt I owed it to them. I didnt have much time to get involved, to make a difference.

Fron 8am to 3pm we dug and hauled and hammered and grunted. We were exhausted, but by 3 o'clock we all looked around the filthy but strangely more liveable space we had created. We finished the large livingroom and kitchen and we were half done with the bathroom. We had torn down the moldy sheetrock(whuch crumbled in our hands like cake) and shoveled out the majority of the stagnant, modly six inch sludge that covered everything. For tomorrow: the bedrooms....