New Orleans Part 3

3/8/06
Last night I got very sick. I had a very high fever. I could not sleep and my already aching muscles could get no relief from the chills and aching that came with the fever. I felt like death. Some time in the night my fever broke. When I woke up this morning I felt a lot better. I decided to go to work. I mean, I only have a short time to make a difference here. I want to use every second and make it count. So I got dressed and packed my back with clean clothes to take a shower this afternoon. The walk out to the bus was painful and then Heath asked me to take the cooler. He works harder than all of us put together, so I never say no.
This afternoon one of the firemen came to check us out. I sat and talked with him while I ate lunch. HE said that his house was gone too, but that everything was great because his family was fine. He told me how it was to be here during and after the flood. He said he spend 2 days finding the floating bodies and tying them to lamp posts. He said he spent several days getting people off their roofs. The house next to where we are working has a hole in the roof from the residents who chopped their way out. They had been in their attic until the water got too high. He pointed and said, “There were hundreds like that.” Then he showed me a picture of his boss’s house the day of the flood. You can barely see the roof in the picture. He had tears in his eyes when he talked about breaking into the gas station to get the Slim Jims and Coke to feed to the people he had brought to the gym of the school. There was no where for them to go. He said they didn’t see outside help from Sunday until Wednesday. Then he said, “You know who the first people we saw where? No, it wasn’t the National Guard and no it wasn’t FEMA, it was the Canadian Mounties. They came all the way down and when they got in they told us they had tried to get in the day before, but the Guard wouldn’t let ‘em through, so they went down the river and convinced a barge owner to take them across. They were the first one’s we saw. The Guard was keeping people out!” I shook my head in disbelief. What a concept. If New York had a natural disaster, I have no doubt I would be telling the same story. Leave it to Canada to take better care of our people than we give.
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I was having a very hard time breathing today. It was very humid; my throat is thick with mucus and then the mask on top of it all. It was tough to work. I kept going. It was very important to me not to waste any time. We finished 2609 Shannon St., and then moved on to help another group. They had a very big house. They had a terrible system. Not nearly as organized as we had been. It was frustrating for us. So we took over. We finished the front room in about a ½ hour and then moved on to the rest of the house. If I had to guess, I would say we did about 40% of the house that day, without their help for the most part. They took a lot of breaks, they sat and smoked, they broke windows for no reason. We all got a little annoyed, but we just kept on truckin’. We said a prayer for the house like we did the last one, giving it all of our good energy and blessings and then our group of 10 women showed those boys how work is really done. Surprisingly, by the end of the day, they were telling us how inspirational it was to work with us, that we were really motivated and that they wanted to work harder because we had shown them how it was done. We were all surprised to hear that. Turned out they were from Georgia. Most were from a college and were getting class credit for being there. That in itself was the difference between our two groups. All of us from St Rose were there because we wanted to be, because we were deeply affected and because we wanted to get involved and make a difference. To them, it didn’t matter whether they worked hard or not. They got credit either way…