NOLA Day Two

NOLA Day 2

Last night I wrestled with my conscience most of the night. It was an epic struggle. What to do, what to do? On the one hand I had powerful urges I could not ignore. On the other, I knew if I gave in to them it would upset a comfortable situation I enjoyed immensely. I lay awake for what seemed like hours trying to decide. In the end, the urges won out. Okay, I wasn’t wrestling with my conscience so much as my bladder. I really had to go, but it was cold out, and a long walk to the porta-johns. I was at the end of the tent farthest from the door and I doubted my ability to navigate the entire way in the dark without awakening my roomies. Finally I could stand it no more and got up. I made it to the door and unzipped it quietly as I could. I pulled the tent flap back and was immediately blinded by powerful arc lights that they kept running all night long. It was bright as daylight, and, as I had already known, a good deal louder as the light’s generators joined the raucous chorus of all the others that they kept running all the time. Once in the porta-john, well, suffice it to say I could have done more than I did, but I just let it go. The opportunity I mean. It was a forbearance that was to haunt me later in the morning when there was no toilet paper to be had in the entire camp.

Promptly at 5:30 alarms started chirping like a swamp full of frogs all through the tent. My roomies rolled off their cots and really rather quietly headed off to their morning bible study. Yes, they, like most of the camp apparently, were part of some religious group. North Carolina State alone has 240 Campus Crusaders for Christ here. I politely (really, even though it was 5:30 and we weren’t supposed to muster at the busses until 7:30) declined their invitation to join them and pretended to go back to sleep. In fact, I tried rather hard to go back to sleep but unfortunately enjoyed no success as the strains of Kum Ba Yah began growing stronger and started competing with the generators. I made up a new verse.

Someone’s sleeping Lord, Kiss my Yah, etc.

My roomies were all excited because today Billy Graham and his son were supposed to be at the camp. Later they were having a crusade in Houston and they were all going. Billy runs a disaster relief group called the Samaritan’s Purse or something like that. They have several tractor trailers on the edge of the camp. I was walking by yesterday evening and a woman in one of the trailers said “Here’s have three free t-shirts.” Why three I wondered? Something to do with the Trinity? Anyway, that made them allright with me. No sign of Billy though.

In a related story former Vice-Presidential candidate John Edwards is supposed to be working here today to. He’s bringing 800 volunteers from North Carolina and their own set of tools. Haven’t seen him yet either.

I’m on team 21 Black. There are 11 of us. Our team leader is a guy named Brian from Santa Cruz. He’s the team leader because he was the first one over 35 to sign up for 21 Black. He’s actually done a good job; he has a good sense of humor, is capable, and regards the rules much as I do. We did get caught today stealing a wheelbarrow and he had to take some heat and give it back. But they didn’t see the two others I had traded for and had stashed in a shed behind the house. We worked today on Guerra street. Bungalow brick houses in what was probably a nice lower income neighborhood before the storm. The first thing we had to do when we got there was survey the scene for safety. I went in the house while everyone else looked at the back yard. I was a bit nervous. I had a hard time getting in the house. It was very dark inside. 3000 people are still missing and they have found three bodies on this project so far in the last six weeks. I thought I had a good notion of what it would be like, particularly after going through Kath and Dan’s house after their flood. I was wrong. This was pure chaos and ruin. Debris (read these people’s stuff) filled the entire space to about chest height. I had to carefully climb and pick my way through to make sure the water was off. They have begun to get some water pressure back in the parrish recently and it was supposed to have been turned off at the house. We have to remove everything, including the plumbing fixtures so we kind of wanted to make sure the water was off. It was, mostly.

The mold wasn’t too bad. I didn’t wear my respirator, just a good dust mask Kenny and Jimmy (two guys from NYC I’ve made friends with) gave me. I did wear a hard hat, safety glasses and steel toed boots. All of those came in handy. We spent the day hauling stuff out of the house to the street in front, where a man with a bobcat frontloader put it in a dump truck and hauled it a way. At first the mood was a bit somber. This was somebody’s life we were throwing out. Baby shoes, Christmas decorations, wedding china, everything. As time went on though we got used to it. In fact we soon started to wish whoever it was hadn’t lived quite so long. The house was packed. Every room, every closet, every cabinet, was filled completely with ruined stuff. When ever we opened a door it looked like a bad gag in a cheep comedy film. It took until after lunch to even get to the bedrooms. I don’t mean get to working on them, I mean actually remove enough stuff to where I could crawl over what was left and even see them. When we finally made it to the floor in the main room, there were 5 inches of mud on the carpet. Everything has to come out. By about 1 I was able to start pulling off the paneling to get to the sheet rock that I pulled off next. I was actually pretty good at that part. A crowbar is probably my favorite tool. I kept four people busy hauling the stuff out that I was pulling down.

We knocked off at about 3:30 and it was a good thing. I was beat. Still am. But it’s about time for dinner now and I have to be up at 5:30 to decline my roomies ‘bible study offer so I’m going to knock off from this too.