NEXT CSF TRIP

Touched by the stories and pictures you read and saw here? Want to help out? Then keep open the week of the University of Minnesota's Spring Break '07, which is when Christian Student Fellowship will be heading down to help out again. The tentative dates are March 10-18, 2007 and we'd love to have you join our team! Please contact Rebecca at heyrebecca@csf.net for more details.

(posted by Rebecca on 8/14/06)

New Orleans - August '06

Back Home in MN Already!

We're back home in Minnesota! I can't believe how quickly our trip went and I just didn't have enough opportunities to update our blog because of the busyness. However, I'll do my best to bring you up to speed on the last couple of days of our trip. Thursday and Friday were both half days of work and we used them to sand the first coat of mud on Michelle's house. It's not that big (3 bedroooms, 2 bathrooms, a living room and kitchen), but it was messy, difficult work. Because of the humidity, we would sweat 24-7 and then the dust falling off the walls would stick to us and form kind of a white paste that was everywhere on our bodies. However, with a little hard work and lots of water breaks, we were able to finish all the sanding and leave the entire house ready for another crew of volunteers to put up the second coat of mudding (the whole mudding/sanding process needs to be done three times to create the smoothest walls possible).

While we were sanding, we also got a little taste of what life is like financially for many hurricane victims. One morning there was a knock at Michelle's door and someone walked in and handed me a slip of paper. After reading it, I realized that it was a notice saying that the water was going to be turned off if several months of back pay were not paid in two weeks time. Michelle shared later that making ends meet since the hurricane had been hard. Not only did she need to pay the mortgage on a house she couldn't live in because it was too damaged to occupy, she needed to pay utilities for both that house (so she could rebuild) and for her trailer (which luckily she doesn't have to pay for because it came from FEMA). Michelle's dad Carol also shared that like most other people affected by the hurricane, Michelle did not have flood insurance, so she received no money from insurance even though her house needed to be totally resheetrocked. Our team really wanted to help Michelle, and after consulting our budget we realized that we had enough money left over from the generous donors who helped make our trip possible to leave enough with Michelle to cover her water bill.

Thursday afternoon and evening we spent in New Orleans. One of the volunteer coordinators at Aldersgate took us on a tour of the 9th Ward and St. Bernard's Parish, two of the communities hardest hit by the flooding. The whole experience was amazingly eye-opening. We drove and walked through neighborhoods that looked like the hurricane had just occured yesterday. For blocks and blocks we saw houses that had been lifted up by the water and placed back down again off their foundations. The insides were full of all kinds of personal items and furniture that had been lifted up by the flood and then deposited back down every which way. What was left of walls and ceilings were splotched with mold and mildew and there were large piles of trash everywhere. There was even a 40 foot barge still in the middle of the street in one neighborhood a mile or so from any water! It amazed all of us that one year after Hurricane Katrina there could still be neighborhoods that looked this way. Most of the residents had not returned and those that had were living in FEMA trailers in the middle of what looked like a war zone. We heard that New Orleans is predicting that it will take 5-10 years to rebuild and I was convicted anew of the importance of volunteers and the great need that still remains in hurricane-affected areas.

On Friday afternoon we packed up and left for Pensacola. My flight from Pensacola to Minneapolis flew out Friday night (with lots of delays because of bad weather and all the security issues) and everyone else followed Saturday morning. All in all, it was a great trip: our team was very unified and had a great time hanging out together, we worked hard, and we learned a lot. I guarantee that the same would happen for you if you decided to head down south and help your brothers and sisters in need!

(posted by Rebecca at 8:17 am on 8/14/06)

Pictures of Us Working

Another Update

It's about time for another update! The last two days have been days of learning our way around our home for the week at Aldersgate Methodist Church in Slidell, Louisiana. Tuesday we got trained in on drywall finishing (mudding, taping and sanding the sheetrock that other teams have installed) and we were introduced to the house we will be working at for the rest of the week. Our house belongs to Michelle and her four children. It is in a lower-middle class neighborhood that didn't expect flooding because it has it's own levee. Instead, the water came up over the levee (Michelle's house was flooded to about 5 feet) and then when the water started to recede a couple of hours later, the levee caught the water and held it for a couple of weeks in Michelle's neighborhood until they could figure out how to drain it. Most of the people in Michelle's neighborhood are rebuilding, because they have mortages to pay off on their houses and they can't afford to move away.

Michelle got her name on the church list asking for help last October, and they were finally able to start on her home in June. By the time we got there, a couple of teams from North Carolina, Illinois and New York had already put up the sheetrock and done about half of the first layer of mudding. It's hot, sweaty work, but after two days we have finished the first layer of mudding throughout the whole house. Tomorrow we will be sanding!

Michelle's dad Carol, who is also from Slidell but suffered no damage in the storm, and Michelle's 13 year-old daughter Amanda have been spending quite a bit of time talking with us as we work on the house. They all evacuated a couple of days before Katrina came through, but by the time they returned, the mold had taken over the house and so the drywall needed to be stripped down to the studs and treated with bleach up to about 8 feet off the ground. Michelle and her two youngest children are currently living on a FEMA trailer in their front yard and are hoping their home will be finished and they can move back in by October.

Tomorrow is another big day so I better finish up, but please keep praying for us! We will be heading in to get a tour of the 9th Ward in New Orleans tomorrow (one of the districts that was hit the worst in the flooding) which we have heard is an eye-opening experience about how bad things really still area in some areas down here. Check back for more details soon!

(posted by Rebecca at 7:59 pm on 8/9/2006)

Pictures from Linda's House

(posted by Rebecca at 8:48 pm on 8/8/06)

WE'VE ARRIVED!

Hello friends! I am writing from the hot and humid state of Louisiana, where we arrived bright and early this morning. The past couple of days since the arrival of our group of five in the Deep South have been busy. Our plane from Minnesota touched down in Pensacola, Florida right on time, at 11:42 am on Saturday morning, after a short layover in Atlanta. A very friendly man from 1st Methodist Church in Pensacola met us at the airport with a large van that the church has generously lent to us for the week. He gave us a short tour of the church (where we will be staying on Friday night) and then we were off to the beach! Pensacola is famous for having the whitest beaches in North America and we were lucky enough to be able to spend a couple of hours on Pensacola Beach on Santa Rosa Island, which is a small island made up of four beaches just off the coast of Pensacola.

After spending the afternoon in Pensacola, our two-hour drive took us through Alabama (where we stopped for a bite to eat at IHOP) and on to our final destination of Ocean Springs, Mississippi. We stayed overnight there with a wonderful woman named Linda, who I met on my first trip to Ocean Springs in January. At that time, a group of CSF students worked on dry walling her daughter’s house, which was heavily damaged from winds and flooding during hurricane Katrina. When I returned with a second group of CSF students in March to Ocean Springs, we worked on putting up and painting all of the indoor trim, and so I got to see Linda and spend time with her once again. This time, the five of us also met her daughter Nesha for the first time. Nesha was just able to move back into her house for the first time 2 weeks ago (the house still isn’t finished and there isn’t much furniture on the inside, but at least it is livable finally). We also got to meet Linda’s sister Gilda and her two pre-teen sons, Jordan and Nigel, who are currently living in a FEMA trailer on Nesha’s property.

Sunday morning we joined Linda at her church and then we rolled up our sleeves and got in our first half-day of work painting the outside trim around Nesha’s house. It looked like a small enough job, but by the time we got it all painted and cleaned up it had taken us about 5 hours. It was fun to see the nice, cleanly painted results though! After we finished working Linda cooked us up a HUGE meal of BBQ chicken, ribs, coleslaw, potato salad, watermelon, and sweet corn soaked in butter. It was so amazing!! (And I haven’t even mentioned the biscuits, eggs, bacon, and cheesy grits that she cooked us for breakfast yesterday and today!). Then we spend the rest of the evening playing PlayStation with Jordan and Nigel and visiting with Linda and Nesha. It really was a great day of both work and fun!

This morning we got up really early, had another big, tasty breakfast soaked in butter, and were on the road by 6:30 am. We arrived at Aldersgate Methodist Church just a little before 8 am, spent a couple of hours grocery shopping for our food for the week, and then headed out to our first assignment – putting a tar-like sealant on a leaky tin roof that covers the front porch of a little trailer home that belongs to a sweet old lady named Rose. Rose had water rise under her trailer to just below her flooring. This caused all of her flooring to buckle so that when you walk inside of her home you have to be careful not to trip on one of the dips in the uneven flooring. Unfortunately, the $2000 she recieved from the government was only enough to replace the water-damaged living room furniture and freezer and since she recieved no money from her insurance company, she has no plans to replace the flooring. Furthermore, the layer of sealant we put on her porch roof is actually only necessary because an earlier volunteer team put on the roof incorrectly (they didn’t layer the tin enough, causing the water to leak through the cracks whenever it rains). This illustrates another common problem faced by people trying to rebuild – even when area churches are able to offer help, it is often help provided by well-meaning but inexperienced volunteers who do a job incorrectly that needs to be fixed later on. After an afternoon of hard, hot, and extremely dirty work, our tar-covered crew headed home with the promise of slightly cleaner work tomorrow - mudding and sanding drywall.

Overall, things are going great. The heat and humidity is pretty oppressive, so please pray that our team (Brian, Eric, Lisa, Rebecca & Zeb) can stay hydrated and not get heat stroke or any other heat-related illnesses. We are also pretty tired, so we would also appreciate your prayers for energy and strength. Finally, please pray for Linda, who suffers from various health problems due to blood clots, and her daughter Nesha, who is going through a very tough time of uncertainty and depression related to a difficult job situation (on top of the fact that she has been staying with friends and trying to get her house rebuilt the past year).

Thanks so much for prayers and your support and please keep checking back for more updates and some pictures (coming soon)!

(posted by Rebecca at 7:13 pm on 8/7/06)