New Orleans or Bust

Okay I've got a ton of stuff to catch up on. I'm in NO for a few days. I've been here since Wednesday. I'll start with that. The trip here was really fun. I rode with Powveria, Carrie, and Courtney. I've never met Courtney previously, but she was a bit quiet but pretty cool. So on Thursday I rode with Megan to City Hall to talk to the head of the building license code. He was an M.E. from the U of A and old. He was really cool and told us how it was and what the problem was. He said lots of people came from all over the place to help "rebuild New Orleans". He would confront them and tell them that they really just wanted to come and make lots of money. He also told me a story about a lady who called about not getting any money for her house. He said that she told him she'd received two checks. He asked for how much and she responded that they totaled over 200K. He asked her if she had a huge house or a double or what and she replied that her house was a single and she thought it was worth more. After we left there, we went to babysit for a bit. The kids were a lot of fun, even though one of them was scared of me and super attached to Megan. To tell both sides of the story, the couple we babysat for had just bought a new house preKatrina. They now live in a small apartment and are working on rebuilding their house. We watched the kids while they worked on it. They were really nice and the kids were a lot of fun. More RFCs arrived, we went out to eat and then came back to sleep.

The next day we started gutting. We hit a double and worked on both sides, after we hit a small garage and totally emptied it. The house was fun, as we took crowbars, shovels and hammers to every single wall. WILD! Jordan Hurst was running around looking for anything left of walls and taking them out. Pow and I worked in the kitchen removing flooring and wall panels. It was fun, but the doctor's masks were hot and didn't work real great. So we've been doing things like this everyday since I've been here. I get up earlier than most, to help Megan prepare stuff for the groups. We make sandwiches, load trailers and all that jazz. We work until 4 or so and then go out on the town or just chill.

Last night we went to the French Quarter to sing Christmas Carols and then Meg and I went out to eat at some Cajun place. I had a nice piece of catfish with some shrimp etoufee. It was really good stuff. Tonight we are extremely tired and I plan on helping prepare stuff for tomorrow so I can sleep late. It's been really fun and a great eye opener. I don't really work for the people here, I work for God and that's what keeps me working when the residents aren't around or don't bother helping us. The house today was really big and had lots of glasses and plates. I took some shot glasses, as the owner only wanted to throw it all out. I also found immense pleasure in breaking some glass, which literally exploded in my hands. Fun stuff.

One last note, Megan's been really good. It took me a bit to understand just how busy and important she is here. People are always looking for her, including me. I try not to tag along everywhere she goes, but I look most forward to chilling with her. I will try to post again before we leave, but EVERYONE here is constantly on here and it annoys me so I try to avoid it.