I realize that it has been a week since I updated, and I apologize to my faithful readers. This will be a bit of a long post, so now would be the time to grab a snack, go to the bathroom and get comfortable. Here we go.
Monday: Happy 24th Birthday to me! What did I do on this day? I continued to gut the house we were working on last week. Katie and our unit leader, Jeanine, brought cupcakes and donuts for a morning break for my birthday and that night some of us went out for dinner. We went to this restaurant called O'Henry's that had advertised a free birthday steak. I was expecting a little thing but what I got was a most delicious 12oz New York strip steak and some tasty mashed potatos. All free! Thank you everyone for your happy birthday calls, text messages and online messages. It was my first birthday away from home and friends and it wasn't shabby.
Tuesday: We finished gutting the house. Holy crap, it was hard work. It took our team five days to gut a duplex in high 70s/low 80s degree weather. I sweated so much that my sweat ceased to taste salty. Gross, I know, but that gives you an idea of how hard we worked. The owner of the place stopped by one day and he was so grateful for all the work we did. He plans on having his family on one side of the house and his parents on the other side. That made me feel good. Another thing that was pointed out to me was that once people see someone working on a house in a neighborhood that has been abandoned, other people see life coming back to the neighborhood and start to rebuild their homes. We saw this happen. On the first day, only a handful of people walked past the house. By Tuesday, there were other houses being gutted, more foot traffic coming by, and just a general atmosphere of "let's get back into this neighborhood!" This was definatly encouraging to me.
Wednesday: To give us a much needed break from gutting houses, Wednesday we did a job called RatBusters. New Orleans is not overrun by rats, but the population has risen since the hurricanes. So what the city of NO is doing is putting small bricks of rat poison down the sewer drains. FYI, rats cannot vomit. I did not know this. So, if any other animal should eat this poison, they would throw it up. I spent this day putting rat poison on wires that will be put down drains all over the city. All in all, I probably did 3 hours of actual work and the rest of the time was spent on a break, lunch and sleeping.
Thursday: Another easy day for us. We went to the house of one of the Operation Blessing volunteers and scraped paint off the outside of the house to get it ready for painting. It was a warm day, not hot, so it was a very pleasant working day.
Friday and Saturday: Spring Break! I couldn't sleep in tho, because I got up early to ride the bus into New Orleans with a bunch of other AmeriCorps people. I stayed in a hotel called The Ambassador that was a ten minute walk from the French Quarter and Bourbon St. I spent all Friday and Saturday wandering around New Orleans and taking in all the touristy things. I ate beignets at Cafe du Monde, looked around in St. Louis Cathedral, shopped along Decatur St. and had my first po'boy sandwich. I had a blast. I only spent one night there because I wanted time to unwind at our housing site and do laundry and just generally relax.
Sunday: Happy Easter! I didn't do much today, which was just what I wanted. I slept in, went to Walmart, ate sushi and caught up on computery stuff.
That is what my week has been like. Only six more weeks here. We will leave Operation Blessing on May 18 and drive to a YMCA camp 30 minutes out of Houston where we will have a week of transition. Then on Saturday, May 26, I will fly out of Houston to Portland. I'll be home for a whole week! I'm so excited, I could just pee! Ya'll better have some Jenna time scheduled into your calander, because I want to see my friends and remember what it is like to be a normal person and not just an Ameri-person. I'll fly back to Houston on June 3. From there, I don't know where I'll be. Stay tuned for more information.
I have one more day off tomorrow for Spring Break and I'm pretty happy about that. That means that I'll have another four-day work week and that is pretty sweet. There will only be seven other volunteers staying here (other than my team and the Denver team that is also here), so it should stay pretty quiet around here. We will probably gut another house, but who knows what we shall be doing this week. I'll try to keep this more updated this week so it isn't so long when I finally do write on here. Hope your second week of April is happy and sunny!
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