usernamenumber | Final New Orleans post

Instead of trying to write out detailed acounts of the last few days I'm going to finish my New Orleans journal by piecing together, in no particual order, all of the thoughts and vignettes that have crossed my mind lately. This trip has been such an experience. We worked hard in St Bernard and we played hard in the city. I really grew to know and like the Hatters on my team plus some new friends we picked up along the way.

As you've probably guessed, Pete's photo gallery has been updated. I'll scan some of my own photos soon, I hope.

On day three everything came together. We started working as a team. We also (with the exception of Laurie, I assume) got nasty cases of testosterone poisoning and began to swear like, well, construction workers. And then there was this strange way of speaking we developed: sort of a cross between a southerner and a gangsta rapper. Strange lines like, "Where the sledgehammer at? Ah gots ta get mah sledge on!" were shouted through the house, even by me. I figured out the key to effective ~~con~~destruction work on day three: Go into house, pick up nearest tool, find job appropriate for that tool. Deceptively simple, but it took a while to figure out. When the end of the working day came I was caught off-guard because I hadn't dropped dead from exhaustion yet like on the previous days.

On day four I invented something. I call it the "working crevatte". It is created by taking an a-shirt, dunking it in icewater from our cooler and then tying it around one's neck with the knot in front. The result feels very, very nice, and is ever so stylish for the man who wants an extra touch of elegance on the job. When the bus came that day we said we wanted to keep going. Everyone felt like they had at least a couple of hours left in them. When we weren't allowed to do that we arranged with the bus driver to head out early the next day.

Day five started like the last song at a show: dance harder, 'cause you know it's going to be over soon. At 11:30am we were about 2 hours away from having our second house finished when it started to rain. Jen said that if the rain didn't stop soon we'd have to call it a day because things would be too slippery and dangerous to continue so we started working faster. Then Jen called in for a weather report and was told that there was a tornado warning in our area. I guess we should be proud that it took an Act of God to stop us, but it still feels anticlimactic. We all climbed on top of the debris pile, now nearly as tall and wide as the house its self and did the big group victory shot (note the tree directly behind us to get a sense of the pile's size).

Later that evening, my uncle told me he could see a tornado beginning to form, though it never touched down, near where we were.

One day we had an extremely cool bus driver who, instead of taking us straight back to camp, gave us a tour of St. Bernard parish. The devastation goes on and on. House after house, neighborhood after neighborhood. We drove for 20 minutes and didn't see a single livable home. We saw a huge shrimping boat sitting that had been lifted over the levy and dropped on someone's house.

We saw a car slammed into the top of a truck at a 45 degree angle such that a year after the impact it was still there.

We saw messages people had written in spray pain on their roofs: huge "HELP" signs and, in one case, "We're ok. Waded out" with a cell number to call.

Along one of the canals you could see foundations with no houses. The houses themselves had been lifted up and floated across the canal, crashing into houses on the other side.

A week of work from us cleaned out two houses. There are literally hundreds left. I hadn't heard anything on the news about New Orleans for a while, so I'd assumed that things were all back to normal. They're not. And it's going to be years until they are, for the land at least. Fortunately a lot of people seem to have moved on.

Greg said something really interesting as we walked through Bywater. He said that in a lot of ways the hurricane has re-inforced New Orleans' character as a city. I asked him what he meant by that and he said, "The vibrant and the destroyed, side by side. It's always been like that".

Bourbon street on any given friday looks like Pacific ave on New Year's, but with more music.

On Frenchman street, which is a bit like Bourbon street, with just as much music but not as much flash and not quite as many people, I watched a reggae band whose drummer had gentle eyes, but who pounded on his snare with a purpose. I'm finding that I really enjoy live reggae. Why is it that studio albums always put me to sleep?

There is a certain unappreciated genious to the design of the crowbar. The manifold uses of its subtly but significantly different ends is lost on those whose primary interface with the tool is Half Life.

I know several people on the team, including me, who say they'll go again if Red Hat has trouble filling the next trip with volunteers. I know people from the previous group who say the same.

On evening three, as we were heading out to town after the day's work, we passed Bus Captain Jen in the hall. Sean invited her to come with us and she's been out with us every night since, including Friday night. Jen is a very cute twenty-something who is amazingly friendly and sweet. She also has a degree in construction work, which I didn't even know existed, and wields sledgehammers, hauls appliances and stacks wheelbarrows like nobody's business. I think every guy in the group is crushing on her to some extent.

On evening four we started taking David, the only non-Hatter in our dorm, out with us as well. I knew I was going to like him when I noticed an Atom and His Package sticker on his laptop. He's an excellent guy out spending a month at Camp Hope. He quit his previous job as a civil engineer when it became clear that it would have left him behind a desk more often than out in the field. When we took a group photo before leaving for the airport Dave and Jen were both in it.

In Camp Hope there were no mirrors. In what used to be the school cafeteria long tables were set up where people would get together and play chess, checkers and any other game that didn't require power. Before we went out one night there must have been fifty people there from all the different groups. It was so beautiful, it made me wonder whether an old school could be rezoned for permanent residential living and used as the basis for building a community.

I performed "Living on a Prayer" in a karaoke bar Friday night. I grossly underestimated my ability to do the high parts of that song, but the audience was easy to please. They cheered when I let my hair down.

There is such an insane amount of sexual tension in this town. It makes me much more uncomfortable than the drinking because, unlike intoxication, it represents an actual temptation to me. Tempted toward what, I'm not sure, but the feelings it wakes up are... untamed. I'm not comfortable with them.

I think that my urge to create, especially when I'm feeling depressed, is connected to my fear of death. And yet I don't feel much compulsion to have kids. It's all about creating things and accomplishments, not people. I wonder why that is.

On Frenchman I found a man who had built and enormous metal rig around a kettle drum to which he had attached all manner of drums, bells and other bangables in a full 360 degree arc around the central drum. Also attached was a platter with sticks for the using. He had a guitarist jamming with him and I jumped in for an improv percussion/percussion/guitar trio. It was great. We talked afterward about how he had built it. The device screamed "burning man" and sure enough he said that he'd be there this year.

Listening to your friends compare notes to piece together all of the embarrassing things they did last night is amusing. It is also a good way to leave one with no regrets about not having gotten wasted. Sleep deprivation makes me plenty loopy and big crowds give me a buzz. That's all I needed to enjoy last night immensely.

Certain colleagues of mine have influenced me toward being more unabashedly male than I normally am. I even participated in, shall we say, a frank discussion of the physical merits of some of the women at camp. Said discussion took place in a gay bar, which somehow makes me feel like less of a jerk for it.

When locals hear that we are relief workers, they tell us thank you for being here. The bartender at the place we went last night came over said that we're giving people hope and that that's what New Orleans needs right now. I told him that I wasn't sure. The first house we gutted had a for-sale sign in the window, as do a lot of houses in the neighborhood. I feel like I'm doing a good deed but also being a sap by clearing places out for free so that developers can make more of a profit selling them. Helping people move in is one thing, helping real estate agents is another. The bartender conceded that I was correct there, but added that with FEMA having basically handed out trailers, run out of money for assistance and bailed, nobody else was going to do it and one way or another it needed to be done. He had a point. I think the best point made on this topic was when someone pointed out that if only we had a few thousand soldiers or national guardsmen left in the freaking country they could clean these houses out a hell of a lot faster than a bunch of church volunteers and software people.

On day three of our project I took a walk through the abandoned neighborhood we were working in. House after house for block after block was empty or being emptied, with piles of debris in every lawn, spreading into the street. The scene here has been compared to a post-apocalyptic movie set, but that doesn't seem quite right to me. With the exception of Mad-Max-esque desert settings, after the apocalypse everything gets dark and gloomy; nature alters herself to avoid clashing with mankind's mood. but the weather as I went walking through this wasteland was almost perfect; the sky was a stunning blue dotted with small, white clouds pushed along by a soothing breeze, as if we needed another reminder that nature doesn't care one way or the other what it does to us.

On day three Robin made an awesome find. In a cabinet he discovered a box whose label said it contained photos rescued from the previous hurricane/flood, Betsy in 1965. When Katrina came around the box was left behind. He got them out and looked through them to find that, unlike any other photo in the house, they were still ok. We put them in the valuables pile for the owners to pick up.

I guess I shouldn't be surprised to find a lot of booze in New Orleans houses, but still... geez. We put the alcohol, some of it previously opened, some of it not, in the hazardous chemicals pile alongside the cleaning supplies. In the morning it was gone. The cleaning supplies remained.

I hate it when people are so cynical about organized religion that they talk as though all it does is harm. The easy majority of the people at Camp Hope are christian groups, communitities whose faith dictates that they work toward the benefit of others and so here they are. Driving through town we passed a church with a sign advertising free house-gutting, sponsored by a local reverend and probably manned by members of his congregation. The cynics should put their lives where their mouths are and get out to do some good before they dismiss these people and what they stand for just because other elements of their values clash. I know the reason that all the religious groups here are christian is that it's the dominant faith in this country, which gives it the most adherants and in turn the most resources to spend on such projects. But the bottom line is that they do them and other should be grateful, if not for themselves than on behalf of those who benefit directly. That's the gospel: faith, hope and charity. The intolerance and general assholery others associate with christians is just people. You'll find them everywhere.

When we left Camp Hope, we added a little something a part of the drywall they let campers decorate

One of the strangest parts of this experience has been piecing together images of the people who own each house that we go through. Even for a good cause, there's a certain self-concious, voyeuristic quality to it. By the time we finished each house, we knew how old they were, where they worked, what they drank, where they gambled and in what era their kids were raised. I've been through the underwear drawers of strangers.

I think that the more one does the more one lives, and the more one lives, the more of a person one becomes. Other than a bag of meat and a personality a person is, after all, the product of his or her experience. On the other hand, I tell myself that if one spends too much time doing, they'll never just enjoy being the person they've become, but that's easily used as an excuse to spend time coasting.

When we signed up for this trip were were each asked why we wanted to go. I don't remember my answer exactly but it was uninspired and generic. One of my co-workers, Nalin, said, "It's what a better person would do. I want to be a better person". That's what I wish I'd said.

I don't think it's possible to really convey what the work was like, but I'll close with some before/after photos because they amaze me that we were able to do it:

The kitchen: