Day One

Our team of 18 kids and 7 adults touched down late last night at the New Orleans International Airport, located in the the western side of the city. It was too dark to see much as we came into town, but the few street lamps that lit the streets showed nothing more than devastation. We are staying at the Peoples United Methodist Church and Recovery Center in New Orleans 3rd ward (the 9th and lower 9th wards were the areas hardest hit by the hurricanes). Even the houses just across the street from the center (below) look badly damaged.

This morning we drove across a canal of the Mississippi River and into the 9th ward. Most of the ward is now just an enormous grassland with slabs of concrete on the blocks where houses were (we stopped and got out at one to get a closer look at it; you could even see the lines on the floor from where the walls separating rooms were). The few houses still standing were spray-painted with "Do Not Demo", or else the government was within their full rights to take the house down. Other houses had been fixed up by their owners or rebuild by contractors, if the home owner could afford it, but keep in mind: these people have no neighbors, no school system and no work or grocery stores for miles away.

Crossing the canal

The lower 9th ward

A house that was not demolished

The concrete foundation of a home

An abandoned church

Houses in areas such as the 7th and 8th wards, were not destroyed, but simply filled with toxic flood water for three or four weeks. After the water drained, the houses (like the ones below) were searched for survivors. Each time a team finished searching a house, they marked it with an X so that the next team coming along would know it had already been searched. The number on top of the X indicates the date the house was searched, the left is the team that searched the house, the right lists any toxins found in the house and the bottom number tells how many were found dead in the house. When we start construction tomorrow, we will be working in these areas.

Afterwards, we went to a more upscale area of New Orleans, where little damage from the hurricanes remained, and worshiped at Rayne United Methodist Church (below)

I can't wait to get out tomorrow and receive our house assignments so we can start working right away.