Today was a difficult day at Project Homecoming. This week, we’ve got groups from what feels like every state in the union totaling approximately 110 volunteers. This is wonderful, of course, that people are still coming to the coast in big numbers. What is not so wonderful is that 110 volunteers requires lots of coordination and cooperation. There was lots of coordination and planning, not a lot of cooperation. The weather was our main culprit.
I arrived at the office to find out where I’d be and who with. I was with 11 people from all over the Presbytery of the Cascades in Oregon and S. Washington and our job was to gut a home in Chalmette. Mark, my boss, gave me fair warning: it’s a ghost town. In order to get out to Chalmette from the office, one has to drive by what I think is the most haunting site in all of New Orleans: a Six Flags amusement park, completely abandoned in the middle of a dead swamp. The roller coasters, the ferris wheel, it’s all still there but without a soul in site. And the swamp it’s in sustained salt damage from the Gulf in the storm so that all the trees are dead. It was a chilling precursor to the neighborhood where we were gutting.
There was the house we were gutting. Then, next door on one side, nothing but a slab. The other side, a condemned house with another two slabs next to that. Across the street, a slab. All these slabs used to be houses. I don’t think it would’ve been so affecting if the sun was shining but as it was, with it pouring rain and water rising everywhere, I couldn’t help but think about when the storm hit. All these people watching the water rise, knowing they couldn’t do anything at all.
We sent the volunteers home early and then had a meeting about how to run the rest of the week. I’ve got a gut tomorrow that features a refrigerator that hasn’t been opened since the storm. Wish me luck!
October 23, 2007 at 5:25 am
So, is the question To Open, or Not To Open? My vote is always to open, of course. Sure, some people might consider that a “mistake”, or even “dangerous”, but you never know what kind of valuable experience is hiding behind doors that should have been locked, but oh-so-conveniently are left available for opening. That said, if you do open it, use a stick.
The image of the Six Flags sounds apocalyptic. It reminds me of movies like The Road Warrior and Planet of the Apes, with all the familiarities of our current existences still present, but altered, distorted, damaged, and abandoned. It’s not always sad in those movies–some of that work is just the corrosion of time, but in this case, everything was still in use 3 years ago. It’s difficult to grasp.
October 23, 2007 at 6:27 am
The current gutting status quo is not only Don’t Open, it’s Duct-Tape Shut. Part of the gutting process is pulling it out from the wall and have people pass around a roll of duct tape between 5 and a dozen times. But I tend to agree with you, even though my girlfriend’s Mom has planted a fear of Hantavirus in my head.