It's Day 5 of work, and boy are my arms tired!

Hello!!!

I just finished my fifth day of work here and yes, my arms are quite tired. I have had the opportunity to do all sorts of different kinds of jobs in my first week here; easy ones and hard ones.

The Jobs

For the first day and a half, I did the following: scraped linoleum off poured concrete floors. That's it. Me, a scraper, a heat gun in some cases, and tons of glue. Disaster Corps, the organizaiton with whom I'm volunteering, is currently involved in mostly demolition work. We go in to homes which have been deemed structurally sound and therefore able to be rebuilt, and we gut the insides. The special thing Disaster Corps does is that we work with the home owners in the gutting process, so that we can salvage any valuables that we may find. So, the last leg in most of these gutting jobs - after the homes have been cleaned of debris, sheet rock, insulation, everything from light fixtures to stary nails in baseboards - we pull up floors. So my crew was assigned to finish up a few houses, which consisted mostly of scraping linoleum and cleaning insulation. Let me implore you all now: please think twice before installing thin off-white linoleum in your homes. And let me doubly implore you not to use entire buckets of glue whilst installing said floor.

After using several muscles I never knew I had, I got to move on to some different jobs. Yesterday, I and the rest of the Disaster Corps team went to a house that, though it had been lifted off of it's foundation and turned 90 degrees, was deemed able to be re-set and structurally OK. In addition, the house was some kind of hisytoric landmark, and was holding many antiques that both the city of Bay St. Louis and the nephew of the homeowner were interested in saving. So, the crew went in to the house, which had not been entered since the day of the hurricane. Needless to say, it was pretty nasty: it took an hour to clear a path into the rooms where we were going to work. We removed an overturned fridge (complete with petrified eggs and jars full of unknowable items), cabinets full of sheets and clothes that were still waterlogged, mattress and beds that ripped to shreds upon trying to lift them. There were roach families, rat families, and something that smelled too much like cottage cheese to make me ever want to eat cottage cheese again. But, between noon and 5 pm, with shovels, wheelbarrows, chainsaws (no they did not let me use a chainsaw), and anything else usable, we cleaned out the kitchen, living room and one bedroom. And, in the process, we were able to save 5 of a set of 6 antique chairs, a chest of drawers, a bed frame, and several knick knacks (the entire house was in shambles, and yet there was a teapot with its lid. It's unbelieveable).

Today, I spent my morning with another group who is helping one guy rebuild his house by taking salvagable materials from houses that will be demolished - apparently Disaster Corps is thinking of helping them expand this idea.

This afternoon, I and 2 others went to a house that fared OK (it took on 5 feet of water, but was brick, so is being cleaned out and renovated). The woman in the house, Debbie, turned her home into a distribution center for many months because, as she said, "It's what I could do." We were packing up her stuff to move to a bigger distribution center at the camp where we're staying, to make the distribution more centralized. And, though the job was easy, clean and without mold masks, she had an interesting story to say the least. She evacuated, but her sister in New Orlenas did not. In trying to save her 17 (17!!) chiuauas, she was killed in teh flood. Her nephew made it, however, by holding on in a tree for 3 days. He didn't learn about his mother until the day of her funeral.

I and the other newer person were blown away by the story. The veteran with us said, "You get used ot those after a while."

The things you see here are unbelieveable and mostly undescribable. I took a drive down the road bnby the beach yesterday. It was just destruction followed by more destruction for the entire length of the rad. There was a desk chair between 2 uprooted trees, blankets wrapped up in tree branches, stop signs wrapped around the poles behind them. There were boats 3 block up the road, which had been docked in the water. The most striking and telling image to me were the blocks upon blocks of concrete steps and landings that just led to nothing.

So, regardless of the job, be it dirty, sweaty, clean, easy, short or long, it is helpful on a daily basis to know that, in a small way, we're helping people who otherwise wouldn't find help.

Other than the copius amount of gnats (did you know gnats bite? did you know they don't respond to bug spray?), the camp experience has been a positive one. In fact, one of our fellow volunteers just happens to be a clasically trained french chef, and just popped his head in to my tent to let me know that the boudin and texas bbq he just cooked up will be ready in 10 minutes. So, I'll have to post about the camp itself next week. For now, off to what promises to to be a delicious dinner!!

I lookj forward to everyone's comments!! And if any of you have any other questions about Bay Saint Louis, the gulf coast, or Disaster Corps, just let me know!

Cori :)