KRT May 14, 2013 (written the next morning)

We got back pretty late last night, so we decided to write yesterday's post this morning because we were extremely tired. Lucky for you readers, that means two posts in one day! Yesterday was actually our shortest work day, but it was just as tiring. One of the sites was working on flooring and the other, dry walling and mudding, same as yesterday. There was actually a third site thrown in yesterday for a couple of people. They got to help clean up all horizontal surfaces (yes it's as easy as it sounds), and they actually readied the house for its final lead inspections, one of the last steps before the family gets to move in. This was really cool for the people involved (ourselves included) because we got to see the difference between some of the beginning stages and the end stages; we were able to get an idea of what all of our efforts would look like in the end.
There was another addition to our sites yesterday as well, in the form of our dear little Flat Bucky. You'll get to see him in pictures later :)

After finishing up for the day at the work sites, we all headed back to Camp Hope to clean up for a fun night out. We started off the evening by going to the New Orleans Port Authority, where we met up with Paul Matthews, the Director of Community Relations. Paul graduated from Tulane University, but attended Bucknell for his freshman fall semester while Tulane was closed post-Katrina. Small world!

We learned about New Orleans' role in the country's shipping industry and took a cruise down the Mississippi to see the wharfs. We also got to see the French quarter from the river, and took lots of pictures!

After some delicious pizza from Slice, we headed over to the Tulane Campus where we heard from Dr. Lopez, the Dean of the LSU Medical School, about his experience working at Charity Hospital post-Katrina. He had been on duty the night of the storm, and was at the hospital for five days afterwards caring for patients while they waited to be evacuated. There were 200 total patients in the hospital, and 20 ICU patients who had to be transported from the first floor to the second floor due to the flooding. Oh, and can I remind everyone that they were without power the entire time? Talk about a stressful situation. Needless to say, he had a lot of interesting stories to tell us about the experience. After that, we went back to Camp Hope to get some much needed sleep!

May 19th

Nigel and Maddie

Greeting avid readers. This is Nigel and Maddie coming at you with another entry for the Bucknell KRT 2013 blog.  At this very moment, I am still in my PJs, eating grits with cheese, and gearing up for our last day of re-constructing houses with St. Bernard Project.  However, before Maddie and I go off, we thought we would fill you in on yesterday's experience.

For me, yesterday was another example of why I came on this trip.  I am part of the group that is working on Ms. Cassandra's house.  On Monday, it took us a while to get the hang of putting up dry wall.  Nonetheless, we as a group tackled it head on and really had a grasp for it by the end if the day.  As you can imagine, we were looking to a full week of this work, but the dry wall did not come in Tuesday.  We were able to get by with scraps so dry wall was a necessity for Wednesday.  Well, guess what?  It was not enough of a necessity because when Wednesday arrived and. We stepped foot in the house there was no dry wall in sight.  I do not mean this in any way as a means of disrespect, but as you can imagine we were disappointed.

In spite of this, this is exactly what I'm hinting at when I mentioned Wednesday was an example of why I chose this trip.  I chose this trip in order to not only learn about the struggles of the people of New Orleans, but to be of service to them.  Not having dry wall to work with is a small example of the hardships Ms. Cassandra as well as others had and have to endure: being told one thing and having the reality be another.  I find it hard to believe they've had to live out of their houses for such an extended period of time.  However, they have made the most of it and overcome adversity.  What we did in the house yesterday was a small example of that.  Despite a lack of dry wall, we were able to accomplish other tasks such as corner beading and mudding.  Tough as it was not to do what we wanted or expected to do, we've learned to expect the unexpected.  All these tasks add up to the ultimate goal of getting this woman back into her home.  As long as we keep this as well as other thoughts of service in mind, we can accomplish great things.  It has shown in the past three days.  I'm looking forward to the next two!

Hi everyone! I am working at Cynthia's home this week. The first morning, Cynthia arrived to check out her home and its progress. She was so happy to meet all of us and so excited to see the new strides that had been made in her home. Immediately, I knew I wanted to make this home perfect for this woman who has endured so much and yet still has such a positive attitude. I was first afraid of how my construction abilities would pan out like many of my peers were, but we have all learned so much from working with our supervisors and each other that we have come very far in building a new home for Cynthia.

Thursday will be our last day and I am sad to end my work on the site, but proud of the work my new friends and I have done on the floors and excited to bring the house to a finish for Cynthia.  Also, Flat Bucky will be joining my team today at Cynthia's and I'm excited to show a part of Bucknell the home.

Nigel and Maddie 

Friday 17th of May

Friday 17

Today is the first day we work under the annoying sunshine as well as the last working day of the trip. In the morning, we learned some farming technique with Jason from the Growth Dat Youth Farm at the City Park.  Our main job was basically kill all the weeds that maybe harmful to the lovely lettuce, tomatoes and squash (OMG it sounds like my favorite vegetable combination for a wrap in the Bison). Yipeng had trouble telling the difference between weeds and squash (personally, I really think it requires special talent!) so as an amazing student co-leader I encouraged him not to give up. You know sometimes some words from your teammate would (either) refresh your energy to put more effort into your work (or just destroy your day . . . Like early in the week when I was frustrated and felt like crying about the mudding work I did to cover nail holes in drywall and a peer told me "No crying in the house"). 

Having done some perfect work (one benefit from this trip is that I keep saying nice words to people), we went to the sculpture garden to have lunch. Staff there didn't allow us to eat inside the garden but we found a gat place to eat outside the gate under a huge old live oak tree.  after the picnic, some volunteers toured an international collection of modern and classic sculptures.

In the afternoon, we helped set up the at the Bayou  Boogaloo  festival. Sounds like a fun job right? It turned out to be moving heavy stuff around the river side under 85 degree Fahrenheit for 3 hours! It was a hard work but everything can be accomplished with an awesome team like this! It was also the last time we worked together in this trip so we all did our best. I personally got to know "my mental supervisor" better. She is actually such an amazing person that helped me a lot physically and mentally (except she couldn't be in charge of my new shirt ;). After doing some fruitful work, we came back to Camp Hope to eat and change.

I was responsible for washing dishes and I knew I did a pretty bad job. We were in a rush so I was kinda paying attention to bowls and spoons (since we will have our last breakfast tomorrow with milk and cereal).  Then we loaded up the vans and headed to the festival. Bayou boogaloo was amazing. Good music. Good food. GOOD FRIENDS.

I can't believe today is our last day together. I wanna say thanks to every single person on the team. You guys have made my week awesome. Now packing time and have a good sleep everybody!

Đoàn Nhật Minh, student co-leader

May 15

We got back pretty late last night, so we decided to write yesterday's post this morning because we were extremely tired. Lucky for you readers, that means two posts in one day! Yesterday was actually our shortest work day, but it was just as tiring. One of the sites was working on flooring and the other, dry walling and mudding, same as yesterday. There was actually a third site thrown in yesterday for a couple of people. They got to help clean up all horizontal surfaces (yes it's as easy as it sounds), and they actually readied the house for its final lead inspections, one of the last steps before the family gets to move in. This was really cool for the people involved (ourselves included) because we got to see the difference between some of the beginning stages and the end stages; we were able to get an idea of what all of our efforts would look like in the end. 

There was another addition to our sites yesterday as well, in the form of our dear little Flat Bucky. You'll get to see him in pictures later :)

After finishing up for the day at the work sites, we all headed back to Camp Hope to clean up for a fun night out. We started off the evening by going to the New Orleans Port Authority, where we met up with Paul Matthews, the Director of Community Relations. Paul graduated from Tulane University, but attended Bucknell for his freshman fall semester while Tulane was closed post-Katrina. Small world!

We learned about New Orleans' role in the country's shipping industry and took a cruise down the Mississippi to see the wharfs. We also got to see the French quarter from the river, and took lots of pictures!

After some delicious pizza from Slice, we headed over to the Tulane Campus where we heard from Dr. Lopez, the Dean of the LSU Medical School, about his experience working at Charity Hospital post-Katrina. He had been on duty the night of the storm, and was at the hospital for five days afterwards caring for patients while they waited to be evacuated. There were 200 total patients in the hospital, and 20 ICU patients who had to be transported from the first floor to the second floor due to the flooding. Oh, and can I remind everyone that they were without power the entire time? Talk about a stressful situation. Needless to say, he had a lot of interesting stories to tell us about the experience. After that, we went back to Camp Hope to get some much needed sleep!

KRT love <3

Beth and Ashlynn

(Van 3 all day!!)

Thursday May 16

Thursday May 16

As our week with St. Bernard Project has come to an end, we all reflect on our time working on Miss Cassandra's and Miss  Cynthia's homes. Today, at Miss Cassandra's house we continued to hang drywall and worked to mud and paper tape all the walls. Although both jobs can be frustrating and even tedious at times, it was very rewarding when a piece a drywall was measured to fit perfectly or when Taylor, our site supervisor, commented on the flawlessness of the paper tape. Even though we faced some minor set backs at the beginning of the week, such as not having enough large pieces of  drywall, we didn't get discouraged. We all put in a tremendous amount of effort and we were able to complete some, although we wished we could have completed all, of the week's goals. As we were cleaning up and taking some group pics, some neighborhood kids stopped by. They were brother and sister and were interested in what we were doing. After we told them about our work at Miss Cassandra's house they asked if they could help, and we had to tell them they couldn't because they were too young. But we can all agree that it was very heartening to see their willingness to help a neighbor that they did not know. It was definitely a great way to end our time at Miss Cassandra's house. 

Over at Miss Cynthia's house we continued to work on the floors. The group was able to finally finish tiling the kitchen floor! Yay! Everyone at Ms. Cynthia's house can definitely attest to the frustration and difficulty with flooring, which made finishing the kitchen floor that much more rewarding. Maddie and Ashlyn worked all day on trying to finish up the laminate wood floor in another room and unfortunately were not able to finish. But Marta, the site supervisor, said to look at it as a metaphor for New Orleans. It has almost been 8 years since Katrina hit and there is still a tremendous amount of work to be done. The city is not finished being rebuilt. Our work here isn't done. The unfinished floor is a testament to that. So as disappointing as not finishing the floor may have been, we all can use that as a reminder to continue to return to this city that we have all fallen in love with. 

After taking lots of pictures of the work we have done and the houses that are one step further to being completed, we headed back to Camp Hope to get ready for Rock'n'Bowl. We were all really excited for the Zydeco  music and dancing. Some of us were also excited for the appearance of a certain site supervisor.

We all showed off our bowling and dancing skills, some more skilled than others. Regardless, we all danced the night away. Janice and Ben were even able to steel a dance with each other. Some of the SBP staff also came and we all had an awesome time with them. Rock'n'Bowl is definitely the coolest bowling alley that we've, or at least I, have been to. It also had the best bowling alley food that I've ever had. 

All together, today was a great work day! We said goodbye to Miss Cassandra's and Miss Cynthia's homes and the fantastic SBP staff. And incase you were wondering, Taylor, the awaited SBP supervisor,  did go to Rock'n'Bowl, so we were able to leave with a proper goodbye. Although we're sad that we won't be working with SBP tomorrow, we are off to work with Grow Dat Youth Farm! Let the farming begin.

KRT Love, 

Fallon 

Today we started what we came down to New Orleans for- service! We got an early start to the day and headed to the St. Bernard Project headquarters for our orientation where we learned how the program started and the types of people it's initiatives help. We split into 2 groups, each of which went to separate houses. One group went to lay tiles and the other did drywall in a home.
My group went to lay tiles on the kitchen floor of a home that is nearly finished- we are aiming for the end of the week! It was an incredible experience because it was a new experience. Many of us had no idea what we were getting ourselves into at the start of the day, but by the end of the day we had become confident with our new skill set. It was so rewarding to leave the day with half the job done. I was proud of my peers and our work because I truly believe it is making a difference which is why every time I looked at our work I couldn't help but smile. I cannot wait to get working tomorrow and hopefully we finish tiling the floor! I'm looking forward to working the rest of the week and seeing the house come together. I have learned so much about myself, working with others, and the city of New Orleans over the past 3 days, so I can only imagine what more I will gain during the remainder of the week.

As fun as the past two days have been, touring the city and eating our way through the French Quarter, it was great to finally start working today.  We got an early start and headed out to the St. Bernard Project to learn about the history of the organization and to get our project assignments.  My group worked on dry walling a house for a very nice lady named Ms. Cassandra.  She is a mother of four, supporting two children through college.  We really appreciated hearing her story because it helped us to see the importance of our work and how much  it means to her.  Ms. Cassandra even stopped by to bring us snacks and to meet us in person!  After a day of working, we took a drive through the Lower Ninth Ward to see some levees and houses.  While a lot of the houses have been rebuilt through organizations like Brad Pitt's "Make it Right" campaign, we were shocked at the devastation that still exists even eight years after the storm.  The trip has exposed us to many aspects of this great city - from the music and celebration of the French Quarter to the hardship that still exists in areas such as the Lower Ninth Ward and St. Bernard Parish.  It was great to roll up our sleeves and join in the effort to rebuild this amazing city.   Even though our arms will be sore tomorrow, we're excited to get back to work!

Together we fleur-ish!
Melissa and Chloe

May 12, 2013 Katrina Recovery Team

5-12-13

Today was a great day in New Orleans! We spent this beautiful Mother's Day morning at the Barataria Preserve--the wetlands south of NOLA. Some of us saw alligators, geckos, snakes, and turtles! It was calming and peaceful, and I think we can say that everyone enjoyed themselves.

The wetlands of this area are home to 2 million people and are such an important part of the environment as they provide homes for fish and wildlife.  They also offer needed protection from storms and hurricanes, but we are losing them due to coastal erosion, sea level rise, storm surges,  and poor management at the rate of 16.6 square miles annually, just in the state of Louisiana.

Our afternoon and early evening was spent in the French Quarter of New Orleans. We all split up into smaller groups; some of us went to museums, others went shopping...but definitely all of us ate some delicious food!

Alexa, Alisha, and I wandered through the French Market, which was extremely busy for a Sunday afternoon. They had lots of local food, handmade jewelry, and little souvenirs. We wanted to return to an art fair off of Frenchman St that we saw last night, but unfortunately it was closed this afternoon. Little did we know, a short way down the road there was a Mother's Day parade where apparently 18 people were injured in a shooting. We were shocked to hear the news when Alexa's uncle called us! We had no idea whatsoever that it happened.

We walked all the way from Frenchman St to Magazine Street because Alisha was told that there were many museums and galleries along this road. We ended up at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art where we experienced many different representations of southern life at various stages throughout history. We only had an hour to explore because the museum closed at 5pm, but it was undoubtedly an hour well spent!

We ended our day at the Gumbo Pot restaurant where we bonded over some mouth-watering southern dishes (seafood gumbo, boudin balls, and a shrimp po-boy)! The food here is seriously to die for.

We came back to Camp Hope for our first large group reflection, and are now headed to bed. Happy Mother's Day to all of our beautiful moms back home--we missed you so much today, and love you very much! Stay tuned for an update tomorrow!

Alexa and Emily

Katrina (finally) Hits Home

Saturday May 11, 2013

Since the beginning of April those of us on the Katrina recovery team have been learning about the various aspects of the disaster, from the scientific to the personal to the psychological damage to the preventable mistakes that call for the disaster to be called a man-made catastrophe. This was all very abstract to me. I saw the pictures of devastation and watched the videos documenting human suffering, and I knew intellectually it was a terrible thing that no one should have to experience. But it still felt like a movie to me. I repeatedly experienced a brief wave of emotion, quickly forgotten as I re-disconnected myself from an area and an occurrence I had never experienced.

This afternoon we went to the Presbytere Museum and toured their extensive Katrina exhibit. The exhibit begins by reminding the viewer of the resilience of the area, highlighting other hurricanes the area has survived and focusing on the progress made since Katrina. It was paired well with the end of the exhibit, which highlighted measures being taken to prevent this again. The middle, though, was what shocked me. With a pair of jeans. A man trapped in the flood zone, knowing there was a real possibility he wouldn't survive, wrote his contact info, blood type, & SS# on his pant leg in permanent marker so his body could be identified. I stood there staring at those jeans pinnedbehind glass   for a long while, shocked. I considered the desperate conditions that must build up to lead a human being to prepare for his own death in such s pragmatic way. I thought about how it would feel, what state of mind one would have to be in, knowing I  might die very soon, and then having the  efficiency to plan for my dead body's fate.

 It was haunting, and though it's still hard for me to imagine, no longer does Katrina seem like a movie. Now when I think of Katrina I think of jeans, and writing my own information on mine, and knowing I might die in a current of rank water, the bloated bodies of my friends and neighbors hitting against my own as we floated down streets past Walmart or Taco Bell. It's disturbing. And I can't say I can imagine what it would be like to be that guy with the jeans. But being here, in the heart of New Orleans and seeing personal artifacts that humanize has created a connection, even on day 2 of our trip, that has completely changed how I think of what happened here and the very real people who were forever affected by this tragedy.