(Top photo: My team of Megan, Natalie, EC, Julie and Keith. We lacked a fancy name but were universally considered to be the team most likely to be off searching for coffee.)
(Bottom photo: Miss Patty and sons along with a good portion of the Vincentian wrecking crew. EC is hanging out somewhere in the back of the crowd.)
Amy the lead Catholic Charities volunteer: “This is not a feel good mission. It is going to suck.”
Sometimes when you do volunteer work it is more for you than anyone else. It’s along the lines of “Let’s go clean up a park” or “Let’s paint a house” and while those are all very meaningful tasks and they take effort that most people won’t expend it is all a positive effort. This trip wasn’t like that. Our job was to basically dismantle someone’s home while they watched.
Think about that for a moment. You have worked your entire life to own this house and all of your memories are tied to this one place that you called home. You raised your kids here, you expected everything to stay relatively the same. Then you leave before Katrina hits and watch on television the water reaching the level of the overpass and know that your house is flooded. When you return it is still standing but everything inside is damaged or destroyed. And the only way to rebuild is to tear everything out and get back to the base level.
That’s where we came in. Over four days we gutted five houses down to the studs and the base floorboards and while I know that the owners (of which Miss Patty was one) were grateful for our work it must have been the toughest thing in the world to watch. Because we really were tearing out all that they had accomplished and tossing it in a dumpster and that simply was what just had to be done in order to move on.
To give you a sense of what the houses were like I would guess that there was probably a foot or two of standing water in each house post-Katrina and these houses were all raised off the ground to begin with. Each wall had visible mold growing on it to at least four feet and in some instances it reached the ceiling. All that could be done is grab a crowbar and tear out all of the walls to the studs. Which we did and while it was tough work there are always some good moments in the mix.
For example, tearing down dry wall is an awful lot of fun. Just grab a crowbar and start swinging until huge sheets of wall are crashing down to the ground (often smacking my legs and resulting in more bruises than I really want to admit that I have.) It was a nice way to get out some of that latent anger and have the thought in the back of my mind that “Wow, my dad would be really proud of me right now.” On the other hand, one of the houses was old, which meant that the walls were plaster on top of tile on top of more plaster on top of wood slats. It was brutal work just to get to the slats at which point you basically wanted to collapse and hope that someone else would take over.
Because remember, this is July in New Orleans. It is brutally hot out and you are wearing jeans and work boots and one of those protective masks that make it a challenge to breathe. After about twenty minutes you are just one big pile of sweat and are constantly stepping out to catch your breath and down another bottle of water. And while I am proud of myself for consistently churning out 5Ks on the treadmill every week I really have no stamina. That or I really have to ratchet up the workouts.
(That said, I still think I did my share of work. I wasn’t the best worker there, not by a long shot, but I still did better than I had hoped.)
Of course, all of the floors were ruined so we had to tear out the floorboards as well. And here is where I have to mention something about Amy again. Occasionally I mention something that I find that any woman can do to become incredibly attractive to guys. Like having extensive knowledge of the Star Wars universe or being conversant in college football lore. Well, I am going to have to add “The ability to tear out floorboards with her bare hands” to the list because, well, damn. That was impressive. The fact that she was simultaneously ripping into me for a) wearing a Notre Dame shirt and b) tiring out halfway through the room just somehow made it cooler.
I did avoid the job of ripping up the tile floors because, well, I’ve done that job before and it sucks. It sucked when my dad made me do it in our kitchen and if I could avoid it while volunteering I would. There was this fun moment of the women on our team ripping up the tile and I would just look over into the room and see a look of maybe not hatred but damn close to it sent back in our direction for not assisting in the effort. That is when I pretty much decided that I will stick with my trusty crowbar and rip up floors, which involves boards violently cracking and sounds really cool.
So the work was tiring and messy but fun in a weird way. And in the end I didn’t feel bad for what I had done (or really what we had to do) because of something that Miss Patty said. She said that she was certain that they were just going to demolish the house. Just bring in the bulldozer and level the entire place, it was just that bleak when you walked inside the house. But she walked back through when she had seen the work that we had done and for the first time in a long time she had hope. She saw that the roof was still good and the outside walls were fine and there was an opportunity to rebuild. There was still a lot of work to be done but she had hope. She could finally see where that next step would be.
We certainly didn’t solve the problem in a week. Gutting five houses really is just a drop in the bucket given all that needs to be done. But to know that a few people feel closer to being home again, that they have the hope that everything will be ok in the end, that is what made all of the hard work and the sweat and the dust worthwhile. That’s what we accomplished at the end of the day, we provided hope.
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