Hurricane Relief Trip - Part 4 (scroll down for earlier parts)

Day 6 – 10/10/05

Our final work day in New Orleans. I am writing this on October 11th as we sit in the airplane waiting to take off for home, with planes lined up ahead of us on the runway. We had a full and exhausting day yesterday, and I was just too tired to write. We broke up into two teams again, and my team was assigned to the Lakeview community of New Orleans. It was the neighborhood that was next to the levee that broke on Lake Pontchartrain. The area got over ten feet of floodwater, and the house we were assigned had been under eleven feet, which was a foot and a half over the top of the rain gutters.

Josh, Matt, John, and Lisa were all assigned to my team, and we found out later in the day that ours was the very first team assigned out of the Kenner Vineyard to go and work in this hard-hit area. They had only just opened it to the residents to return to the area the Wednesday before. The lady whose house we were sent to was named Teeny, and she had only returned the day before. She went to the Kenner Vineyard and had only been back for the first time this Sunday after evacuating to relatives out of state. It was good that we had saved the worst for last; it was really hard both physically and emotionally to see the total devastation that had once been someone’s home. I couldn’t even imagine what it must have been like for her, having known it when it still looked nice.

Now the entire neighborhood was totally dead. Someone said it looked like a nuclear fallout zone and another said it was like going from seeing things in color to seeing them in black and white. Everything (houses, trees, cars, streets) was coated in a layer of gray. It was all just so tragic.

I took a lot of pictures, but just as you can’t capture a sunset or a field of flowers, you can’t capture the devastation either. Or the smell.

We had experienced the smell of the refrigerator that broke open the day before, but it was nothing like this. The flood had come in, lifted everything up, swirled it around, and then dropped it again. The fridge there had become lodged between the kitchen cabinets, sideways with the door hanging open. Fortunately, Teeny had some full facemasks that kept out a lot, but not all of the smells. We just had to shovel everything in the wheelbarrow and cart it all out. I told John that if someone had told me a year ago that I would be removing someone’s kitchen cabinets by shoveling them out (they just pulled apart) I would have told them they were nuts.

We talked to one of Teeny’s neighbors, whose house would have to be bulldozed because its foundation had collapsed. He took us down a few doors where an older woman had stayed through the flood and hadn’t survived. The “1DB” (one dead body) was still spray painted on the front door.

I asked him if he minded if we prayed with him, but he said that we had enough to do with helping Teeny. We prayed for him anyway later, when we prayed with Teeny before leaving. She said the whole experience was somehow freeing, because she could now seek God and go wherever He leads, maybe even mission work. She had lost her job as well, since the company had also been hit by the storm.

The rest of the team got there about two hours before it was time to go. They were really a big help, especially in lifting our spirits. About the same time a news crew for the educational channel one showed up together with some people from the CDC and the federal police together with the army to interview us. I told Dom that he was the team leader and he should go. He told me “As team-lead, I designate you as the PR guy,” and that I would talk to them, and then he ran off! It was an odd feeling being interviewed in front of a camera, but kind of fun. I felt like I said the right things about it being the least we could do under the circumstances and working together with the Vineyard Church community. It would be fun to see what they end up doing with it.

We didn’t get back to the church until after seven. We washed up and grabbed dinner (we got more great LA food) and as I sat down to say grace I about lost it. I just sat, thinking about how so many people had lost everything, some even their lives, and yet God has still given us so much. A great church and community of believers we belong to, great friends that we made on this trip, as well as our own homes and loving families that we are going back to.

It’s Day 7 (10/11/05) and we are less than an hour from Boise.

I am sure that this will be an experience that will last a lifetime (I hope we can come back either sooner or later) and I am glad that my son Josh got to go, and I got to be with him. He really did great and got to see a little about what is important in life. I am looking forward to getting home to the rest of my family as well as a hot shower and a comfy bed.

Lord, help me hold all this fresh in my mind. Help me to share it with others, and to learn from it that which is really important, and how little “things” are really worth.