What I didn’t expect:

What surprised me was how much work we actually got done. I didn’t think the group was going to be able to finnish as much as we did on the houses. It always feels much better to finnish more than you thought you would in any task. This week was a good successful week in my book!

What I learned about service:

This past week really taught me the importance of service learning. What really stuck out was how the group would put their differences aside on the work site and always came together to work on the project of that day. Last week the group split up into two smaller groups to work on two different sites. The house which I was in was small and crowded in the beginning of the week but opened up with time when the house came together. This wouldn’t have been possible without the help of everyone in the group and volunteers. This help is much needed all throughout New Orleans.

Since it has been about 5 years since Hurricane Katrina I would never have know the devastation that remains in New Orleans. Homes are still empty and people are still in need of the help of volunteers. That is why I am so glad I decided to do this trip. So many people do not understand that there is still so much work to do – including me before the trip.

Pam Jenkins, one of the speakers we had while staying in New Orleans, put everything into perspective for me by saying, “you are giving someone their life back.” This sentence sticks in my mind because I did not even think about it on such a personal level prior to her comment. I can’t image losing everything I own, escaping my town, and then returning to nothing. However, this is what many of the families in New Orleans experienced. By building these houses we are returning them to normalcy, giving them hope, and handing them back a piece of their life that has been taken away from them for five years now. In many ways this gives me back faith that every little bit counts. Every wall I insulated and every nail I had to screw was just one more step in completing this house. I am honored to say that I have played a part in repairing three homes – helping out so many people that truly deserve this.

Now I get to experience what those in Dulac had to deal with and I am very ready for that challenge.

A few days ago, Professor Grigsby said, “I don’t think of you guys as inanimate stones. You are all working very hard”. Being in New Orleans was the experience of a lifetime. I can now successfully say that I am able to put in insulation, sheetrock, and put in tiled floors. One of my favorite parts of this trip thus far was working with the people in Americorps. Their hardwork and dedication to society really made me strive to have that same determination. In only a week at NOLA, I helped re-build three different homes around the city, ultimately putting a smile on the homeowner’s faces. I did not know I had the ability to do construction on houses, but it goes to show that you can do anything you sincerely set your mind to.

It is hard to comprehend the amount of new information I have obtained on this trip so far, but I specifically recall the disaster tour with Jim last week. Going to the different sites around the city to see where levees broke was truly fascinating. Furthermore, I was very intrigued by the countless amount of X’s on the houses, indicating that the house was searched post-Katrina. It really hit home to know that so many houses were searched for unpleasant purposes, and to see that many of the X’s are still present on the houses five years later.

Aside from the incredible nightlife on Bourbon Street, My biggest excitement has been my will to wake up every morning to embark on a new journey. Every day has been very different and quite informative, I only hope to recall as much information as I can to share it with as many people as possible upon my arrival home.

Today (Dec. 14) the group went out to the wetlands to plant some trees to help with coastal preservation! It was an early morning when we piled into the vans at 6am! Fortunately, all of us were able to sleep on the way there except for Jan and Joe who were driving.
We knew that we were going out on boats and there would be no toilets or areas to become warm. We packed our lunch and were off like a heard of turtles!
The day was spent by drilling holes into the Earth with very cool power drills. Once the holes were created, someone would plant a small plant in the hole and cover it up with dirt. We ended up planting about 1000 trees! This was quite a day at work. The view from the marshes was beautiful. At the end of the day it was nice to stand on the marsh and look over a calm area. It was one of the first times I was able to see through the harsh conditions in Louisiana and recognize the hope and essence of this wonderful place.

Till next time . . . .

When 9/11 happened I was in 6th grade. The first day back at school my Social Studies teacher said to our class, “You may not realize it, but your innocence has been taken from you.” And it had. And I felt it. That is kind of how I’m feeling on this trip. We have learned so much about various things such as the government, the wetlands, the corruption of the New Orleans police department, the human destruction to our wetlands, the oil spill, and the fact that Hurricane Katrina was not a “natural” disaster. The poverty we have witnessed, and the situations we have learned about, are opening my eyes to the world around me. I am a Junior in college, and I have looked at the world generally positively, and without adequate regard to the major issues that are present. Mainly, I have looked at the world without questioning it. Now I am learning to question the world around me and not to simply accept it for what it is. 9/11 darkened my view, however I was still a bit young. Although I am young now, I am at a point in my life where I am developing my ideas, beliefs, and opinions about the world, and the life I want to live. Opening myself to the truth behind certain issues has certainly darkened my innocence. With this loss of innocence and naivety, comes the importance of morality and question. It has shown me that morality is extremely important to me, and the people I have met on this trip, and that provides a bit of light and excitement.

Community service is an interesting thing. One of the things I have primarily learned is that education about what you are doing is extremely important, not necessarily about the physical thing that you are doing, but the overall concept of why you are doing it, and why it needs to be done. Also, the main thing is that it is often temporary service. There is so much more to it than simply the act. It is hard to put yourself in the position of the people who you are trying to help. In fact, it is impossible. But you must forget about yourself, and try your hardest to understand the world from other perspectives. Union College is such a bubble of paradise and we are often so wrapped up in our studies and social lives. We may not be able to completely immerse ourselves in other ways of life and situations, however, we can go outside our bubble and think beyond. I am beyond grateful for this opportunity. The things I am learning are extremely significant.

After leaving New Orleans and spending our first work day in Dulac it made me realize how important culture is to community members. Our mini term is community service based so we’ve worked in impoverished neighborhoods and with people who live with struggles I can’t imagine facing but I’ve noticed that what keeps people going is their pride. In New Orleans we met many people whose homes and community had been destroyed but they chose to come back and rebuild. The people I’ve seen seem to have such a strong connection and relationship with their neighbors and community that they would rather risk another serious hurricane than live else where. When I talked with children from the Lower Ninth Ward they expressed how much they enjoyed walking around the French Quarter and it seems that regardless of how difficult their situation might be there is a temporary relief. Although I’ve only been in Dulac for a day it seems as if there is less of a relief from the day to day hardship. Today we worked with a family to clean their house to help them sell it. It was painful to see the situation they had been living under for years. The house its self was falling apart and the back yard was covered with decomposing furniture. When we had the chance to talk with the woman who lived there she expressed that her favorite things to do involved going to Walmart and eating dinner out. It broke my heart that things my family does on a regular bases and barely even thinks twice about were things this woman loved most. For this family the relief and escape from their difficult life is Walmart.

This community service term is unlike any community service I’ve taken part in before because I have immersed myself into the culture and situation far more than I have in the past. One challenge for me has been to look at the situation from the perspective of the people living it. As an outsider sometimes my first impulse is to want to give the people I’m working with everything I have and the life I live. I’ve realized that not only is it impossible but it is also far from what these people want. At first I would look at houses that were completely destroyed and wonder why the home owners didn’t just knock the house down and build a new home and it was difficult for me to understand how important it was for them to rebuild the house they’ve lived in for centuries even if it meant compromising the quality. I feel so blessed that I’ve been given the opportunity to work in New Orleans and Dulac and I look forward to bringing what I’ve learned here back to Union.

I think that after listening to numerous speakers and seeing the situation of neighborhoods like Mid-City and the 9th Ward while doing construction work or volunteering at the Blair Grocery Project, I have a much better understanding of what the situation of New Orleans is like. Its one thing to read articles and watch movies, but its another to see something with your own eyes. Five years after Katrina and Rita, there are still so many homes in certain areas that need to be fixed, which I knew before I came down but actually seeing it had such a strong impact on me. One of the things that I also found interesting was the talk from Malcom Suber about the situation of race and the corruption of the police department. Never having been in the deep south before, I guess I was unaware of how present racism is as opposed to the northern states where racism still is present but much more discrete. It seems that New Orleans is a city still has many race issues that also relate to the corruption within the N.O.P.D. Malcom Suber told us that the corruption of the police department has become more corrupt after Katrina, when you’d think would really be the opposite way around.

When thinking about service work and volunteering, I think there is a big difference between the two. I would consider Blair Grocery Project and Pheonix of New Orleans two organizations that do service work. They are really making an effort to serve the specific communities that they work in over a long period of time, where as the volunteering we do has a much smaller impact. I also think that our volunteering has a larger impact on us than it does on the people/community that we are trying to help.

Yesterday the group left New Orleans and moved to the Dulac community. The van ride was about an hour and a half. For the most part I slept through the whole thing. I also didn’t feel well the night before which was probably why I slept most of the day.

Once we got settled in our new community we took it easy the rest of the day. Everyone really needed a day to catch up. The evening ended with watching Inception!

Today we are off to help within the community of Dulac!

The system in NOLA is one that must be looked at realistically and analyzed with an understanding of the living conditions of its citizens. The monsters in NOLA aren’t the people or police but the culture and mentality of these individuals. Some of the police are corrupt individuals who follow the truths of the all mighty dollar rather than serving to preserve justice and peace. The city council members are monsters who will do anything and everything to build themselves up while leaving the communities that they “represent” to wither away to relics of their former selves. Even the churches, which are supposed to build up communities, segregate the locals and force them to choose ways in which to diverge from the whole. This is the real picture of NOLA. The children, in the 9th ward, are allowed to run the streets without any supervision or guidance from the “adults” in the neighborhood. These factors in addition to the storm are what has crippled NOLA and caused it to be a city filled with all the negatives that we try to strive to avoid. Although the situation is bleak there might be a glimmer of hope in the future.

There are people in NOLA that do care and want to see a society in which people respect and CARE about one another. These small signs of change have had an amazing impact on me and my journey on this trip. I was concerned about how this day would go especially since I have titles picked out before the day even starts. I was thinking “Monster” what am I going to learn today or right about that will pertain to the song title. My inspiration came in the form of a gay African American male that taught in Harlem and has since relocated to NOLA to start the our school blair grocery. He really gave a tangible entity to the conditions under which the poor live in the 9th ward. The idea that we, even as volunteers, could be monsters was something that was addressed and was shocking. As much as we want to do “good” do we actually take time to understand what that good is. Although, building a house made us all free great about our accomplishment and knowing that someone would have a home for the holidays is amazing we never considered the after affect. We are building houses and not a community. The houses that we construct might not even go to the people who truly deserve them. Since the storm housing in NOLA has quadrupled leaving the poor, mostly black, with no where to return to due to financial constraints. This in addition to the lack of good hospitals like Charity and medical personal NOLA is in a downward spiral. The Monster is the system in which we live and give power. The poor get poorer and the rich accumulate more wealth. The middle ground is starting to get larger and larger while the middle class gets smaller and smaller. Times must change and we as a society need to respect the culture of caring which is over over looked.

Today we arrived in Dulac! It’s a lot different from New Orleans, but I expect that we will work outside more which I think I’ll like. Last week was pretty wild. I did construction in 3 houses and got to explore the area once the work was done. We also went to an urban farm on saturday. It was a mini version of the plant nursery I grew up on-lots of greenhouses and raise bed gardens. The best part of this experience was the talks we had with Nat-the guy who runs show. He talked about a lot of things, one of which was social activism. In a nutshell, he basically motivated us with the ever popular question “if not now, when? If not you, who?”. I’ve heard this many times and never really thought about it until Nat put it into context for us. One idea he gave was to get kids from the poorer schoools in schenectady and run with them, to promote good health. He said that Michelle Obama has a program within “Let’s Move!”-her campaign for healthier kids, where if you document an after school program that you do with the kids that promotes better health, then you can get the school a significant grant of money. More details can be found here: http://www.fns.usda.gov/tn/healthierus/index.html. I think I might try to initiate something like that when I get back to school. You can check out the farm’s blog here: http://schoolatblairgrocery.blogspot.com/.

Another thing that was interesting this week was my encounters with New Orleanians. At the Rock N’ Bowl I met a guy named Ben who taught me how to swing dance. It was really fun and he was interesting to talk to. He told me that he is from Mississippi and comes down the Rock N’ Bowl every week! A stranger encounter occurred while walking in a french quarter: I gave a homeless person a dollar and he offered to sing for me. I couldn’t really say no so he took my shoulders and sang to me about “Keep on, holding on” very close to my face. It was very uncomfortable. It almost felt like this guy had seen so many people walk by and ignore him, that the first person to really interact with him, he felt the urge to really engage. I can understand that one must feel very isolated being ignored all the time, wanting to explain themselves or just plain talk to someone (besides the woman and child who were with him). All in all the week in New Orleans was filled with new experiences.