The Continuing

Thursday, March 1, 2007
11:51:17 PM

Today was probably one of the most awesome days in Louisiana as of yet. Today we went to “Renaissance Village”, the largest trailer park in the state. It was set up by the government organization called FEMA (http://www.fema.gov/). There are about 2000 residents that live there in travel trailers and have been for over 2 years. The whole place is patrolled by armed security guards and has an erie feeling to it. Working with our community partner City Year (http://www.cityyear.org/) we worked on many projects around the park including, road/street signs, wall murals, benches, tent repair, and lots of painting. I did tent repair, painting, and cleaned out one of their big sheds. In the afternoon it poured rain like I hadn’t seen since the first day I was in St. John’s about 2 years ago. Over lunch I got a chance to talk to one of the residents. He was 65 years old and had lived just outside New Orleans. His 200,000$ house was under about 23 feet of water. Before he was rescued, he had to chop a hole in the roof of hi house in order to escape the rising water. Like many people, he had hurricane insurance but not flood insurance and so never saw any insurance money from it. His future was very uncertain. Also over lunch I along with two others were interviewed by a local television station for the evening news. The rest of the afternoon was spent finishing up our projects and heading back to the LSU for pickup. Tonight for supper, my host family put on a giant Crawfish boil. It was really neat. We boiled a huge sack of live crawfish in a big pot over propane stove. The water inside was seasoned to make everything spicy. We also had sausage, corn on the cob, mushrooms, potatoes, and onions that were boiled in the same liquid.There was also fried catfish, chips with guacamole and salsa, french fries, and awesome brownies for dessert. We invited over two other host families so we had a pretty good crowd. (Danni, My, Leo, Arial, Christa, Angelo, Maria, et al) It was all good, except now I smell like crawfish.

Morning Carpool