The Continuing

Wednesday, February 28, 2007
10:36:09 AM

Well, its all good so far Today, I woke up a little later but to the same wonderful aroma of fresh brewed coffee. My host mom had made me 2 giant pancakes with chocolate chips for breakfast; they were the best I’d had in a long time. She didn’t have any baking powder so they were more like crepes. We made the morning newspaper today with a full page spread about the program and what we are doing here this week. We had the usual morning carpool to the campus. In the morning we gad a semiunar on marketing.

New Orleans Facts:
• 25 - 40% below poverty Line
• 1/2 of the people left New Orleans (about 200,000) to live in Houston, Atlanta, Baton Rouge and other major centers.
• Baton Rouge, as with other cities had to deal with the influx of people, including the school system
• 60 - 80% of New Orleans is still underwater. Even where people are rebuilding, they May be the only ones on their block. The rest is wasteland.
• People are suffering from PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder) as well of depression.
• In the FEMA trailer parks there is security, but theft, drugs, and other crime is still common.
• People have been living there for over 2 years.
• Renaissance Village - 2000 people - 500 trailers - 700 youth - 500 pre teens
• Performance venue was the initially the place where the victims stayed.
• A great deal of animosity between the residents of Baton Rouge and the refugees from New Orleans. This area wasn’t very rich to begin with and now there are even less resources to go around.

CI Project
Beautify to provide a sense of community

• Bulletin boards
• Tent repair
• Murals
• Steps
• Signs
• Street names
• Maps (of Renaissance Village)
• Parade (before BTS, street parade for the kids)
• Planter boxes (main boulevard)

For lunch we had Lebanese food, pita bread, hummus, and caesar salad.

In the afternoon I, along with some of the other cast members were assigned to the “random acts of Kindness” team where we just went around doing random acts of kindness and promoting the show. We played jump rope with kids at a local school, put up posters, and crashed into two frat houses and offered to clean them up for free. One of them was a real dump; man I thought doyle was bad, anyhow. Its all Good™. While at the student union building, I was able to renew my ISIC international student card and the lady there gave myself and Lauren some free tshirts. In the later afternoon I worked some more on the cast a website. We’re getting there slowly. I went to another host families house for supper. We had spaghetti with sausages in the sauce instead of meatballs. For dessert we had home made apple pie with pecans on top as well as vanilla ice cream. It was all Good

Selling lost and found items, I got a new travel mug