The First Day

Our day began by traveling across the street to the Methodist Church where we received an orientation by Dale Kimball, who is the head of Northshore Disaster Recovery Inc, who we receive our projects from. After an hour talk by Dale, we finally received our projects. This year we were given two projects again, so we split up into two groups of 9 for the projects.

The first group, which I am a part of, traveled approximately 45 minutes to Mandleville, LA to work on a house. When we arrived, we met Susan, the owner's daughter, and Angel, her very cute dog! After a quick introduction, and learning that the house had been flooded with about three feet of water, we got to work.

We first began moving everything off of the walls as on Tuesday, a company was coming to spray foam insulation on the walls. The house is fully framed, and the ceilings had already been sheetrocked.

After a trip to the gas station down the road for a bathroom break (many of the houses volunteer groups work at do not have working toliets or bathroom, so the groups need to either go to a neighbors house, or to a place down the road), and our lunch break, we help Susan move everything from under the house as they are going to be spraying the foam insulation there as well. Before Katrina, the house stood on 3 foot stillts; now they are on at least 12 foot stillts, which will help trumendously if another Hurricane were to roll through the area. The moving involved pushing a fairly large boat to the back yard, as well as moving a fridge and range.

Once that project was done, we went back inside to begin mudding all of the screw holes on the ceiling, and finding screws that weren't fully into the sheetrock so that Laura could come around and finish screwing them in. This took us the rest of the day, and around 3:45 we packed it up and headed back home, where Daniqua, Alex, Erich, and Richie cooked a wonderful pasta, garlic bread, and salad dinner. Following dinner was our devotional period, where we do a Pow, Wow, How session. Each person talks about a Pow (something that didn't go too well), a Wow (something that went great), and a How (how we saw or felt God) during the day. The night ended with some great games of Scatagories, Bananagrams, and Apples to Apples.

I'm hoping tomorrow that someone from the other group will post about their worksite and explain what they're doing and where they're at. Our group will be heading to a different worksite tomorrow because of the insulation being sprayed.

Pictures will be uploaded tomorrow at some point. Until then ~ Richie