Gamers At Work

Sorry for the delay posting, we have been incredibly busy.

Wednesday saw us pausing on the con/destruction front and spreading out to work with some food pantries and a soup kitchen. It was a nice break from bashing things and drywalling, and we got to meet some wonderful people. Bishop Ella O’Neil, for example–a wonderful woman who runs a food pantry for an entire neighborhood out of her flooded and gutted (and yet to be restored) house. She lives in her office at the church, and after three years of this, finally got a tub there to wash up four months ago. She cooks on a hot plate. It’s eye-opening to see the woman who is providing for all of these people having to struggle to get by herself. I’ll be telling you all more about Bishop Ella in the upcoming weeks–she needs some help to keep going, financially and spiritually.

Tuesday night was our ride on the St. Charles trolley for dinner at Brigtsens’ restaurant…amazing food.

Thank you all for your support, and we’ll be home soon.

-Tom

So, what happened to Day 2, you say. Good question.

More driving, which somehow seemed like as much driving as Saturday, yet was half as long, and in (for some of us) familiar and excellent scenery. We arrived at the hostel (there will be photos up on the website when we’re back, and hopefully some video footage…this is a nice place), unpacked, did some light van maintenance, picked up two more volunteers from the airport (yay for Mike and Jen!), got groceries, and went to find some grub. Then…sleep.

Today Yesterday we were oriented by Rachel from Pnola–not the same Rachel as last year, but a new Rachel, in the same position–and then we finally set off to get our hands dirty. And dirty we got them.

9 of us went to put up drywall, while two groups of 5 headed to two different houses to start the gutting process…yes, even over three years after the storms, there is still plenty of gutting to be done. And let me tell you, our volunteers put in some serious effort. Serious. We’re ahead of schedule on the two gutting projects, I’m told, and at least keeping pace with the drywall crew. Our new goal is to leave town with Pnola well ahead of schedule.

I’ll post more tomorrow, but for now rest assured that our people got filthy today, ripped out a lot of lath and drywall and insulation, put up a lot of drywall and insulation, and generally worked like they were tireless. Bravo, volunteers.

-Tom

Welcome back to the blog!

Day 1 of our 09 New Orleans work trip saw our Iowa contingent safely to Memphis, and into the arms of the Neely family, and their Interstate Bar-B-Que. It was a good 9 hours–people got to know each other, the van performed admirably. Couldn’t ask for more. We’re filing over now in groups to the Waffle House for breakfast before the last 5 hours to New Orleans, and elsewhere in the nation the rest of our crew is gearing up for the trip down, so stay tuned.

-Tom

Left New Orleans this morning, said our goodbyes and hit the road. Three of us stopped in Memphis again–more Neely’s Interstate Barbeque, and a Motel 6. The drive up seems a lot longer than the drive down.

All the pictures will be up on the regular website soon, and the newsletter will start rolling again with plans for some work with Habitat-Indianapolis in August.

Peace-out!

Gamers For Humanity brought 9 people to New Orleans this week, and 8 of us are now gone again. That’s right, we are leaving one of our members behind.

Gabe, a recent grad of Cornell College, decided to come on the trip when his plans to move to Chicago after graduation fell through. He decided he might as well be homeless in New Orleans for a while, before being homeless in Chicago. However, it wasn’t long into the trip when he started to feel the pull of the Big Easy, and he decided to stick around for a while.

He’s lined up housing already, and possibly some paying work, as well as a number of contacts in the city, and plans for a book. We’re not sure how long he’ll be there, but some of us expect that he’ll still be around next year when we make another trip down.

It’s funny–to the rest of us, it seems like a big thing, to just pick up and move to New Orleans for a while. But when we told the Pnola people about Gabe’s plan, their reactions were of the “Oh, that’s cool” variety. We had to remember that for the most part, these are all people who just picked up and move to New Orleans at some point, whether on their own, or through AmeriCorps or similar agencies. They were happy to have Gabe stay, but it wasn’t quite so remarkable as it was to the rest of us.

Anyway, Gabe: good luck, brother!

We’ve reached the end of the work week, and I’m not sure how to sum it all up, so I won’t try. What is unanimous, though, is that we have all had a terrific time this week. I’ve heard from more than one person in our group that this was the “best trip I’ve ever taken”, and the people at Pnola have been wonderful to work with: Lance, Genevieve, Kyle, Ryan, Wes, and all the others were a pleasure to be around. Not only were they patient with those of us who didn’t have a lot of experience, but they epitomized the sort of person it takes to do this kind of work–selfless, and motivated.

With the old support beam gone and the new wall in place in the basement, we were able to finish shoring up the floor joists in the back room–there were places where the joists were almost completely rotted through, and other places where they had been, well…less than ideally constructed. Some of the flooring itself had had to come up for that job (and because it was rotted), so we replaced that as well.

There’s still a lot of work to put in at Miss Olivia’s place, but it’s farther along than it was when we got there, and in the end that’s the goal. Manny will get the wheelchair ramp for his mother installed, and a couple of other homes will have some new lighting and such. If you’re interested, you can follow the progress of the homes on the Pnola website.

Here is our trusty crew, assembled and dirty after a day at Miss Olivia’s house:

That night it was back to the house for some rest, a few errands to run, the tail end of the first night of French Quarter Fest, and some pizza at The Slice. At the Pnola office that afternoon, I spotted a neighborhood map on the wall. It shows the state of the neighborhood, as of December 2006. The green buildings are occupied houses, the yellow are gutted houses, the orange are partially gutted, and the red are ‘blighted’. The blue are commercial buildings in use, and the pink are commercial buildings not in use. I’m not sure what that map would look like now, but it’s got to be more blue and green. It has to be.

Thank you again to the Pnola crew, and to everyone who has supported us on this trip.

Let me introduce you today to the greatest threat to mankind that you’ve never heard of: the poisonous catapillar, aka mortus catapillarus. They hang out around live oaks, and once they get a taste for human flesh, there’s no stopping them. There were thousands of them skulking about, and, I’m not kidding, they would come right for you if you got near them. If you see one, stay far, far away.

The new wall got completed in the basement, and the old support beam got removed. We were going to chainsaw it out, but, in a strange turn, the chain brake mechanism was missing from inside the chainsaw. Odd. So, we took the circular saw and sawzall to it. A few solid kicks and a makeshift battering ram later, and it was gone.

A sobering moment today. The back of the house is full of salvaged personal items–boxes full of everything that could be saved from the house, and some stuff that probably still needs to be thrown away. But today the bathroom needed to be cleaned out…Miss Olivia’s towel was still hanging on the shower door…the soap was still on the soap dish. While a lot of junk had been thrown into the room, much of it was just as she’d left it. She got up one morning, showered, put on makeup, left the room–and hasn’t been back since. It was like time stopped in that room, in a way. I just stood there shining my flashlight around for a while before I could get myself to start working again.

Work that day was just the start. After work, there was a lot to do, planned and unplanned. The first stop was the library for the mid-city neighborhood, where we dropped off two boxes of paperbacks and hardcovers. The science fiction section of the library had maybe 18 books, so I think we about quadrupled the size of that section of the library. It’s a small library, and they lost a lot of books in the floods, but they are coming back.

The surprise at the library was to find that two of the staff members were gamers! They were happy to learn about our group, and they will be valuable contacts for our trip next year. Very nice, warm people.

The next stop was the Boys and Girls Club, just down the street from the Pnola volunteer house. This was another great experience. I got to meet Jessica, the woman I’d been talking to in person, and it was immediately obvious that she and the kids just love each other. The kids were wonderful, and we stood no chance of being able to carry the boxes of games in ourselves.

The facilities are great, and they’ve gotten some generous support from the Country Music Network and other groups. While they are affiliated with the NFL and the Saints, it’s a strange and unfortunate fact that only one Saints player (Drew Brees) has bothered to visit the Club since the opening day. But regardless, it’s a great place. Students from Ohio State and LSU built them a new baseball diamond recently, and a couple of us stopped by again on Friday to deliver a new volleyball/badminton set. Good kids.

The last stop for the night was VDay, a convention associated with the Vagina Monologues in support of women’s rights and the fight against violence against women. They needed help that night getting the sets ready, so a trip to the Superdome to help was in order, to build a 30 foot vagina and a yurt.

Last night, after the work day was done, Tom and Shauna got to meet Skip, a landscape architect who works for the city. Aside from being a font of knowledge about the city (Skip is in charge of the city’s ‘neutral grounds’–what people in the north call ‘medians’, but were originally neutral territory between the French, English, and Spanish neighborhoods), Skip is busy renovating his own house. Most of the work is done at this point, with some wood work, countertops, floors and painting yet to go.

Back at the worksite on Wednesday, we continued the spackling and mudding job upstairs. We made a lot of progress, but it doesn’t really translate well to pictures–the work involves layering a coat of drywall mud, smoothing it off, waiting for it to dry, and repeating. So, while each day’s pictures look like the same walls, in reality much of the house will be ready to paint next week.

Meanwhile, down in the basement, we got to work on shoring up the floor of the addition in the back of the house. This was a big project, and the Pnola folk had been working on it for a while already. This week, a warped old support beam had to be taken down, after a new support wall had been put up. So out came the hammers, and in went the nails (sure, it sounds that easy, but we sacrificed many nails to the lumber gods before we got back into the groove of hammering).

Here’s the old support beam

and here’s the new wall that will take over the job.

Finally, tonight after work we had a treat that we’d been looking forward to: dinner at Brigtsen’s Restaurant. The food was incredible, the rest of the group got to meet Skip, and we left feeling very good. Here we are all cleaned up and ready for dinner, in the backyard of the Pnola volunteer house. You can see the waterline on the wall behind our heads–that’s where the flooding reached in that neighborhood during the storms.

Meet Reverend Clarence Thomas, formerly minister of an interfaith church here in town. He has lived in New Orleans his whole life–former Exxon employee, then a minister to the sick and infirmed through his church.

Rev. Thomas was displaced to Alabama when the storms hit, and was there for two years, returning to New Orleans last fall. He stayed for part of the time in Alabama at the Green Acres retirement home, where he will tell you that he met some of the best people on the Earth. He attended a large Baptist church in Springdale, AL, and if you have some time, he’s got a lot of great pictures from his time there–and from before the storms in New Orleans–that he’ll readily break out.

His house has been gutted twice since the storms. The first time was after he returned in the fall, repairing the damage from the flooding. The second time around was from fire, after the flood damage had been repaired. Half of his home is still being refinished, by a crew working on a home across the street from him. The Reverend lives next door to the house we’re drywalling, and has let us know to tell him if we need anything.

Still working on the drywalling today for ‘Miss Olivia’, and making good progress. Here’s Gabe, dutifully hammering some freshly installed insulation.

More of our lively crew: Caryl and Rachel

and Anisa.

Got a good early start today, and hit two projects right off the bat.

One couple needs a wheelchair ramp for the husband’s 90 year old mother, so some of us headed over to a now-empty FEMA trailer lot to scavenge a ramp. By ‘now-empty’, I mean that the FEMA trailers, brought it over two years ago, were removed last week. The ramp was huge, and much more than we needed, so we tore it in half. It was also substantially over-built…an average of 8 nails to hold any given two boards together. Four hours of wrecking bars, hammers, and a sawz-all later, we had what we needed. Here’s the original ramp we started with:

The rest of the crew headed to a home that’s well under way, to start mudding and taping the drywall. One thing to keep in mind is that houses in NOLA often have tall tall ceilings. But a lot got done there, too.