Day 100 – About time we did some work

Author – Kate
Based In – New Orleans

Today’s Photos – http://www.flickr.com/photos/32017704@N03/sets/72157613766938919/

After 99 days of lolling around enjoying ourselves we realise it’s about time we did some work. With that in mind we jumped out of bed at 6am this morning to head to the 1st Street restoration project that we’d missed the day before.

1st Street was already a very underprivileged area of New Orleans before it was hit hard by the hurricane. Plenty of houses are boarded up or empty and look like they are waiting to be knocked down, some are fine but a bunch of properties are boarded up and still being lived in. The only good thing about the terrible state of things is that since there is so much that needs to be done even useless office based bodies like us should be able to provide some help.

We met a bunch of the other volunteers before being assigned to a group who were going to be clearing up Miss Idas house. A room at the back of Miss Idas house had been torn off by the hurricane and our groups job was to clear the wreck left behind and then rebuild the room. The first hour on the job was spent throwing damp bits of house into a skip. There were cockroaches and spiders running around including one particularly big one which must’ve escaped form the zoo which made the task slightly scary. On the whole though this was quite motivating work because it requires pretty much no skill, you start with a pile of mess and an empty skip and a little while later the mess is gone and the skip is full. Well almost full, anything semi salvageable was being put next to the skip at the instruction of a local guy with a shopping trolley who was having a field day carrying away wrecked washing machines.


Once the yard was cleared Grant and I were shown how to use the nail gun and saw so that we could build the frame of the new room. This was exactly the kind of volunteering we had pictured and was going quite well, I was even looking forward to the hug I would get from Miss Ida when it was all finished but we were pulled off the job because the foundations would have to be fixed first and so we had to leave that project and the resulting hugs for some other day.

Our afternoon was spent laying cement covered slabs on the floor of apartments so that they could be tiled over the following day. This requires cutting the cement slabs using a tile saw so that they fit in and around the room and then drilling them to the floor. Grant was quite exited as it’s basically a giant jigsaw puzzle involving cement and power tools. There was one small hitch mentioned, we had to wear ventilation masks because the floor we were cementing was covered in asbestos. I wasnt quit expecting permanent lung damage as a potential perk from volunteering, I had been hoping for a t-shirt. Our instructor Phil assured us we’d be fine because we weren’t going to be disturbing the asbestos but then he did assign himself to the room without any asbestos and we were asked to sign disclaimers earlier that day so you cant blame us for being a tad suspicious.

So with masks on our faces and fear for our lives in our hearts we slaved away all afternoon. Grant and I had our own room to work on and despite not usually working well together we did ok (give it a day or so and this bit of the blog will be full of rants). Grant being the A type personality that we all know and love, quickly and without words nominated himself as the boss. Me being the lazy easier to go with it that fight it type personality that Grant loves, decided to go with it for today since he wasn’t being too bossy and before long we had finished our room. We were even invited to be in the same group tomorrow to tile the room “since it had gone so well” Phil said. There’s a distinct possibility it’s just because no-one else is dumb enough to go in the asbestos room but since the cement is covering the asbestos now we should be ok.

We were pretty knackered by clocking off time but still felt we could manage a quick jog around the Audubon Park track that Miles had shown us before heading home. That turned out to be a bit of an error of judgment as we were wrecked afterwards so there’s is absolutely nothing to report after 5.30pm apart from loafing around feeling achy but proud of ourselves.

Tomorrow we hit the tiles!