What a great trip!
Reflecting back on the trip, this page is dedicated to reflecting on what we accomplished on the trip and the great experiences that I hope will shape the lives of everyone involved.
Working with His Hands 2 Go, our 4 teams had one mission to bless some of the people of New Orleans with helping hands to do things that they could neither afford or were able to do. We had an AMAZING group of 37 students and 7 adults on the trip. Here's the group:
Team 1 spend three days weeding waist high weeds, composting, building a mud pit for Dude, putting a roof on goat pens, weeding and clearing the greenhouse and putting down weed control cloth, building platforms for the goats to play on, generally doing the things that needed to be done to get the Marais Garden to a place where it can provide food for the community this summer.
One student put it this way, "At first I thought I kind of wanted to work on a house for one person, but then I realized that this garden would help to feed lots of people and thought about it's impact, I was excited to do the work here." Another student mentioned that when he heard that Pastor Teresa's knees were bad and she was going to need surgery, he wanted to work even harder for her to get this garden up to snuff.
Team 2 worked hard to paint Pastor Teresa's home. In New Orleans every house has wooden siding that gets painted, presumably because of the verocity of the storms, but paint doesn't last forever. Her house needed scraping and paint on the trim and siding to help protect the wood from rot. Most of the houses are set up above the ground and painting is hard work on ladders. You can see the results were awesome. This team worked through the most adversity after one of the students had an accident that required medical attention and eventually surgery on his arm when he leaned down and broke a piece of glass that sliced it open. But after that trauma, they rallied together to get most of the job done!
Team 3 was working at Steamboat Willie's house. A fulltime professional musician in his 70s, the team put in a ton of hard work to paint his house, replace rotting boards on the deck in back and the front stairs, clean the back yard, cut back weeds and repair the fence that had been damaged and was falling over from a storm. The work was hard but the change was dramatic. We also had the opportunity to bring the band to Cafe Beignet and sit in with him on Monday night. We've played with him several other times on previous trips and he's always been such a gracious host musically that it was very exciting to be able to work on his house. One of the genuine good guys and wonderful musicians that you'll ever meet!
Finally, Team 4 worked on the home of a former teacher. We initially arrived with the understanding we would be cleaning the and painting the house, fixing the mailbox and cleaning up the yard. Little did we realize this woman's story and that we would end up transforming much of the house inside and outside.
Turns out there was plenty and we were all very deeply affected by all of it. We were able to clean the inside of the house and the outside and do several repairs to drywall. You can see how much we were able to remove from her house, there was more-this is just days 2 & 3.
Watching her face brighten and her countenance improve was amazing. She can now get around in her house freely and sees the light at the end of the tunnel in regards to having a house she can enjoy living in. I told her that not only does her home look better on the outside, but it is becoming a home on the inside again! We were all changed by the process.
We repaired her fence, power washed everything, recemented her mailbox, cleaned her yard, cleared out wasp nests, cleaned out windows, installed a room air conditioner for her bed room (did I mention that her central air went out before we arrived?), convinced her to call the termite abatement people right away to keep the problem from getting worse, replaced the drywall on two ceiling spots, replaced a set of blinds, installed a new ceiling fan in the kitchen, got rid of 100s of pounds of expired food from food pantries that she would never be able to eat (just too much food!), repainted the front porch and replaced spindles on the stairs that were missing, and other little projects too many to list! These students worked hard and you just see the depression and hopelessness we had seen when we arrived lifted. So blessed to get to know and work for this wonderful woman.
She was on the verge of hopelessness-we got to come in and provide hope.
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