Katrina, Day 1

Day one has come and gone. I considered blogging about the travel day, but then I realized I can just include the highlights of that day in Day One's blog. So we got up at 4:00am yesterday to arrive at the airport at 5:00am. Ok, this is too slow. Fast forward to the first highlight. I met this realtor on the plane from Dallas to New Orleans who told me story after story about people here who are now coming back to their homes and dealing with gutting them to re-build, selling them or trying to even live in them. Her stories from the flood were the most powerful. She told me about a man and his wife who didn't have much packed and hadn't planned to evacuate and so when the flooding came, they went up the trapdoor into the attic. All the man had was a screwdriver, no other tools, so he spent something like 7 hours that night scraping the roof to make a hole so they could get air and finally a big enough hole to climb out of so they could sit on the roof, where they stayed for 2 days until a boat came by and picked them up. All that first night, the water was up to the ceiling, so the attic trapdoor was banging back and forth. Can you imagine?

Today we spent the entire day working on a house. I think it was a pastor's house because we found checks for the general fund of a church. Now their family lives outside on the front lawn in a 150 square foot FEMA trailer. And they've been there since Katrina. There were still closets full of clothes, a vacuum, lamps, etc. We tore down the interior walls and removed all the insulation and fiberglass, leaving just a frame.

All day I kept singing to myself this song:

Stepping forward
Keep us from just singing
Move us into action
We must go