so i left you last when we started on kenny's house. kenny had been working on his house the whole time and living in his fema trailer (nothin more than a travel trailer set up outside his house). kenny stayed for the hurricane and i dont know his story of the flood (where he went), but he stayed... and, as you noticed before, he was ready with his shotgun in case anyone tried to loot. (if you look closely at the "im here" picture, the coke can is backwards, it's because i took it from the inside looking out!) we finished gutting kenny's house by the end of that day... hard work, but so good.  kenny was so happy, so appreciative that we would come help him.  "it woulda taken me another couple months to do what y'all did in one day!" :) so cool... :)

day three--laura's house

got lost on the way to laura's house. i didn't upload any pictures of the surrounding areas because it was so devastated... just try to picture houses that were once beautiful homes, now skeletons of a house, or only the roof--the roof laying on the foundation... or... completely gone... sigh.

after a full day's work of mudding out room after room... my mom and i worked in what was the dining room, wary of snakes, but digging through the mud with our hands, looking for the teacups laura hoped we'd find.  and we did... her teacups were found, whole, not even the handles broken off... no chips, nothing!  wow.  something so delicate, so fragile, fell from the wall, must have landed in the water, and sunk under the mud, preserved and protected for month after month.  amazing!  now, she can't use them again, but they were her memories of her mother, and we were honored to be able to give them back to her, one at a time, slightly muddy, but whole.  by the middle of the afternoon, my parents and i had finished the dining room, scraped the wood floor as clean as we could get it (didn't matter, the drywall would be coming down the next day...)  laura was amazed that she could even walk through the room!  this is how thick the mud was in the dining room... that's my parents digging through the kitchen.  there was about 6-8 inches of mud throughout the dining room, mixed with furniture and dishes.  in the kitchen, there was about the same amount of mud, but more dishes and more stuff. in one of the rooms, they found a quilt made by laura's godmother, who had sewn a hat and the name of all the grandkids, nieces, nephews, etc... and it had been passed down to laura... it was covered in mud, but we knew it was something she'd want. and we couldn't give it to her in the shape it was in... so my dad and tim spent some time washing  the quilt before giving it to her. she was so happy!

end of the day

thursday's over and the house is almost done... some nails left to pull, some more things to move, more cleanup left.  this is the dining room, looking through to the laundry room.

just a peek at the trashpile.  measured about 90 feet long, 20 feet wide, and about 6 or 7 feet tall.  just from laura's house... insane...

mud line in the living room (i dont remember if i took this picture, but i wanted to show you guys just how high the mud got in the main section of the house.)

friday we finished laura's house. on that day we had a team of about 23 people, and we all stood in her living room, prayed blessings on the house and the family, and sang "amazing grace" before leaving.  laura was just excited to be able to walk through the house.  there was hope she and her husband could start over.  there was hope life would go back to some sort of normalcy... that mud and stench would no longer be normalcy...

sights around new orleans... downtown, and where we were working... just some stuff...

tim, dave, cody, and brian... some of the guys on my team

on the back of this was spray painted "TOW"

mardi gras celebrated a little differently this year...

tim's mascot, popeye, he found it at laura's house, and tied it on to the front.  he said we needed a mascot. :) it certainly made us smile!

one of the oldest apartment buildings in the state. or country. or something like that. in downtown new orleans. in the french quarter.

cafe du monde french cafe... back up and running. :)

there's something freaky about this...

the cathedral in downtown new orleans

so that was my trip in a nutshell.  go help if you can. new orleans needs your help.  the people need your help.  :)