"Hey, hey, hey!" (the beginning words of my voice mail answering machine on my cell phone). What a week! There was tons of excitement, humidity, sunshine, rainfalls, windyness, and of course meeting a couple famous celebrities in the process. This past week consisted of the Jimmy Carter Work Project 2008 that took place in New Orleans, LA. The area of focus was the Upper 9th Ward where there is still so much devastation and destruction. The project had roughly 800 volunteers from all over the US, including parts of Canada came down for the 6 day build. The goal was to build 7 blitz houses (houses that the keys were going to be given to the home owners) and another 16 houses that would be dry walled in. In future weeks, our team and other AmeriCorps members are going to go back and finish up the already started houses and see how much we can accomplish with 4 weeks remaining. I got the chance to meet several of the volunteers and everyone I ran into was high spirited and excited to be working and making a difference. Some even were complimenting us hospitality team for giving back they way we were, even though we did not actually get the opportunity to build.
Our tasks consisted of: waking up and arriving onto the work site no later than 5:30 AM (that meant setting the alarm for 4:30 to assure that we would arrive on time...Raven 3 is NEVER late!) re-filling the water jugs, helping set up breakfast and lunch, taking out the garbage, making sure that all port-a-potties were stocked clean with TP, assist with the bands that performed at lunch time and basically accomplishing any job that Elise or Elizabeth wanted us to do. There was also the perks of being in the hospitality group, that was receiving a ton of Habitat merchandise: t-shirts, keychains, pencils, tool bags, etc., gettting the chance to meet Jimmy Carter and Rosalynn Carter and even Harry Connick, Jr. Connick was there because he is the spokesperson for the house being rebuilt in the Musicians Village area. Him and Dave Matthews have partnered up to help. The Musicians Village was hit hard from the hurricane, but is slowly getting back to normal...all that needs to be done is making the road smoother.
The week was tons of fun, here is a play-by-play description of how this past week went...
SUNDAY
- arrived to the work site around 1PM to properly get golf cart trained; we are going to be using the golf carts to deliver supplies, water, and TP to the 23 houses in the neighborhood area
- Jimmy Carter Kick Off started and our team headed towards a park downtown where we checked in volunteers, boosted the morale of some of them, got the chance to talk to some of them and get there backgrounds
- we assisted with the setting up of dinner that was catered by a nearby hotel, listened to some wonderful jazz music
- got to bed early because we knew we had to awake early the next morning
MONDAY
- got up at 4:30 AM and headed to the site
- helped with registration with our sponsor and then some of us helped with parking
- later in the morning we helped the Salvation Army set up lunch for the workers, we had to unload the truck with all the food and utensils
- we left for the day around 2 PM since they did not have anything for us to do
TUESDAY
- woke up and arrived to the scene around 5:30 AM and began doing the same things we had done the day before
- more hecticness today with more and more workers signing in
- Raven 3 yet again was working and doing as much as we could to assist with jobs that made our Habitat sponsors lifes easier
- we then were mentally preparing to meet Jimmy Carter and Harry Connick tomorrow
- also, i ran into a girl named Ashley Johnson who was the character Chrissy Seaver on the Growing Pains...got a picture with her!
WEDNESDAY
- woke up again and headed to the site where we anticipated in meeting the former president; we set up for breakfast, made our water runs, saw the progress of some of the houses, and then came back to watch the news/press conference
- JC talked about future and past Habitats and tried to reach out to the media in order to spread the word about the non-profit organization
- we ended up leaving for the day at 1:30 PM but had to come back to help with the dinner celebration at the Marriot Hotel
- we came back at 5 PM and led the volunteers in a 2nd Line while they waved their brightly colored bandanas
- arrived at dinner where there was oysters, clams, rice, and very yummy food!
- President Carter said a speech with Rosalynn AND Harry Connick, Jr. sang a little bit, then he convinced Mr. President to sing When The Saints Go Marching In...great vocals
THURSDAY
- came in the morning for hospitality crew but about 8:30, the downpour rain came and flooded all the workers site's/houses; they sent everyone for cover
- not only were there massive ammounts of rain, BUT there was also huge amounts of wind that blew over a couple of the registration tents
- Raven 3 made the best of the situation by providing the rain entertainment and creating a slip-n-slide with the black trash bags...TONS of fun and also great PT!
- the day was cancelled due to the rain which was unfortunate, but it was nice to go back and catch up on sleep
FRIDAY
- seemed as if Friday was like Thursday with the rain day; it started pouring at 8 AM this time and everyone fled for cover; the rain delay lasted for a couple hours and then volunteers went back out in the drizzle to finish the blitz houses (all of the houses on Law St. were Blitz houses and everything was done at the end except the carpeting)
- it was amazing to see the dedication of a majority of the builders even when it was drizzling
- later in the day we came back and set-up for the catered dinner provided by Texas Roadhouse, we helped and also helped the band Ricardo Crespo
- overall a very strange, but fun day
SATURDAY
- today some of my team, and a couple people from other teams got together and performed an ISP at the Children's Museum downtown
- we got to monitor the kids, dress up in the mascot costume, plaster shoes with them...it was crazy insane there with 9 different birthday parties going on at once
- they said that they loved our help and would love to see us back helping again
So all in all, this was a very entertaining and wonderful week with all the fesitivities that went on. I had loads of fun with helping as hospitality and I am looking forward to actually getting the hands dirty and building some of these houses. We start this coming tuesday and have a tuesday through saturday work day. The Jimmy Carter Project went well other than the rain. He is a very nice man. Other side notes include...the Cubs are happily in 1st place :), a couple of us AmeriCorps people from Perry Point are trying to get tickets to go to Game 7 and watch the Hornets tomorrow night. They need to win to continue on in the playoffs. So if you have time, look for me on TV.
That is all I have for now. Thanks for reading and I will be sending more updates very soon to tell how the 1st week of building went. Keep smiling everyone...because I am...I love this program :)
