the one

well just the one about spring break. Once we landed in MS we had to drive about 3 hours to Pass Christain and we arrived pretty late in the dark and yet you could see there wasn't much there. We attempted to find where we would be staying, but with no luck we pulled into a church parking lot and slept in the car. Seriously my whole serve trip in 3 vans with our stuff for the night. sweet! welcome to MS. Most of us were so tired from not sleeping the night before cuz we were up at 3am Portland time, but yet i still couldn't sleep much cuz the sleep i had gotten was sitting up; from the plane to the car. But we survived, slept a few hours til daylight and then found breakfast. Meals for the week were in this big tent called God's Katrina Kitchen. Cuz it was spring break they fed mostly all volunteers, but this tent has been providing free meals bascially to whoever needs it. Its pretty cool. Our sleeping arrangements ended up being slightly better than the vans for the rest of the week. We slept in the abandoned cleaned out Pass christian library. There was just one big room with mattresses (PTL) on the floor. This was the main headquarters for Campus Crusade.
Every morning the group leaders would get work requests that had been filled out by the community and our team would go do whatever they needed. Our team was split up most of the time doing different projects. We did some yard clean-up, gutted a house ( basically just involved a sledge hammer and crowbar) and put on a new roof for a family. The roof project was our biggest project. A car full of girls showed up at this guys house, knocked on his door with hammers and a pitchfork in hand and tell him we are here to give him a new roof. I can't imagine what he was thinking at the time because i think it was obvious we had no idea what to do. But heck we climbed up on the roof and started ripping of shingles. That is what we are supposed to do right? Well our team completed it from start to finish with the help of a campus crusader that acutally knew how to put on a new roof. It took us 3 days and it was great to bless this older couple George and Margaret, well not that old. The entire inside of their house was destroyed, they were starting to rebuild from the wood framework and George was the one doing it, so being able to give them a new roof for free was a big deal. About 10 people from our team did the roof while the other five took the 3 days to gut a house that had not been touched since Katrina, 7 months ago. All i have to say is, a really really really stinky fridge, everything was garbage from all the stuff to all the walls and the lady wasn't coming back. The house wasn't bulldozed because it was being donated to the historical society. Kudos to my fellow team members because they cleaned out that house.
Being there was strange cuz the city was destoryed and there was not 1 normal looking building in the entire city. The only things that showed life were all the fema trailers. We drove threw the worst hit parts of the city right on the peninsula and all that was left of those homes were the concrete stilts they were on. Some sites only had staircases that were left. No damaged house, no evidence of a house just a dozen stilts where the house used to be. crazy. i have pics but i definetly left my camera in MS in the rental van. hopefully its in the mail. it will take decades to rebuild the city and thats if progress isn't slowed by other hurricanes this summer. one of the locals was saying he has lived through 18 hurricane warnings. Sometimes you stay, sometimes you go, nobody was expecting the magnitude of katrina. One of the houses we gutted flooded to the cieling of the 2nd story and it wasn't even on the waterfront. A 30ft wave surge pushed through the city by 180 mph winds, can't really imagine the size of this storm. All you could see was that nothing was left.
Some of our team, including me didn't want to leave cuz the people their need so much help. You could just pick one family and there would be enough to do for years. Now imagine thousands of families. It was hard to come back and jump right back into school. Thats pretty much all that i can tell you. I mean there are tons of tidbits here and there but thats the big stuff. I know what i did and experienced but i don't know what it all means yet. I'm glad i went. Met some cool people on my team and came away with some new friends.
I'm not going to blog about it cuz this is already tooooooo long, but if you want to know about a highlight of the trip for me not included on this blog, ask me about the Waffle House, brittney or the 7 travelers. Same story, different reminders. :)