Our fist few days were spent cooking in the kitchen. The camp fed the teams that were staying there, local residents and church groups that would pop in with a van and pick up meals. Latterly the National Guard were popping in and picking up food. I'd cooked some chicken wings and was looking forward to having one only to discover that the National Guard had swung by and taken the lot!
Bobby (pictured) was the chef. I'll tell his story another day. We instantly liked the guy and I think he took to us as a group quickly too. He'd not had a day off in over two months so after one day in the kitchen we were on our own cooking for approx 750 people.
Things were measured in Cambro's, plastic insulated food carriers. They could keep a meal hot for hours. Bobby disappeared one day, the day we'd to cook Jambalaya for over 1500 people!
Needless to say given the temp was in the 90's and you'd be standing over a huge wok the heat in the kitchen could be extreme. If you got to hot then Sharky would put you in one of the refrige trailers to bring your core temp down. Most days one of the teams who were out gutting houses would end up in a trailer for a spell at they'd got too hot and were in danger of dehydrating and going hypothermic.
A group off around 100 from Pittsburgh arrived and they had space in their vans to take us with them. In a convoy of vans we followed Sharky on a tour of the devastation. This was my first experience of Dark Tourism and it was a rather unsettling experience. We stopped and got out in the Lower 9th ward. This was a poorer area of town and home to many of the gangs of New Orleans. The place was however a ghost town. The people of the lower 9th were either dead or displaced mainly to Houston. When the murders stared a couple of days latter people would talk of "Houston coming back", i.e. the gangs were returning.
We drove to 2 hrs and in that time saw perhaps 10 houses in which you could live. Both rich, middle income and poor areas were effected. Shopping areas lay wasted, cars and other vehicles littered the streets and gardens. Where some gutting of houses had occurred the waste lay at the road side to be collected, but who knew when?
The next day some of our team went with the Pittsburgh guys to a re-hab center to help paint and lift floors. The rest of us stayed in the camp to help cook. A couple of days after our guys had gone to this center someone was shot dead right in front of it. A team of guys from Pittsburgh were in the center at the time. Needless to saw a lot of the Pittsburgh kids phoned home to tell their parents and worried parents started to call the leaders. They left camp the next morning. Despite these happenings we felt quite safe and had no great worries about our safety.
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