View From The Basement

Carbon Neutral Mission

Last summer I lead a Youth Mission Trip to New Orleans to get involved in some relief work following Hurricane Katrina. We flew from Edinburgh to Atlanta and then on to New Orleans. I've calculated the CO2 for this trip  @ 1.6 t , and tried to work out how many tree's I'd have to plant to off-set this.

The amount of CO2 a tree will absorb depends on many variables, so any calculations are a bit of a guesstimate. I reckon 20 trees will over 4 - 5 years will off-set my CO2 for this trip.

So this month I'm going to give to Greenbelt. Not this Greenbelt, or that Greenbelt, but the Greenbelt Movement . This movement was set up by Wangari Maathai the 2004 Nobel Prize winner. What I like about it is that it's not just an environmental project planting trees in Kenya, but looks to provide employment for women, both in the planting of the trees and then in the management of the planted area.

Kenneth's Story

Kenneth [pictured here in the black top standing next to Bobby] is someone who you can't think of but your face breaks into a smile. He stayed in the bed next to me in the dorms and frequently you would go to go to bed and find that he'd left some gift to take home for my boys.

Kenny worked in a local restaurant so some days we didn't see him as much as we would have liked. He like Bobby was from the lower 9th ward. I'm unsure at what point he and his wife got out of the lower 9th, if this was before the industrial levee broke or after. Anyway he and he wife became separated with no means of contacting each other. Kenny ended up at the New Orleans' Superdome. While this was surrounded by water the raised access roads meant that it was still accessible, hence it was used as a place of refuge.

Kenny quickly assessed the situation in the Superdome and left after only a couple of hours. He spent the next couple of days sheltering on one of the raised freeways that surround the area around the Superdome. Kenny was eventually picked up by the American Red Cross who managed to repatriate him with his wife and grown up daughters. They were put on a bus, given a small amount of money for food and sent to one of the receiving towns for evacuees from New Orleans. They eventually ended up in Houston which is where many of the other refugees from New Orleans still are.

Kenny's wife was still in Houston. Kenny had come back to New Orleans to find work and a place to stay. The finding work bit of this plan he'd managed but finding somewhere to stay that was affordable was proving difficult. A number of times he'd come back to the camp with a big smile on his face as he thought that he'd finally managed to secure a place only to be later disappointed as the deal fell through.

I guess Kenny was fairly typical in that men have returned to the city to find work and homes to stay in, but their families are dispersed. I pray and hope that Kenny has found a good place to live and that he and his wife are now back together.

Bobby's Story

Bobby was the camp chef and our fist day at camp was spent working with him. Our group and Bobby clicked and worked well together.

The next day we gave Bobby his first day off in something like three months. So what did Bobby do on his day off.....he went and gutted someone elses house. In many respects that summed Bobby up, a big guy with a big heart. Sure Bobby had issue and some people found him a little gruff, but we loved the big guy.

One day after eating our lunch Bobby and I were sitting at a table talking. One of the kids from Pittsburgh came over with a video camera and asked Bobby if he would tell her his story. What follows is what I can remember of this. Anything in [ ] is a note I've added for clarity.

Heavy Hearts

We all left New Orleans and the Good News Camp with Heavy Hearts. Not because we had no hope that the city would recover (although this is a real question) but because given the chance we'd have stayed longer.

I think you can tell if a trip has been good / right with the following question, "have I left part of me there?" I think for all of us who went on the trip the answer to this is a resounding yes, part of us will always be in New Orleans, with it's warm and resilient people and with the staff of Good News Camp with whom we connected with in a special way.

They will leave Good News Camp when it closes at the beginning of August. The board who run the park want the parking lot back, so Good News Camp will close. Sharky was mad when this was first announced, but then the lights of the mini-league pitches a block away came on. He cried when he saw the lights, tears of hope perhaps as a glimmer of normal life shone in the desolation. So the parking lot returning to a place for those going to the football games in the stadium is also a small sign that some sense of normality is returning to New Orleans.

The staff team will got to Houston to be part of Christian World Embassy to be part of their first response team to disasters.

So ended our trip in New Orleans.

I'm away on family holiday for a couple of weeks but on my return will post some of the stories of the people we met on the trip.

Gutting Houses with Tom Hanks

We'll he wasn't really Tom Hanks, his name was Jim but he looked like a younger Hanks. He was part of a group that stayed at Good New Camp for nearly a week who were working with PRC Compassion. We traveled like what seemed ages to a small housing estate to finish off a house they had started the day before.

This is the house we were working in. Gutting normally meant removing all the drywall from the walls and ceilings + the insulation. It was incredibly hot and we could only work short shifts before needing a drink break. I reckon I must have drunk  10 - 15 cans of water.

The photo's show the progress we made. The team worked hard and while it was not nice there was a degree of satisfaction in having done something toward getting this house ready for it's owners to return.

This house was typical in that we never met the owners. They were elsewhere, perhaps Houston, or other parts of the south.

One of the first shovels of debris I lifted had a roll of undeveloped 35mm film in it. A stark reminder that these people had lost so much that will be irreplaceable; the family heirlooms, the photograph albums etc.

Jim (aka Tom Hanks) and his team left the next day after the murders. We however now had our own transport we had more options as to what we did. Mike, Gordy and some of the girls headed to a ladies house to help move furniture and gut.

The next day one of our tasks was to lift the floor or one of the large tents that had been taken down, stack the OSB boards and pallets. To avoid anyone getting sick or over-heated I made them all take one of the breaks in a refridge unit.

Latter that day I borrowed a thing like a large car jack with pulled out the steel spiked in the ground to which the ropes of the tent had been fixed.

The day before we left Mike, Gordy, Michelle C, Lauren and myself went to gut another house. we got to meet the owner which was nice and had some good conversations with her. She was a Christian but was disillusioned by church so was not going anywhere. Yet she was finding that God kept bringing Christians into her life. She was totally blown away that a bunch of young Scottish Christians were in her house ripping the moldy drywall off and cleaning the place up. She called her friends, she called the newspaper, she even called the TV station.

Before we left we prayed with her. There were tears all round.

Dark Tourism Pt2

This is a short commentary on the photos below.

(1) The state of this house was fairly typical

(2) the 17th street canal broke here. click HERE for story.

(3) This house is opposite the 17 st breach. The school next to the levee wall and the school bus were washed across the street and sent crashing into this building.

(4) This is up near lakeside. These expensive properties are totally trashed.

(5) This house would have ended up on the road had the large tree in view not stopped it.

(6) Desire St. Made famous by the Tennessee Williams play. There is no longer a street car service to Desire St.

(7)The streets are by and large deserted. It's like driving around early on a Sunday morning when everyone is in bed.

(8) In the lower 9th.

(9) Note the boat in the porch.

(10) This pic needs no explanation.

(11) Buildings here were damaged as a 16 ft surge from the industrial canal breach (caused by a 500 ft barge crashing through the levee wall) hit the people trying to escape and the buildings demolishing everything in it's path. The buildings nearest the levee were washed against those further back.

(12) Front of same building.

(13) The white vans are what we traveled in. The other vehicles are all abandoned. In the fore front are the steps to a house that's been demolished.

(14) More cars and houses in the lower 9th.

(15) this area has been cleared of houses. The ground was covered with shells!

(16) Another empty street of the lower 9th.

(17) another view of the 9th.

Dark Tourism

Below are some of my photo's of our drive around the areas of New Orleans flooded after Hurricane Katrina.

Heat in the Kitchen

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.

First Days in New Orleans

There were eight of us who made this tip: myself, Mike, Michelle G, Michelle C, Lauren, Hazel, Kim and Gordon. We flew the new Delta service from Edinburgh to Atlanta and then onto New Orleans. Because of the 6hr time difference we left on the Tuesday and arrived the same day.

We grabbed a couple of cabs from Louis Armstrong Airport to take us to The Good News Camp, but the address we'd been given was just a postal service shop. The drivers had not heard of the camp, it was late and we were very tiered. I suggested to the cabbie we try City Park as some of the emails I had received made mention of this. Now City Park is approx 22 square miles so while I thought my suggestion was good the cabbie was not so sure.

God is good and we easily found the camp which was located in the car park of Tad Gormley Stadium.  The man on the gate was not expecting us. Something had occured in another part of the site that had taken the experianced staff away from the gate and main area leaving us to wonder if we were indeed in the right place.

We were and after a short delay we met Sharky, the guy responsible for the day to day running of the camp. He briefed us, i.e. "don't walk in the park at night you'll get killed" (at the time we thought this was a bit extreme. However, during our stay the National Guard were called into the city due to 6 murders in 2 days!). Finally we were shown to our dorms which unfortunately involved waking up the guys who were already asleep there.

There was no A/C in the camp and the temp was consistently in the 70's at night. Thus there was a constant noise from fans blowing and the big generators which provided power. Our dorm was rather near the generator!

One of the camps primary functions was as a base / hub out of which groups could work. During our first couple of days there were a couple of AIM's teams there. They seemed a great bunch of people and it would have been good to have shared camp with them for longer.

For the first couple of days we were in the kitchen which involved making lunch for approx 250 and dinner for 500. Most of the teams who used the camp were only there for a week and would rotate who they left at camp to help, if they left anyone. We were there for two weeks and did not have transport, so we were able to come along side and help the camp staff, many of whom had not had a day off for a couple of months.

Youth Mission Trip Pt 1

My plan over the next few days is to tell the story of our youth mission trip to New

Orleans

where we got involved in some relief work that is ongoing. I'm going to try and do this in three sections.

Section 1 will try to recount what we actually got up to. (This might take several posts to keep each post to a reasonable length).

Section 2 will be a re-telling of some of the stories of people we met and of what happened in

New Orleans

during and after Katrina.

Section 3 will be some kind of analysis of life as we found it in

New Orleans

.