Real Life, by New Orleans 2007
Saturday, March 31, 2007

Friday!

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Friday. It’s amazing and sad that it’s already come to this point. For anyone who has read one of these before, our day is fairly typical. We get up early and work on gutting out two different houses. Although in some regards today is not so typical a day. In this case, both houses we are involved with can obviously be saved and rebuilt. By volunteering our time we are actually helping the owners to speed up the process of returning home. This seems to be a very good way to end a week full of frustration, questions of purpose, and just really hard work. We continued working with a group from Western Oregon College, with whom some of us have developed strong bonds of friendship; originally stimulated through common geographical backgrounds, yet completed with hard work.

After work we meet with a couple members of the ACORN non-profit organization we have been working with. Through this little question-answer session we are able to learn a little more about the group we have been working with.

Although some of us are fairly excited to be done with work, no one is happy about leaving in the morning.

Friday Part Two

By Shige

Friday was our last day to work. This week made me to think about what volunteering is, what we were doing, and what is helpful to the people in New Orleans. Actually, I’m not sure about them yet. However, to me, it was very impressive to see what is going on there. In downtown, you can’t see any damage from hurricane Katrina, so tourists think that New Orleans is fine, has got recovered already. Yet, actually where we were working was very terrible still now although it has been even eighteen months since the disaster took place there. I believe that it is important to see anything through your eyes, not through mass media, rumor, or etc.

By the way, New Orleans city is amazing! Just walking around down town makes me excited. Music, people, mood, and so on—everything there is exciting! This city has huge energy.

I believe that people have to seriously consider this contrast between city and areas where we worked.