Being back in NOLA for the third time is honestly an amazing feeling. I honestly love this city and the people who live here. It's a change of pace from NJ and our lifestyle. I wanted to bring up a few points in this post which sort of encompass what I was going to write for my first blog post.
the noise of the neighborhood. We had in the lower 9th ward during one of our tours and Birtt was talking about one of her former homeowners Juanita, who I met on both of my previous trips. Britt explained to the group that the thing Juanita said she missed the most was the noise of her neighborhood. For some reason that struck me and has been something I've brought up in a lot of conversations we've had while down here. To miss something as simple as the everyday noises we barely recognize. The riding of bikes around the block, people sitting on front porches, having neighbors to turn too and wave at as you drive down the block, these are all things the people in these neighborhoods don't have anymore. We stood up on the levees and the only things you heard were cars in the distance and you saw a few houses in a lot of empty space. I wish we had pictures to show the underclassmen of what the area they are standing in looked like before. I wish they could meet people like Juanita and learn how many generations used to live on one block. They look out and see the empty spaces, but if they could only see what little empty space there was before the storm. The simple sounds of a neighborhood are the sounds we either don't notice or that annoy us and we wish they'd stop. How would we feel if they were all gone. If there were no more sounds around us and if we could never stop by the neighbors house just to say hi.
the second thing I wanted to blog about was about was our service down here. We've had an interesting time working at different sites. People were expecting hammers and instead we got other tools to work with. It isn't what we expected and some people were annoyed, but at the end of the day we have to remember the impact we leave. Whether I painted the office that the New Orleans Mission's Director will use for the next few years, or if I'm reconstructing a woman's boiler room, I've left my impact on this city. When I come back, I'll still be able to say I worked there and did XY & Z. I'm used to always wishing there was more of something for TASK where I used to serve for Bonner. I've been spoiled at TASK with a full staff and an amazing organization of people there. The Mission was a complete antithesis of TASK. With pest problems and a staff that is often more unsure of situations, the mission has just recently been able to say they're back on their feet and still moving toward getting where they were before the storm. The damage to the building left conditions unsuitable for the very people they serve. The men sleep in tents and the women have a smaller room in the back and kill about 7 rats a day in the tents. While at the food bank we learned that almost 1 in 5 adults and 1 in 4 children are experiencing Hunger in Southern Louisiana. The problem that exists in this city is more than just rebuilding homes that were destroyed. Included in the issues faced is the growing number of people who continue to struggle in poverty on a daily basis.
On a more personal level, I've been enjoying our stay and I love our group. I didn't really know the new bonners or the freshman that well, but during this stay I've gotten to know a lot of them better. At TCNJ, we're caught up in our own service and school work, and bonner meetings aren't the best setting to try and get to know people, but this trip has really brought people together. It's always amazing to see people work together with people they never knew before the trip. I hope that we bring this togetherness back to TCNJ and start branching away from our usual groups in Bonner and form connections with many Bonners. We have a sense of working together here to accomplish a goal and I want to see us bring this back to our campus and to our sites, but more importantly to our program.
I wish we could stay another week, but there are these annoying things called classes that start on Tuesday.
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