Recap

Hello,
I will say that right now I am very tired because working with POC is pretty tough. Yesterday myself and 6 other individuals went to start gutting a this one house located in New Orleans East. One group went to go paint a church and two groups went to finish gutting a house that was started last week. I will say Gutting a home is very tough work. I just takes a toll on one's body, both physically and at times emotionally. Just seeing all the stuff that is in these homes and just thinking that someone actually lived there is just a disturbing thought. Almost every single picture I find, I put it up on the door. Doing this and actually seeing whose home I am gutting and what it means to actually work one someone home, really does motivate me. I look at those pictures and just think that I have to give this my all because I have individuals who are relying on me to help them out. For me, it just has become something kind of personal. Just to add something more, the neighbors came by and said thank you for helping out but asked us to bag some of the stuff because she has children and does not want them to be exposed to all of the mold and whatever is on the stuff. Today we went back to the location and had more people and I believe we got stuff done. We started to taking down the drywall and what was kind of disturbing was that the homes only had a layer of drywall between their homes, so the neighbors can and probably still are being exposed to all of the junk from the homes that have not been touched. There is this one room on the second floor of the home, that is located in the back and that room is just haunting. As one of my friends from the trip stated, it is the most dead room in the home but at the same time it is the room that is most full of life because everything is in that room. There are pictures, magazines, clothes, stuff animals, beds, a drawer, and other stuff. It is pretty bad and it smells horrible. We have masks one with filters but that is still not enough because that smell is just so strong. For the most part it is somewhat better but it is still pretty bad. Also, there is this one closet in that room that just has this huge whole in the roof.

After we finish this, we go back to the location we are staying at, get something to eat and debrief. During debriefing we just talk about what we experienced,what we thought and so on. After we finish there, we go out to the community and talk to the locals. During this we talk about this meeting that is happening this saturday called the Survivals Council, where locals talk about the problems the face and they look for solutions to those problems. Such problems consist of education, housing, public housing, rent, employment and so on. So we try to promote this. The whole idea of this is to try to organize bottom up or let the locals decide what they want, what are their needs, and trying to fulfill those needs. We try to promote this but the most important thing is to try to just talk to the locals and just hear their stories. Just hear how they are, what they went through and just let them know that there are people out there trying to help them. There are some stories that are just so horrible and I will never forget them. So locals do not talk about their experience with the flood because they just do not want to think about it anymore. One local told me and my friend Krystine "Please do not make me talk about that horrible experience, I beg you". This individual main issue was her landlady, who has not fixed the home she is living in. The land lady hires this one guy who charges cheap but does not know what he is doing. Also, the land lady kept all of the money that was supposed to go to her tenants and she had made her millions already. What is insane is that some homes are abandoned, others, individuals are living there but are suffering, some homes were individuals worked on themselves and are nice, and some home are just so nice and the owners of those home immediately got their money to rebuild their homes. These individuals cannot relate to those who are having trouble because they got taken care of. There was this one woman who told us that she used to work for the Univerisity of New Orleans but her father got sick and had to tend to her father. The flood came, her house ruined and she had to take care of her father. She has become ill herself and has been working on cleaning up her own her and that is very dangerous because she is ill and there is a lot of stuff in the air that is harmful. She also told us that she has a 6th grade granddaughter how is in texas getting counsellings because of everything she went through.

Today we had a guest speaker called Jane who talked us about the education in New Orleans. Pretty much New Orleans is trying to experimenting with Charter schools. So it will have the most charter schools in the US. Joshua told us that Charter schools are not a bad thing but there just be some form of Public education. Jane told us that children from New Orleans were two grades behind other student in the US. If these students tried to go to another school, they would be arrested because that was not permitted. She is working with middle school students to try to get them to think about what they want in their schools since they have seen what other schools in other states look like and how they function. So she is working to prompt that. There is more to that but right now it is not coming to mind. She also told us that she meet a student that went to high school in one of the public schools and told us that that student never carried a backpack because that student was never assigned a textbook. I wonder how is a student supposed to learn and do homework with out textbooks. She also told us before the floods, there were some schools that were very good schools, which for the most part were only white. These schools allowed for students to go to good colleges and had computers in biology labs that allowed student to bisect an animal using a laptop. To get accepted to these high schools, individuals had to pass a test and how are poor black students supposed to get to this school if they are two years behind. What got me was when Jane told us that she just seeing how New Orleans students were doing in these schools in other states and a teacher told her, with tears in her eyes, "how can you do this to these poor New Orleans students?". That just think that that is powerful because a teacher just broke down and cried for the New Orleans students who are not given a chance to make something of themselves because their education in New Orleans was just so bad. Anyways, I better go to bed. Until next time.

Ebelio