New Orleans-Day 4

Today we hit our groove!  We got up, bright and early, ready to face the day.  We found Tim at the work site with ample jobs for us to complete.  We continued to raise the back wall and also took care to make the day injury-free!  Boards were cut, nails were hammered, songs were sung and lots of sweating and hydrating happened. 

New Orleans-Day 3

Every mission trip has its bumps and bruises...hopefully we got them all out of the way.  Long story short, nail guns fire hard, look out for falling ceiling beams and don't trip over floor clutter-but, thankfully, everyone is okay. The scariest thing that happened was that our NOLA expert, Donna Johnson, fell and broke her nose at the work site, but thanks to some quick thinking, group efforts and steady prayers, Donna was out of the hospital and recuperating quite rapidly by the evening. But there's much more than close calls and hazards...

New Orleans-Day 2

Today we began work on a house that-surprise!-the mission trip group last year had gutted out. This year though, we will not be destructing, we will be creating! After a quick orientation meeting at the partner United Church of Christ congregation that was organizing our work site, we set off to go make our little address of New Orleans at 329 N. Tonti Street that much better. Folks settled into jobs that were assigned by our director, Tim-who past mission trip groups had already developed relationships with. He gave us a laundry list of things that need to happen in the house-everything from tearing out old, termite and flood destroyed studs, replacing them with new studs, creating the back wall of the building from scratch, building kitchen storage areas and a wheelchair accessible ramp on what will be the front porch. About the only thing not needing serious work was the closet-but the rest of the place was a different story.

New Orleans Day 1

How is it that a day full of driving can leave a person so exhausted?  That's the question that seemed to be on the minds of the 7 of us who went out to grab a bite of dinner before bed-time.  After leaving Country Club at 5:30 that morning, we had driven through four states, across the Mason-Dixon line and over half of our group had served as drivers on our epic 15 hour journey to New Orleans.