The New Orleans Birthday Build - Part II

New Orleans has a weird combination of devotion and hopelessness, of energy and despair. It’s seductive in one way, and a great place to visit but you wouldn’t want to live there in another. I had visited my friend Meg when she lived there in the mid-‘80s – one year just after Mardi Gras, and then the next year for Mardi Gras – I was glad to see it in both quiet and in parade mode – and even more glad to return this year to help build, help the economy, and see some other parts of the city. After the post-Katrina tour, Kristina and I had lunch in the French district (along with a hurricane – the drink, that is; those go down easy…). I drove to the airport to pick up Aaron, another build participant. He’s another Morocco RPCV, in the health program – I had shared a taxi with him from Marrakesh to Essouaira, he came up to Azrou once and it happened to be a Friday so he joined us for couscous with Youssef’s family, and I am not sure I ever saw him other than that! But he had lived in Louisiana for a little while and when he saw that the build coincided with his grad school spring break, he signed on (and we agreed to share the rental car).


Kristina took Aaron and me on a little tour of the Garden District. We took the streetcar (no, not Desire) along St. Charles, past gorgeous old homes – this area didn’t sustain much damage during Katrina either; it’s the high ground. We passed Tulane and got off around Audubon Park. We had a beautiful walk in this green space and then walked along Magazine Street, another main drag of the Garden District, residential with little commercial pockets. We stopped and I had some crab and corn bisque – I had that at least twice more during my stay, and if I thought I could find a recipe that would come close to duplicating it, I would learn how to make it. Yum!




Then it was on to Camp Hope, a former school in St. Bernard Parish that has been refurbished as a place to accommodate large groups of volunteers. The ground floor has a big cafeteria, and upstairs the former classrooms have had the walls removed so there are two long sets of rooms filled with bunk beds and lockers – one side for men, and one side for women. I thought it would be fun for the whole group to stay there, but most of the group found more plush accommodations. However, as long as someone was going to stay there, I as the group leader felt I would stick with the group – Beryl, Carol, Aaron and I stayed there. We found our beds and got settled and then I turned in – usually I’m up for a game of Scrabble, but I was tired, and I knew that we’d be up early the next day (and by early I mean before 6:00 a.m.).


For $25 a night at Camp Hope, you get a bed, breakfast and dinner if you want to eat there, and a make-your-own lunch. A good deal! We got ready, and the four Camp Hope-ites went to Harvey, on the other side of the Mississippi, for our orientation. This area didn’t get flooded either, but it isn’t all that desirable, so land is cheap and Habitat for Humanity has built a lot of homes in the area. Habitat is the largest homebuilder in New Orleans, which says something about the city’s recovery. It built 97 houses last year (up from eight to ten a year before Katrina) and has built approximately 240 homes in the past five years. This year it will build around 60 – 20 to 30 were in process while we were there. The week that we were there – a big spring break week (I had trouble getting the slots – it might have helped that I mentioned that I was working with Habitat for Humanity Philippines and really wanted to do Habitat as opposed to other volunteering, or they might have held slots open for college groups and opened them up just in time for me) – 300-400 people were there. I might have this wrong, but I think they said 300,000 have helped on builds since Katrina, and Habitat for Humanity USA has two million annual volunteers total. That was all said quickly, and there was a short safety talk, and then the large group was split among different houses in the neighborhood. Our group – now joined by Suzanne and Doug, friends of my friend Joy (who didn’t come, but she told them about it and they decided to come – you never know, as I said) – was to spend the week with a group from University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh, building a house for Vanette, a young woman with two kids whose parents are currently in the Army in Afghanistan. She has a job, but without Habitat for Humanity she would never be able to afford her own house. She had already put in most of her “sweat equity” hours (in the Philippines they don’t tell you which unit you get until all the houses are built, so you don’t spend more time on yours than on the others; here, you know it’s your house) so we didn’t see her much, but she and her friends did some painting and she came by a couple of other times during the week.


Our house was almost finished – our task for the day was to do trim. I did a lot of coping – that is, using a coping saw. That meant I was outside most of the day, while others were inside measuring and putting the trim around the windows and doors. I developed quite a knack for coping – of course, they break everything down into chunks that people with no experience can handle. But it still felt good to master some tools!




Our little group went out for Vietnamese food – there’s a large Vietnamese population in New Orleans, and the food was quite authentic – I can say that after having just been in Vietnam! Back at Camp Hope, I was tired after a day’s hard work – but this time, not too tired for Scrabble and cribbage!