On Wednesday morning, I did some more coping. Our little group gelled well and everyone was joking around and having fun – but also working hard! It seemed time to give someone else a chance to cope (and to be outside), so I was reassigned to a team of UW-Oshkosh students doing windowsills. I adored Aaron, the staff person assigned to our house – he had a good leadership style, explained things well, kept an eye on everything, helped where needed. There were also some Americorps volunteers assigned to our house – that was it for skilled labor, and there were a lot of us to manage. When Aaron rejected some of the windowsill work we had done I was crushed. He was right though – they weren’t level. Time stopped for a while in the middle of the afternoon. But we rallied and redid them and they came out right and looked good and I learned to use other tools and by the end of the day felt proud again. There was a long shower line back at Camp Hope, but I wasn’t about to skip – I earned that shower! Glad there was enough hot water for everyone.
Carol, Aaron and I (Beryl stayed in) headed downtown to meet Kristina for free jazz at Lafayette Square – this is a regular Wednesday afternoon NOLA thing and this was the first one of the year. The featured performer was Trombone Shorty, who I’ve heard of since – maybe I’ll get some of his music! It was fun. We then went to the Warehouse District (a new area of town for me) for Cajun music at Mulate’s, a place recommended by our post-Katrina-tour driver (they had some great shrimp and corn bisque!). We then took the ferry across the Mississippi to Algiers point – I love boat rides so was happy to do it. Algiers is where my friend Meg lived when she lived here, and it looked both familiar and different. The view of the skyline at night is impressive, too. Once there we went out to a local bar and it got late and I was tired – I would have been happy to just take the ferry right back, but on the other hand, it was another experience, and nice to go along with the group, and nice to have Kristina with us.
On Thursday, we were joined by Diane, the sister of a Princeton classmate of mine; her daughter goes to Tulane and she was visiting anyway and decided to join the build for a couple of days. She’s a big baseball fan, and she and I have emailed over the years, but we had never actually met. If you’re counting, out of ten people on the build, four of them were people I had not met before! But I knew that we’d all get along and have fun, and we did. Today, we painted the interior of the house. Somehow 24 of us split up naturally among the various rooms of the house and weren’t on top of each other. The Birthday Build people were for the most part in the living room, though volunteer Aaron also spent a lot of time in the bathroom (painting it!) and Doug – who, as staff/handler Aaron quickly recognized, was the most experienced and competent person on the volunteer team – did a lot of troubleshooting all over the house. Some of us used brushes in the corners and around the windows – I spent most of my time with a roller, doing ceilings and walls. And getting a lot less paint on myself than I did in the Philippines! I think.
On the way home, we stopped at a drive-through daiquiri place that’s close to the highway on-ramp – as the driver, I did not partake, but we all marveled at the existence of such establishments (only in New Orleans?) so we had to go. We ate dinner at Camp Hope – Suzanne and Doug came too; it was pizza night. Suzanne, Doug and Carol then went into the city for some theatre, and Aaron, Beryl and I went into the French Quarter, found a bar that had the NCAA games, and played some cribbage – a low-key evening. It was nice to get back to Camp Hope before lights out – the headlamp I’d bought in Boulder came in handy, but it was even handier to be able to make a little noise and to see…. The Camp Hope staff people were very nice, but were wondering what to do next, with the numbers of volunteers coming to New Orleans falling off. There were plenty of people when we were there, because it was spring break, but for other times, what? I helped brainstorm some marketing ideas. I later read in the Times that it was taken over for BP cleanup crews, with air conditioning and carpeting put in – and heard that the staff, who had been dedicated and hardworking, have been replaced. I wonder what its fate is now.
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