New Orleans!!!

Again, so sorry for not posting lately. It has been a very busy first week in New Orleans. We are working for a Catholic Charities organization called Operation Helping Hands. Originally we were supposed to have a split round and also work at Camp Hope. However, Camp Hope fell through and we will spend the whole round working for OHH. We are living in Marrero, LA which is across the Mississippi from New Orleans. It is about a 20 minute drive to downtown from where we live…in a mansion! Ok, well it’s not a mansion, but there are only 7 of us (Sara, Rene, and John are on disaster and Caleb is on fire composite) and we live in a Spanish mission style cottage. It is 50x times better then tripping over each other in that little dorm hallway in Dover, DE. I even have my own room, and the kitchen is large enough the whole team can stand in it at once!
I am also working in Marrero. Right across the street from where we live actually. Matt and I along with another long term volunteer from Regis University have been working on rehabbing an old convalescent home for wards of the state, into volunteer housing. It has been slow going. But last week we had a group of short term volunteers for a couple of days, and they were able to do so much work, I almost cried. There is still a lot to do, and I’m not going to lie, it is frustrating to be working on volunteer housing, when the rest of my team is working in the Upper and Lower 9th Ward. However, I know volunteer housing is very important down here. We are painting 7 dorm style rooms, along with the trim and the doors. The trim and the doors are different colors in different rooms, so that part has been fun painting in bright yellow, blue, red, and pink. We are also installing laminate flooring, the kind that fit together. We have three rooms floored. All of the walls painted minus two rooms. All of the trim is painted minus one room…however we have to scrape off all of the paint on the doors that we have painted. At the end of the week, we found out, the doors should have been sanded, primed, and then painted because of the latex paint we are using. 2 doors per room = a lot of doors. I had a very frustrating day today because I only scraped a doors that we had already done.
As far as city life goes, I LOVE NEW ORLEANS! Part of the reason why I haven’t posted in so long is because I feel like I am always on the go and doing something. The music around the city is amazing. My team and I have tried to go to a free concert every Wednesday called Music in the Park in Lafayette Square (sponsored by the Saints of course). We have also wandered around Bourbon, Frenchman, and Magazine Streets enjoying the nightlife and atmosphere.

In Peace, Stephanie