Today has been filled with great experiences. We met Eddie, an electrician and homeowner who had water up to two inches below the ceiling on his ground floor. We learned about how he built the back addition to his house and the care he used in building it to withstand the forces of nature. We also got a taste of the frustration and anger people are feeling down here from the perspective of our host.

We woke up, ate breakfast, and drove to the organizing site, a shuttered strip mall with RV’s and tents in the parking lot and huddled next to the buildings. Six months later life doesn’t seem anywhere close to normal here in the Big Easy.

We caravanned to the worksite after getting protective gear and equipment from ACORN. Volunteers have been inundating the area, and today was no exception. Our work crew had fifteen people, and another crew was a few blocks away.

A group was from Brown University, spending their spring break in a similar way to ours. An entire family had come together to volunteer. A woman had come from Chicago, where she teaches junior high on the Southside. After she was done gutting the houses, she was going back to another FEMA camp to serve food to survivors in a town that was decimated by the hurricane. A brother and sister from Canada were in the group, as well as other people from around the United States.

Gutting a house is a relatively simple task. You clear out a room of all furniture, and you take up the carpet, or remove the flooring. Then you wail away at the walls with a crowbar or hammer. Once you have all the drywall and insulation off the wall and in the middle of the room, you haul it out in a wheelbarrow. Finally, you pull out all the nails that had been in the wall and sweep the place up. The process is repeated for all the rooms in a house. At the end of the day it looks like the house was never finished, a work in progress. Life down here certainly seems that way.

Halfway through the day, a number of board members from the Needmor Foundation stopped by to check on the project. Needmor is one of the major funders of ACORN. It was good to meet the board members, but a bit odd, since I was in a protective suit wearing a face mask and goggles, while they were in suits. These board members were some of the “compassionate Americans” that the President said we would need in this disaster. We were some of the same group.

I wonder if the government could have done this work without volunteers. I don’t think I would have done it if I were being paid. The Bush Administration has chosen to administer the response through loans and business incentives, rather than a massive rebuilding effort akin to the WPA. Would a team of young American idealists have answered the call to rebuild New Orleans full-time? Or is it only reasonable to count on some of us to spend an “alternate” spring break?

It has been a great day of work. I am sore and tired, but feel energized for the next two days.