Mission trip to New Orleans: the work continues

Here's another update from New Orleans. On the previous posts, I said that these were coming from Meaghan Kelly. It turns out that she's sending them, but there are many people collaborating on the writing. Along with Meaghan, these updates are being written by Clare Fischer Davies, Mary Davies, Mary Kesson, Stephanie Monteiro, and Amy Scanlon, among others.

Tuesday morning, and it’s time for our second day of hard work at Grace Church in New Orleans. Again, we broke up into small groups and prepared to continue most of the work projects that we had started the day before. Dry walling, dry walling, and more dry walling. Which lead to a substantial amount of spackling and sanding. Grace Church has a large facility, with many rooms off a long hallway. Just after the hurricane, there was six feet of water in the building. After the initial flooding, the waters receded to four feet, where they stayed for approximately ten days. As a result, the walls throughout the entire building need to be replaced from eye level (depending on your height) down to the floor. Some of this dry walling has already been done, but there is still much work to do.

In other areas, the painting group finished painting the entire floor of the church nave, and washed some of the water lines off of the walls near the door. Others made food for the masses. Day two seemed to go much more smoothly, as our learning curve was not as steep.

In the morning before we started, we were given our question of the day to ponder. “Will you persevere in resisting evil, and, whenever you fall into sin, repent and return to the Lord?” In the evening after our much-needed showers, we met in our small discussion groups to talk about the day and this question. For this group of 33 people, living in community has not always been easy. How do we experience evil or sin? How do we recognize these shortcomings, and work to love one another despite them?

After our small group discussions we piled into the vans and headed into downtown New Orleans to Mother’s Restaurant for some authentic area food. We satiated our hearty appetites with shrimp and oyster po' boys, jambalaya, gumbo, crawfish pie, and debris. With full stomachs we went down to the French Quarter to see the sights, and to appreciate the part of New Orleans that is still bustling with life and joy and enthusiasm. The residents of this city are undoubtedly proud of this part of their culture and their way of life here, and they seem eager to share it with visitors.

Lights went out at 10 p.m. that night – a decision that caused some dissension in the ranks, but essentially was a wise one. We fell asleep quickly, and slept soundly until 6 a.m. on Wednesday…