Mission trip to New Orleans: work by the numbers

This is a follow-up to several previous posts here on the New Orleans mission trip. As I write this, most of the participants are safely back in Rhode Island. I think some travel complications have kept at least a couple of people in Louisiana until tomorrow. This entry was written by Meaghan Kelly and Jon Shumate. Pictures will come soon, I'm told.

After our late night out at the Zephyrs game we were treated to an extra hours of sleep Friday morning – much needed by all. When we did wake up however, we were raring to go. We had one day of work left, and there was a lot to finish at the church. We immediately split into our groups and started to chip away at the rest of our to-do list. The last of the drywall was put up, the second coat of polyurethane was put on the floor, the sacristy was reorganized and usable again, the windows in the front doors were cleaned, the nursery was painted and the hallways were primed. It was hard to believe, looking around the church at the end of our day, how much we had accomplished in such a short time. Betty (our point person at the church) and Ronald (the sexton) took some time at the end of the day to thank us for our hard work. Betty wept some as she looked around the restored sacristy, and Ronald made a small speech, admitting that he was skeptical about our group, but was now impressed by what we had accomplished. Walter, the rector, told us that both Betty’s tears and Ronald’s speech were relatively uncharacteristic, and that alone spoke volumes about what we had done there. On Friday night after our work was finished we gathered at the Palace for reflections (which will come in a later blog entry), prayer, and some recapping of what we had done over the week. We thought we’d share some of our more amusing (approximate) stats from the week:

Number of paint rollers used: 30
Number of brushes used: 12
Number of sandwiches consumed: 275
Number of cockroaches (living) found in the sacristy: 35
Number of miles run by our St. Michael & Grace leaders: 17
Number of unnecessary miles driven looking for Walmart: 10
Number of gallons of joint compound used: 15
Number of puncture wounds: 1
Number of subsequent trips to the emergency room: 1
Number of times Bob went to the hardware store: 30
Number of gallons of water consumed: 110
Number of gallons of coffee consumed: 20
Number of cups we had to pull out of the trash to drink the coffee: 3
Number of walls we tore down by accident: 3
Number of tries (on average) it took to wake Cameron up in the morning: 3
Number of walls we put up: 15
Number of coats painted on the floor of the nave: 3
Number of cabinets torn down: 5
Number of dead trees taken down: 2
Number of people that had sewage accidentally spilled on their leg: 1, sorry Peter.
Number of showers available for the 18 people staying at Chez Cortez: 3 (Peter got first dibs)
Number of times we moved the organ: 4
Number of lives changed from a week in New Orleans: 33

So there’s a little wrap up of some of the work we did (and didn’t do) in New Orleans. In the end, it was a very productive week, and the church is in much better shape because of our time there. The general consensus was that we wish we could have done more, but we are glad we could do even a little bit to help a community that needed it.

Stay tuned for a more detailed piece on our reflections on this mission trip…