Today started bright and early (7 am after a 17 hour drive!) at the Hands On New Orleans (HONO) Headquarters. It’s a great place– a makeshift bunkhouse in a church’s spare room housing up to 100 volunteers at a time, mostly college students. Crews are organized and highly motivated, but part of me thinks that the progress they’ve made so far is due to their spirit. These people want to see change. They’ve put every part of themselves into HONO, and have become as tightly knit as a family in their efforts. I think everyone in the Knox crew has been inspired by the example these volunteers set.

We begin our projects tomorrow, with two groups working “gut”, removing drywall and molded-out studs from houses, and one group on “mold”– stripping mold from otherwise intact rooms in houses. We’re staying at the Salvation Army a few blocks away from HQ, and we’ll meet our team leaders there tomorrow to get to our worksites. I’ve done Habitat work before, but there is an urgency to this project that is palpable. New Orleans is an amazing place. The sense of history is overwhelming, from the French Quarter, which I had a chance to explore today, to the old ports, to the French-style houses of Central City. It is also a community of juxtapositions, from the racial divides only made more evident by Katrina and Rita to the simple sense of a city in caught in flux; trying to reconcile the antiquated, from which it draws much of its cultural heritage, with the modern. I feel humbled to be a part of restoring a city like this– a living, relevant, and endlessly interesting city– to its former glory.

In other news, the girls definitely get curtains for their showers, while we guys get to know each other.

More after the first day of work!