It's Monday Night

It's been an interesting couple of days. I left James' House on Sunday early in the afternoon. It was a longer drive from Houston to New Orleans than I thought, it took almost six hours, (rain and accidents). I am at the Bethlehem Volunteer Center. It's located just a few miles away from the 9th ward. When I drove just north of the city to find the center I could see downtown off in the distance, it didn't look any different than I remembered 15 years ago. I didn't see any real damage until I drove through town with one of the centers workers this morning. It is incredible what has happened to the city and surrounding area. We drove through some areas where block after block had been destroyed. It was hard to imagine that there had been neighborhoods where now ther are only weeds and junk. Many homes have still not been cleaned out.
Katy (my guide) took me to the house that my team will be gutting out on tuesday. She told me the story of the man who lived there and as I walked into what's left of a house, I think for the first time I realized, that this person had lost everything material that he had accumilated in his long life to this storm and flood. It was heart breaking to stand there and see all of his stuff just sitting there in big piles on collaspsed floors covered with the fallen ceiling and dirt left from the mud that had dried a long time ago. I hope to have a chance to take some pictures and post them tomorrow, but I have to tell you after seeing hundres of pictures, it's really different seeing it in person. A youth group from Bethlehem Evangelical & Trinity on the Hill Episcopal Church from Los Alamos, NM has joined me and will be here for the rest of this week. So even when I'm on Sabbatical I still get to work with kids.