St. Bernard’s Parish

(in the words of Malai) Woo!
We arrived here in St. Bernard’s Parish three day ago. We left at 2:20am to catch a bus to Oakland (1 ½ hours away) because it was cheaper to fly us all out from there. We had at least three charter busses packed with AmeriCorps members and all of their belongings. Once we got to the airport it was basically a free for-all…and you had to hope you knew what you were doing or you were going to miss your flight! There were at least 130 AmeriCorps members flying out to various areas around the Gulf…which meant different airlines, different flights, sometimes layovers…Gold 1 was split into two groups. Also, instead of sitting with other Ameri-members on the plane, you are randomly spread out in individual seats (usually the awkward middle seat). We had to wait a few hours at the airport to gather as a team again and catch our ride to Camp Hope. We finally arrived at Camp Hope around almost 10pm.

Camp Hope is:
Located in St. Bernard’s Parish (they call counties parishes in Louisiana)
The largest volunteer camp in the United States
An old converted 2 story middle school

Camp Hope has:
Classrooms filled with bunk beds (34 beds in the female room)
Lounges
A used books section
A few TVs (hello again American Idol!!!)
A give and take room where you put things you don’t need anymore (I found a shelf, bug spray and a pair of pants)
Cold showers inside the building but warmer shower available outside in a ‘mobile shower unit’…we have to take 4 min or less showers
There is another Ameriteam that cooks breakfast and dinner for us and they lay out lunch items for us to pack each day

It is amazing how much work still needs to be done here in New Orleans. It has been 2 ½ years since the storm but only 40% of residents have been able to return. Few businesses in the Parish are open and many houses remain uninhabitable. Our orientation the first day was great! The organization is extremely organized and knows exactly what they want to do with us…we were sent out to worksites to build for the next few days. Our organization is called the St. Bernard’s Parish Project (SBPP). Their goal is to find homeowners who lived in SBP before the storm, take their gutted houses (must have faming and be structurally sound) and restore the inside including walls, floors, appliances, doors, etc.

(Paraphrased from a SBPP packet)
St. Bernard’s Parish is more of a suburb of New Orleans and it was the only parish to be completely destroyed in the flood. Before Katrina the population was 67,000 and the Parish had 27,000 homes. Senior citizens comprised 50% of the population prior to the storm and residents worked as fishermen, in the trades, and at refineries. After Katrina 100% of the homes in SBP were rendered uninhabitable and standing water of 4-20 feet stayed for up to 4 weeks. Now only a little over 1/3 of the residents have been able to return…most living in FEMA trailers or in their attics above the waterline. Only ¼ of the businesses has been able to re-open. SBP is described a community filled with hard working middle-class families, veterans and generations of families who live within a few blocks of each other. In the years before Katrina, insurance companies rezoned St. Bernard out of the flood plan, so most residents no longer had flood insurance after decades of paying for it. When Katrina hit 75% of families were under- or uninsured. The first rescue crews into the Parish, five days after the storm, came from abroad: the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Residents felt abandoned by the US government…especially the residents who were veterans.

Now AmeriCorps is the large force coming from the government. It has been said many times how the volunteers have rebuilt the Parish…if it weren’t for volunteers SBP would not be what it is now. The director of Camp Hope was telling us how a resident has regained his faith through the volunteers…during the flood he spent 5 days stranded on the top of his roof, waiting for help. During those 5 days he lost faith in the government and humanity…his father (who was on the roof too) survived but his mother could not make the 5 days of hot summer heat with no food and no clean water. He told our director that after the rebuilding started he would see the volunteers giving their all to help the residents move back into their homes…and after awhile seeing that restored his faith in humanity.

--> Check out New Orleans pictures here

Transition Week!

Our week and a half transition has come to an end and now we are off to New Orleans!

Over our transition we did our official briefing and debriefing presentations about our projects, traveled around, caught up on sleep, ate a lot and spent time with old friends from other teams.

Gold 1 worked at the Sacramento Boys and Girls club over transition. We helped clean and organize but mainly we tutored and played with the kids. During our time there we also created the game of bouncy-pong…a small bouncy ball flew around the gym and everyone was spread out with ping-pong paddles…the object of the game was to hit the ball and try to not get hit by the ball. The kids were ages 6 to 18…there were about 50 each day. Popular activities included bumper pool, basketball, tennis, tether ball, pool, foosball and coloring. During their homework hour we led educational games including AweSUM and fun creative writing activities.

We are leaving for the Oakland airport (because it is cheaper to fly out of Oakland) at 2am tonight! We are spread out over two flights. Some of us will have a layover in Huston, Texas. Camp Hope here we come! More to come!

--> Check out the new pictures here!

Goodbye Portland!

Gold 1 has now officially ended our time in beautiful Portland, Oregon. We are currently in Sacramento, CA for transition week and we will be departing for New Orleans, LA on Feb. 6th.
Here are some final pictures from Oregon...

---> The Last of Oregon

--->Trip to the Oregon Coast (Ashley, Kathleen, Sarah, Amanda, Amanda)

Our Last Portland Update

Here are more team pictures...sorry for the slow updates, lately we've had extremely poor internet service.

Phase 1 Work & Such

Waterfalls & Mt. Hood

Malai announced where our next project is going to be…St. Bernard’s Parrish in New Orleans, Louisiana!We will be working with the St. Bernard volunteer group building houses. Instead of learning the basics about different kinds of construction (like we are doing now), we will become trained/skilled experts in a certain area and/or we will individually be the supervisor of a worksite and lead volunteers. Gold 6 is currently working on that project…they said we will have someone become an expert electrician and another team member will be the trained plumber.

On Friday Gold 1 will drive back down to Sacramento for transition week. We will fly out of Sacramento on Feb. 6th to go to New Orleans. Yes, we will just miss Mardi Gras…but it will still be going on the week we arrive!
The other day some of us went to Mt. Hood to go sledding. We checked out multiple places on the mountain and had a LOT of snowball fights; there was SO much snow. The place we wanted to snow-tube at was closed but we could still use their hills. Sleds were too expensive to purchase so we made sleds out of cardboard and trash bags…yay! When our sleds disintegrated, we just used our bodies/parkas/raincoats.

This weekend some of us went to the ocean and some went to Seattle! We saw the famous Haystack rock, drove up the coast to Astoria and then took the scenic highway through Washington back to Portland.

Work has been going great! We have spent the last week or so putting finishing touches on the Wasco duplex…it is almost complete! More pictures coming soon!

Happy New Year!

Well, we all had a great holiday break and now we are back to work in Portland! We have been busy working on multiple projects at multiple houses and storage areas. Last week we went to the Columbia River Gorge and Multnomah Falls. Some of us also took a trip to Fort Vancouver. We don't know where we are going for our Phase 2 project...but we will know soon!
-The links on the right work again
-Multnomah/Fort Vancouver pictures coming soon!

New pictures!

The latest pictures of Gold 1: HERE

Manual Labor, Macaroni Grill & Yreka

Gold 1 just arrived back in Sacramento from Portland. When we first drove to Portland we did it in one day…but this time we took two days. We ended up staying at a pretty nice Best Western Hotel in Yreka (why-reek-ah), CA. Yreka is an absolutely beautiful small mountain town. It is right by Mt. Shasta which is the 2nd tallest volcano in the US. We walked around their small town and ate at a nice semi-tacky place called Grandma’s House.

Our last week in Portland was tiring but fun. We attended a housing dedication for our Borthwick site, continued working on both Borthwick and Wasco, dug a rain trench for a house in New Columbia, helped at the Habitat office and we started to organize the Habitat storage unit. Basically a LOT of physical labor…on top of physical training in the morning about every other day.

We did find things to do in Portland on our days off. For instance, Portland has a HUGE Saturday market downtown that is open everyday until Christmas Eve where many of the local artists come to sell their products. There were so many booths ranging from knit hats to jewelry to wooden sculptures. Did we mention before that Portland’s public transportation is one of the best? We are now MAX (light rail), bus, and streetcar experts. The city is set up in zones; if you stay within one zone then your light rail ride is free!

Portland is a really great city…no tax, beautiful mountains, clean streets, hardly any ‘shady areas’ of town, amazing places to visit, not far from the ocean, great public transit, very liberal in general, artsy people, very environmentally friendly, and an overall safe city where you don’t feel like you’d get mugged. On the downside…they have a set city limit that you can’t build houses/businesses beyond so as the population grows more people are crammed into the city limits; that means prices for houses are HIGH (even when you aren’t downtown). A decent looking 2 bedroom/2 bath house would start at $300,000…and that is still a small house. Typical 1 family homes are being phased out and duplexes, town house, apartments, and condos are coming in. Even though it is nice that you don’t have to pay sales tax on anything, funding for public schools is almost non-existent. Locals told us how many schools have to fundraise just to be able to stay open. It also rains…a lot! We hear it is just the season we are in…but nonetheless it still constantly rains. One local told us that the rainy season is from October to June.

On our last night in Portland, the owner of the Macaroni Grill franchise treated our entire team to a complimentary dinner: appetizers, entrees and desserts! We all dressed to the nines…at least with what clothes we had. When can you order absolutely anything off a menu and not even have to look at the price?

We are now on Holiday break! Check out the blog in January for our next update.

Love,
the Amandas