A couple of weeks ago, during spring break, I went to New Orleans, Louisiana. It was a service trip, so much of my week was spent out in the community doing physical work (my group painted a house, others did construction or worked on an urban farm). I've been to New Orleans twice now, and both times I have been surprised by just how much rebuilding work there still is to do. In some of the neighborhoods we worked in and visited, there was certainly evidence of the fact that the population still hasn't recovered from Hurricane Katrina in 2005. (Here's some more information about the storm, if you're interested.) Many houses are clearly still uninhabitable, and there are many empty overgrown lots where houses most likely stood 10 years ago.
Now, don't get me wrong, many parts of the city are beautiful and flourishing. Coming into a city like New Orleans as an outsider, I feel like its so easy to focus on the negative, to think about the huge tragedy that happened there. Especially since we went there with the purpose of rebuilding, its hard not to think of the city as a broken place, and a place that needs to be repaired. It makes me really sad that I was never able to see the city before Katrina; I feel like I'll never be able to fully appreciate it because I'm always so focused on the negative aspects.
But, its an incredibly beautiful city, and unlike anywhere else I've ever visited. I highly recommend you visit if you ever get a chance!
Most of my week I spent painting a house. This house, to be exact:
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| This is after we washed the house and before we started painting |
Our leaders put a lot of emphasis on walking around and meeting people in the neighborhood. Hopefully I will be writing about some of the people I met in another post, but here are a couple pictures of the neighborhood I spent a lot of time in:
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| A garden next door (the white wall is a cemetery) |
The trip definitely wasn't all serious. I spent time eating beignets (yum!) and hanging out in the French Quarter:
The trip was an exhausting, but amazing, experience. (It didn't help that I was sick for most of it, so I crashed when I got back to school the day before classes resumed.) All that to say, life was a little difficult after coming back! I wanted to update you all much sooner but had many other more pressing things to deal with (like the housing lottery and registration, stories for another time). Please feel free to ask me questions or bring up the trip! I love talking about it, but sometimes I don't even know where to begin.
I'll be writing another blog post soon about the trip, so look out for that!
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