First Day at Work

I woke up first and showered and turned coffee on, and went down for food. Told Mare I was leaving..since all the past life of having Mare as a room mate came back..she is hard one to get up, and best not to talk. She eventually was down for breakfast..which every day was the full, bacon, eggs, grits, gravy, fruit, yogurt etc etc..and onto the bus. It was cold the first few days in NO., so we were all layered.

Oh I should state the site we were working on was in the ninth ward, and called the Musicians’ Village (www.nolamusiciansvillage.com) a development conceived by Harry Connick Jr. and Brandford Marsalis to help fellow musicians return to the city. It is an 8 acre site all above flood level on cinderblock piers. There will be 72 homes. The centerpiece will be a center that will have small concert hall and educational resources. That construction not started yet, we worked around it


There were 2 staff Habitat people and a few Americore volunteers in charge. The first group was asked who wanted to be on high ladders, both Mare and I said no to that one, next group was for wood work, we again passed, and then there were three! Mare, me and a man named John. Our leader was Andrew, a 21 yr old Americore volunteer who had been in university studying psychology, but dropped out to do this (Americore work).. Our first task and eventually our almost 3 day tasks was putting in chain link fencing!! well first we had to pull out 4 poles that were not spaced correctly from the closing thing. so we had to dig them out, break concrete from them, re-dig holes, mix cement and back in. Turns out a few weeks ago there were about 300 volunteers at the area we were working, and obviously too many cooks in the kitchen’ alot of errors. We heard latter from other volunteers that much of their work was re doing things, paint spills etc from before. So after afew digs, mixing cement etc we got pretty good at the holes digging. This took almost 2 full days.alot of fences. Many were there for division of the property lines and on the ends of blocks for keeping people out of yards. though there were spaces at bottom of fences so it did not keep critters out.