Thursday, March 30, 2006

New Albanians on site, helping to rebuild New Orleans.

You may have seen this story in the Monday C-J:

Spring break in New Orleans IUS students drawn to chance to serve, help rebuild ravaged city, by Dick Kaukas (The Courier-Journal).

Here's a dispatch from two of them (one an IUS student, and her husband a civilian volunteer).

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We are staying in a tent in the parking lot of St. Mary of the Angel's School in the Upper 9th Ward, and they have us working in the Lower 9th Ward. It looks totally like a war-zone.

We worked at Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary School yesterday in the middle of the Lower 9th Ward. Apparently, it flooded up to the second floor and residents used the second floor as shelter.

It was an interesting contrast, as they let us go upstairs after we gutted the first floor and there were notes survivors left on theblackboards. We even found a letter from a child from an assignment they turned in about the hurricane (prior to the flooding).

Other things you'll see are where people broke security glass on the second floor in order to open doors to try and find food, as well as a photo of the library where you can see the mold up to the level where it flooded (no books as they were all mush, but some surviving books could be found stuck up in the ceiling where they floated up).

Today, we were gutting a house in the Lower 9th Ward and took some video of us just driving around, we'll try to get that up another day. We'll try to touch base again sometime before we leave. Gotta run, sorry for the random bursts, leeching WiFi from a random parking lot.

http://www.haloapplications.com/neworleans/sign.jpg
http://www.haloapplications.com/neworleans/mathbug.jpg
http://www.haloapplications.com/neworleans/classroom.jpg
http://www.haloapplications.com/neworleans/mathbug.jpg
http://www.haloapplications.com/neworleans/library.jpg
http://www.haloapplications.com/neworleans/door.jpg
http://www.haloapplications.com/neworleans/board.jpg
http://www.haloapplications.com/neworleans/letter.jpg

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