We finished our first full house today (the 2nd we worked on). Woohoo! It was a relief and great feeling of...VICTORY! Okay, maybe I'm being a little melodramatic but I'm only sharing what we were feeling.
Our homeowner was happy. It was one step closer to his family making a home again.
In the end this is all the materials we took out of the house. It was quite a big pile.
After wishing our homeowner all the best and praying with him, we also presented him with a gift Bible that we'd all signed. It was a way to remember that it was God who provided all this.
Our next stop was our final home which belonged to an senior lady and her family. This house was different in structure because it was brick and had very small windows. Because of the design the air couldn't circulate very well.If you take a closer look at the photo, that dark line on the wall shows you how high the water was.
The heat and mold smell inside was overwhelming. (I didn't work on this house. Instead, I kept the homeowner company as she sat outside the house.)
She was a nice lady. We talked for hours. Speaking with the homeowners you got a true sense of the community of this place. These are families that have been here for long time, some for generations. Our homeowner had lived in this house for over 40 years, had raised her children and now her daughter's family was living there with her as well. Three generations.
One of the things she expressed a loss over was the sense of community. Many families had no other financial choice than to leave New Orleans for places like Texas or further south to the Carolinas. Passing house after house you felt the missing people. There should've been kids laughing in the streets, folks having a cold drink on their porches. But there is little of that now.
