Last week kicked some serious ass. A few friends and I volunteered to go to New Orleans to help with the Katrina relief effort. Our group was made up of about 80 students from Omaha and Lincoln. There were several other groups like ours that made up the whole group from Operation Blessing (
http://www.ob.org/). In New Orleans, somewhere around 4000 other students had assembled and were volunteering as well.
Aside from the ridiculously crappy leadership at every level of the organization, it went very well. We were divided into groups of about 12-17 people, and we were assigned different projects in and around the N.O. area. My group was assigned to gut a house (about 2 blocks from the University of New Orleans and Lake Pontchartrain) that had flooded. Here's a quick series of before, during, and after pics. Basically, we had to remove everything except for the studs and exterior of the house. All sheetrock, insulation, cielings, floors, tile, fixtures, windows, doors, etc., had to go.
We even weakened and pushed down the old garage, then moved every piece to the curb. Here's our finished pile after 3 days of destruction:
The lady that we did this house for hadn't lived in N.O. for long, but was obviously very intelligent and well off to begin with. She owned several other houses and commercial properties around the city. Politically, I agreed with most of what she talked about. It was really interesting to just listen to her talk about why
she thought that all of this was happening, who f'd up, who should be the next Mayor, etc. I did feel like we should have been helping someone who needed the help a little more, though.