Quote:
Originally Posted by Dantilla
I've been to New Orleans twice since Katrina, doing volunteer constructuon work with a group of skilled construction guys (and a few gals), and have found two types of people:
-Those that roll up their sleeves with a smile on their face, and work their tail off putting life back together again, and,
-Those that sit on their butt, wondering why nobody's given them a new house yet.
My other observation is that over 90% of volunteers coming down are church groups.
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There but for the grace of God go I.
You nailed it. The few bad apples make the rest look bad.
While I haven't went to NO, I've sent money and helped gather and shipped tons of construction supplies and helped pay for others to go there and start to rebuild a very small part of the city. All though our church.
For years we've been sending humanitarian groups to Mexico, an Apache reservation and India, I've been on several of those trips.
We saw what happened in NO and a couple years ago we shifted our focus and decided to try and help people closer to home.
Me, being an insensitive non-caring so and so, came to the conclusion that most people there are trying to help themselves and a small percentage of others are simply milking the system for everything they can get.
I'm a voting member of our church board and in the planning meetings insisted we focus on helping those who try and help themselves. I made it clear that I thought helping those who won't help themselves is a total waste of resources and wouldn't be any real help at all, they'd just sit there and wait for more help.
There are too many others who are more deserving and for them, our efforts would actually make a difference.
I'd also like to say that if I lived there I'd be tempted to go postal at city hall.
I'm not exaggerating when i say that has to be the most corrupt local government I'd ever been in contact with.
I talked to nearly a dozen people there trying to get permits or coordinating the projects and basically came away with the feeling that most of these so-called civil servants were more concerned with how much of a cut do they get than helping their community. "Special fee" is how one person described it. I asked what the special fee was for, he told me that there are so many groups coming down there and calling his office that it requires him to work overtime and he doan work overtime for free.