Well, I've been officially chosen as one of the 10 students to go back down to New Orleans this spring, and I'm excited.

It's a pretty good group: Chris & me, John, Zack & Brent from the last trip. Greg (who I went to Germany with), Ken, two girls I don't really know, but see at Mass a lot, and Chris' housemate Paul.

We're having two Mardi Gras parties. On the actual Mardi Gras day we're having a big party with Cajun food, a slideshow, Gulf Region trivia for beads, and the Brazillian Ensemble is performing. I'm really excited. It's also a fundraiser for the trip.

The Newman Club is having a Mardi Gras semi formal on 3/4. I just want Mardi Gras things to raise awareness for New Orleans, I guess. People seem to think it's over and done with. I'm glad so many college kids are going down during their breaks. It'll help bring more awareness. I hope.

Mardi Gras this year in New Orleans will have 70 floats instead of 200...it's going to be really depressing, but I hope it gathers more press and attention. I'm not really a press whore, I just want attention brought to it, so people continue to help...there are still so many displaced and homeless people there. The city's still in such terrible disarray... I can't wait to go back.


18 days! wow, that's not long at all...

Well, we had a meeting about the spring New Orleans trip.

We're going back to Covenent house (the battered woman's shelter) to do some work for them like building fences and working as supervisors (since we have experience!) on other programs (non-Catholic Charities related), which is pretty cool.

We're going to drive down, but stop overnight (the more "humaine" way, as Father put it.) hopefully at a church or something, but possibly at a hotel (ughhh $) and only 12 people (10 students, Father Tim, and Patrick) can come because they're already having 20 people staying there :0 and people who went up over break have a slightly higher chance of going. They want at least half the students to be "veterans". Now all I have to do is make enough money to go... we have a letter to send out to our home parishes (if we get chosen) but FC just left St. Andrews, and I didn't really grow up there, so I don't know if there's much of a chance of anything happening there. I guess I can make a good arguement by the fact that I was the CYO president...some people might know me...ughhh, I hate money.

Meanwhile, Patrick was saying that conditions inside of New Orleans have worsened because as of yesterday, the people staying in hotel rooms in the city have been evicted and are now living on the streets! The lady in charge of Covenant House was talking to Patrick on the phone on her way to a FEMA meeting to beg for money for a woman who was battered and now homeless because she was evicted from her hotel room. Anyway, the crazy thing is she was talking about how there are an influx of volunteers coming down over Spring Break and how she was just on the phone with a guy from Syracuse who wanted to come back...and one of the ladies there said "SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY?!?!" and was saying that we helped her mom!!! Apparently the random lady at the FEMA meeting's mom lived next door to the house and was the one the boys helped take the fridge and stuff out of. CRAZY. I'll post it when I get the e-mail with the exact message, but that's still great to think that we actually helped people enough that they remember us.
Oh, if you didn't notice (or read in my lj) we've got all the pictures posted on:
http://photobucket.com/albums/f242/Alibrandi/ so check them out.

When I did a search for "New Orleans Homeless" the first response I got was with the exact location of Covenant House. Odd. And unsafe.

Meanwhile, the official report is coming out and saying that the Bush Administration was a total failure (um, duh), that planners failed to act, and that millions of dollars were lost to fraud (and now people have no place to go and are living on the streets because of it.) It's ridiculous. The lady from Covenent House says that it's actually scary with so many people living on the streets. In a nation that prides itself on being so advanced, the report (written by Republicans!) and given to Congress is called, by the authors,

"In many respects, our report is a litany of mistakes, misjudgments, lapses and absurdities all cascading together, blinding us to what was coming and hobbling any collective effort to respond. Our investigation revealed that Katrina was a national failure, an abdication of the most solemn obligation to provide for the common welfare. At every level -- individual, corporate, philanthropic and governmental -- we failed to meet the challenge that was Katrina."

(source: AFP)


Um, in other news... Dick Cheney shot a 78 year old man in the face over the weekend.

This was in the Buffalo News yesterday, and is pretty upsetting:
Twisters Add Insult to New Orleans' Injury

By JANET McCONNAUGHEY
Associated Press Writer

KENNER, La. (AP) -- Tornadoes tore through New Orleans neighborhoods Thursday that had been hit hard by Hurricane Katrina just five months earlier, collapsing at least one previously damaged house and battering the airport, authorities said.

Roofs were ripped off, utility poles came down and a radio tower fell near a major thoroughfare, but no serious injuries were reported.

"Don't ever ask the question, `What else could happen?'" said Marcia Paul Leone, a mortgage banker who was surveying the new damage to her Katrina-flooded home.

She would go no farther than the front porch of her house Thursday morning. Windows were blown out, and the building appeared to be leaning.

"I've been in the mortgage business for 20 years. I know when something's unsafe," she said.

Electricity was knocked out for most of the morning at Louis Armstrong International Airport, grounding passenger flights and leaving travelers to wait in a dimly lit terminal powered by generators. The storm also ripped off part of a concourse roof, slammed one jetway into another, and flipped motorized runway luggage carts.

"Everything's still backed up and the whole day is going to be messed up," airport spokeswoman Michelle Duffourc said after power returned midday.

The line of severe thunderstorms moved across the area around 2:30 a.m. Tim Destri, of the National Weather Service, said it appeared the damage was caused by two tornadoes, one that hit the airport and another that moved into New Orleans.

Duffourc says the power is out to the entire airport, including the areas where passengers are waiting for flights to resume.

The storm collapsed at least one house in New Orleans' hurricane-ravaged lakefront, police said.

"I cannot believe this. We were hit twice. It's not bad enough we got 11 feet of water," said Maria Kay Chetta, a city grants manager. While her own home was not badly damaged, one across the street lost its roof and another had heavy damage to its front.

Police spokesman Capt. Juan Quinton, who lived in that area, said that gutters were ripped off his already flood-damaged house and that toppled trees blocked the alley behind his house.

A federal trailer was pulled off its moorings and plumbing hookups, he said.

"It's an act of God and there's nothing we can do about it, so I just don't worry about it anymore," Quinton said.
-----------------------------------------------------

I feel terrible. Also, this didn't get a lot of press, I wouldn't have heard about it if my friend Sarah didn't IM me with it. Those poor people. At least no one died.

While we were down in New Orleans, there were a lot of moments when the reality of the destruction really hit us hard. The first time we entered the city and realized how small we really were in comparison, the time we saw a house where instead of a "0" on the wall there was a "1" for number of people caught inside during the storm, and the trucks coming to clear the mountain of every piece of furnature, photo, and good the homeowners owned--and sweeping it up in minutes.

I think the hardest moment for me during the entire emotionally charged week was helping the son of one of the homeowners try to box up things and put them on pieces of board balanced on the support beams in the attic. The only things that he salvage were dishes, one dance trophy, and a few of his mother's ceramic collectables we could find. Once we had cleared out a lot of the stuff, I began working on one of the worst hit rooms-the bedroom. The water had smashed everything together and warped the floor into an "s" shape. The bed was on an angle, lying half on top of one of the dressers, and the fan looked like it had melted. I think the most heart wrenching time of the entire week, was when the son walked into the room, to the closet we were trying to clear. He stared at it for a moment and said "I lived in this house my entire life." We followed his eyes to a box that had attached itself to the floor. He said, "That's full of pictures, but they're gone forever now. They're all melted. The water melted them. I don't know how strong that water was, or what was in that water to MELT all my pictures!" and then he left.

During my second day of working down in New Orleans, I was clearing debris from the former living room of the first duplex when I found something shiny in the plaster pieces on the ground. It was a small statue that had hung over the fire place reading "God Bless Our Home". This small sign had survived Hurricane Katrina, the flooding, and strangly enough, the Syracuse Relief Team. It reminded me of the strong faith these people who lived in that house had, and I was very glad that we could help them. Their house had been mostly destroyed, but God had blessed their home by letting them out safely. Friar Peter put it over the door frame--a small sign of hope and faith in a sea of destruction. I hope everyone who sees it is moved, as I was, and like me, smiles and believes.

I've got to finish this up before the next time we head there!!

Friday was the last day we were in New Orleans, and it was, yet again, pretty emotionally charged. We woke up late--around 9:30, and the house was already kind of buzzing. It was downpouring (the first time the weather hadn't been 70 and sunny the entire week) so we weren't sure if we were going to be able to work, which really upset us. Then a rumor started going around that Father Tim thought the house wasn't stable enough to have us go, just because a few people had fallen through the floors.

Matt Adams and Mandi organized a group meeting and everyone sat down at the table and discussed how we didn't actually want to leave New Orleans. We figured we could work all day Friday (when the rain cleared up, which it promptly did) and then head out on Saturday. We all wanted to go finish up the house. But then they dropped the big ball on us--they didn't think it was safe, and they thought the house would probably have to be torn down. Eventually we decided that a smaller group of people would go and finish cleaning up while others got ready to go. Some of the people who had only been at the house for one day stayed to clean up our house. I stayed because I thought I'd give my spot to someone who really really needed to go back. I would have probably just been pulling nails if I'd gone back. Some people said they needed to go back to get closure from the house (before it was torn down!?! or condemned??) but I was alright. Rumor has it that the houses needed to be gutted anyway before they could be looked at, so we helped that way, right? No one could have known for sure that the wood was so rotted through that it would need to be torn down...not even Father Tim. He felt bad afterwards. Maybe they won't tear down the house. Who knows?

Father Tim, John, and I went to the biggest Target I have ever seen in my entire life to get lunch and car supplies. It had two floors! And an escalator for carts!!

We went back to the house and made lunches, packed, and got ready to go. When everyone returned we ate and hung out for alittle while before we got into the cars for the 26 hour car ride home. The car ride home was a lot more fun than the ride there. We played "I went around the world", which was very difficult. We reflected on the trip. Ryan and Alexei were paired up and talked as Lester and Skeeter for four wonderful hours about how life is better on the other side of the Mason-Dixon line. We stopped at the Waffle House and Hardees. We're having a meeting on Saturday to get together and discuss what we're going to do from here, and that's pretty much the story.

I'm going to write up my other post for Father Tim now.