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.