NOLA Post #2

Tuesday 1/19

            We have officially been working on the house for two days and I have a new found respect for construction workers. Monday morning we started the day off with our orientation at The Saint Bernard Project’s main site. I signed my name on the benches with the name of every other volunteer that has worked with them and then listened to their opening speech. I was astonished that after all this time, they still receive 5-10 calls every week from people looking for them to rebuild their homes and have a waiting list of 100+ people. Never did I think that that many people were still trying to rebuild their lives back in New Orleans. They explained that besides rebuilding homes for people, they also build new homes to sell for people that were young when the storm happened and want to start a life where their family began. This was the type of house that we would be working on, an “opportunity house” as they call it. We broke into our sites and went over to our houses. The site supervisors on my site were name Cam and Tanya, both young post college students that run the construction of this house from start to finish.  They gave us a tour and we began working right away. Over the past two days I did mudding, a lot of mudding. This is similar to spackling, in which we either use pre-made or make our own “mud” which is applied to the walls at all different places to cover up things. I mudded up corner beams, vertical and horizontal wall seams, wall edges, and much more. It seemed like we were covering almost the entire wall in strategic thin coats of mud. By the end of each day I was extremely exhausted, standing for so long doing such a tedious job really made me appreciate the work that people do every day in creating buildings.