Work in Progress

Disasters like Hurricanes Rita and Katrina have made such a horrible impact on the people of Louisiana, Texas, Mississippi, Florida and others. But the sad thing is that while these people have been resilient and come back to rebuild their homes and their lives; while they’ve been brought closer and made stronger, people unaffected by the disasters only care for so long.

I’m definitely guilty of this myself. There were cyclones in Myanmar, but I don’t even know what happened and haven’t taken the time to find out or help. When Rita and Katrina happened, I barely contributed anything and until coming here 2 1/2 years later, didn’t take the time to find out the scope of damage and destruction. But I am doing something now, and I feel like it’s at least something.

These trips are always such great learning experiences, beyond Bible study and carpentry work. We drove down to Holly Beach yesterday and saw hundreds of FEMA trailers, slabs of concrete missing houses and boats stuck on land and houses with holes in the roof and mold damage inside. Very few of the houses in Cameron, LA where we’re working survived and many people are still rebuilding and don’t have the money or resources to finish.

The couple whose house we’re working on is very friendly and the wife told us her story today. Videos and pictures will be up soon.

Heading Out

I’m leaving for Port/or Lake Charles, Louisiana tomorrow for a mission trip where I believe we’ll be doing hurricane clean up and re-building type things. I won’t be able to get to a computer so I’ve put my Twitter RSS feed over to the right here to give updates on what’s happening. It should be interesting; I went to New Orleans in April 2005 before Katrina and now I’m going to Lake Charles after hurricane Rita. So check it out, the updates should be interesting.

Note: The previous Twitter posts on the feed were from the Online Journalism Symposium at UT and for a class sports blog project.

I was looking for videos of Lake Charles and Hurricane Rita and happened upon this. The Charlie Brown music and upbeat voiceovers made this storm sound like a Sunday picnic coming.