we have now been in long beach just over two days. we arrived without incident and got settled in without any problems on saturday. as you get closer to the coast you can start to see signs of the hurricane still. once we turned right onto hwy 90 (the coastal highway) we saw a lot of the devistation we could have imagined.. however, i don't think we could have imagined it going on and on as it did. the featured picture is of the bank.. you can see what is left is the vault. there are two banks like this within a block or two of us. i think the fast food sign is taco bell, but i could be wrong. if you want an account of a pastor that did a helicopter fly over, this is a must read to understand some of what we are seeing.
sunday we woke and stored our things away and participated in the early morning worship service & sunday school after that. i had a little moment to speak to the congregation. i think i did okay, my intent was to share some stories of my connection to the church and introducing our team to them with some added humor, i think at my expense, but i can't recall every thing i said. the afternoon was our scheduled field trip to new orleans. we went into downtown, french quarter area, to be more like tourists than anything. one can get the idea of some of the scope of the vast size of the affected areas. as you drive into town on i10 you pass apartment building after apartment building, subdivision after subdivision, and shopping area after shopping area that is just empty completely and totally empty. there might have been a scattered fema trailer here or there, but by and large not enough to notice as life coming back into the area.
we got back to church a bit late for dinner with the church's youth group, who just returned from a mission trip to mountain top. some of the church members had cooked up a great spread of hotdogs and hamburgers. we chilled out with some of the church members and listened to some of their stories, not all had to do with the storm, but many did. many of the stories had to do with the recovery momemts, ala. "it was a big deal when sonic opened" or "i just sat at the traffic light." one story i enjoyed hearing was about the recovery of the dupont plant down here. living so close to one i had a particular interest and could imagine the size of the project. however, it seemed so much more in size and technical detail that i ever could have imagined. we had a late worship and some changing of our work detail later on which made for a caotic evening. but all ended well.
first day of work for my team was interesting. we went to a wonderful ladies house. the wife of a methodist pastor. her house was torn up by one of the tornados from the hurricane. because the water came in from the tornado she was able to get insurance money (albeit two months later) and she speaks highly of fema (something you hear more of than not). all we did for mrs. jo was move some of her big funiture back into her home as it's done interior construction now. this was going to enable her to start to bring in her memorabilia (which she had some cool stuff). she was so very grateful for our half a day of work that she bought us some ice cream sticks and then brought a spaghetti dinner to the church to show her appreciation. because we knew we were having a half-day we went back to the church to change and have lunch. a couple of other groups stopped by for lunch where we heard some good things, especially from "gator house" more on that later i'm sure. we headed to our second project where we got up and sweaty with a roofing project with our brazil team. the kids worked crazy hard, today in our groups. when we returned we heard much of the same. one group had to end early as they ran out of materials. most everyone had a full day, which was a bit of a question yesterday evening. tomorrow is another big day so i'm heading to bed, more photos and updates to come.
