Volunteer Letter: Matt

A note: This is a letter that Matt sent to his family and friends. He was gracious enough to let us post it here for you all to read. Thanks Matt!

Hey all,

If you have a few minutes, I wanted to tell you about my recent trip
to New Orleans. The story of my trip is below, but if you want to skip
to the flashy stuff, the pictures are available
here.

I decided a few weeks ago to take a new job, and I wanted to take a
week off before starting. When I was thinking about all the great
things I could do (aka, beaches to sleep on), I realized that unless I
acted fast, I’d either be spending a fortune, or sitting on my couch
all week seeing how many episodes of Growing Pains I could watch
before blinking (my guess was 1.8).

While researching plane tickets, I kept seeing prices for flights to
New Orleans and started reading some NOLA-area news to see what it’s
like there now. With every article I read, I learned a little more
that Hurricanes Katrina and Rita haven’t really left. The damage was
still present, and most of the citizens who left were still not. A
little more digging and I found a great group called Katrina Corps
(www.katrinacorps.org). The Corps is an organization that “guts” the destroyed houses so that homeowners can take the $10,000 offered by
FEMA (sounds nice but very difficult to actually get as we learned)
and start rebuilding. I’ll talk more about gutting very soon.

I signed up, and before I knew it was wandering around Magazine St.
waiting for the rest of the group to come. The people that I would
spend the week with were almost all college kids on Spring Break, and
the whole organization was 5 consecutive weeks of this. Half of the
kids on this trip were from U. of Arkansas (soo-eee), and the other
half were pretty much all from Wisconsin (they really are addicted to
cheese). After our orientation, which consisted mostly of talking
about safety and signing LOTS of waivers, we got to bed and prepared
for a long week of…I still had no idea.

Our group (later to be named the Booty Kickin Gutters) got to our
first stop, got suited up in Tyvek suits, respirators, safety goggles
and gloves, and were sent right into a house that hadn’t been touched
since its owners left in late 2005. There were personal items strewn
all over the place, like the storm happened within the walls of the
house and turned it inside out.

Now is a good time to cite the 2 rules we learned in orientation. 1 -
Be Safe. 2 – DON’T OPEN THE FRIDGE. Not even a little. (Think the
cranberry sauce Mike and I left in our fridge from Thanksgiving ‘06
was bad?)

With those two rules in place, we prepared to “gut” the house. The
best description for this term is to take everything inside that makes
it a home, and put it outside so you’re only left with the skeleton of
a house. Everything from picture frames to vacuum cleaners to ceiling
tiles to the bathtub — all had to come out. We walked into destroyed
homes and walked out between support beams.

This went on for a full week. Every house was another home to be
disassembled, each having a sliver of it’s owners to save and place in
the house before leaving. An old guitar. A wedding painting. A social
security card. A family album. A thank you card from President Jimmy
Carter. Each was a sign that despite the destruction, some things can
still survive.

Between our two groups of 40 people, we gutted seven houses by the end
of the week. Seven families, who had to qualify for this service, paid
a fraction ($1,000) of what professional contractors were charging
before the storm ($10,000) or after the storm ($15,000). Despite the
families deciding to let us turn their home inside out, we never got
to meet any of them.

We did meet their neighbors though, and they shared some of the most
powerful, moving, comical and hopeful stories that I’ve heard in a
long time. One man who stopped by during our lunch break told of the
family who used to live in the house we gutted. He also talked about
another family down the block who lost an elderly mother because of a
dropped cell phone call to her son and the winds of change taking her
away. He told the story like he was pointing out an open wound, one we
could all see, but we could not stop him because we hoped it helped in
some way.

He told us stories about FEMA’s attempts to help, and how they were so
blundered that you couldn’t help but laugh with him. Follow the faces
with me. It took him 3 months to get a FEMA trailer , he laughed
when it took him 3 more weeks to get a key , he couldn’t believe it when he wasn’t allowed to fix simple problems in the trailer (i.e.
clogged toilet) because it was government property , but he later
learned that the first few thousand trailers all had the same key .

Had he not laughed, the whole thing would have been a horror story,
but his demeanor, even while sitting on a destroyed TV stand that we
threw out on the street, barely wavered from his Southern smile.

This happened several times during the week — when we met one of the
first people to move back to the lower 9th ward; when we met a hotel
employee who talked about rescuing family members in his boat while
making sure that those who passed away would be found when the waters
receded; when we talked to a group of seemingly random people from
Wisconsin who made this all happen because they were so moved by their
first trips.

So, in all this, I had nothing to complain about when I got a shard of
glass through my foot. A little discomfort, a lost shoe, and a lower
9th ward tan because I was out of commission for the last day. In the
whole situation, I don’t think I got the bad end of the bargain (other
than being known as the Gimp for the last 24 hours of the trip). I got
an awesome B’day cake and song from the group, lead by the U. of
Arkansas (soo-eee), met a great group of friends, and got dirty doing
something good.

I’ll be kinda surprised if you’ve read to here, and I’ll be thankful
that you did. It took me a full week to learn how much farther New
Orleans still has to go before it’s fully livable again, and I hope
these stories gave you an idea of that. And with any trip, going away
to where so much is lost makes you realize how much you have at home.

Hope this finds you all well.
Matt