Habitat Project in Baton Rouge

[Timsings]

This coming Saturday I am driving down to Baton Rouge to serve, along with about 16 other folks from Nashville, as a crew leader for the last week of the Baptist Blitz Build. All the volunteers are American Baptists. According to an e-mail I received, 73 volunteers are from the Great River Region, 50 from New Jersey, and 39 from Pennsylvania. Is anyone familiar with any of these folks? Is anyone here also planning to be in Baton Rouge, or have you already been? As the lone Baptist among my group (but more CBF & SBC), I am expecting to catch some "friendly" grief from my fellow Nashvillians about being among "my people". It could be a long week.

Tim Reynolds

[jerryl]

Great Rivers is my old region. I'm from Area V, which is all of Missouri. Most of Great Rivers is in Illinois, and I'm much less familiar with folks from over there. (Not that I know that many Missouri ABCer's.)

There is a blog on this work, , and I see some folks from Third Baptist in St Louis have worked there, no one I'm familiar with though. And the Great Rivers Region has info on this. Seems that GRR is putting a good bit of effort into this.

[Tim Dahl]

[Timsings]

My wife and I arrived home late last night from Baton Rouge. It was an interesting week. Flexibility is a Habitat byword, and we proved it last week. The houses we were supposed to finish had not had the drywall installed, so we were limited to doing siding and insulating the inside walls. Of the five houses that were to be started, only two of the slabs had been poured. So we framed the two that we could. By the end of the week, five houses had been sided, drywalled, and mostly trimmed. Three other mostly completed houses had their trim work almost completed. One of the framed houses was dried in and had the windows and exterior doors installed. The other had the roof decked. So we didn't do everything we had expected to do, but we had a full rich week.

On Sunday, May 11, Jeanie and I drove down to New Orleans with Russ and Pam Griffith. Russ is a construction specialist with Habitat International. Most of our group knows Russ from his time on the staff with the Nashville affiliate. In New Orleans, Russ drove us through the lower Ninth Ward. We saw damaged houses, repaired houses, rebuilt houses. We saw Habitat's Musicians Village, the location of the upcoming Brad Pitt Project, the house rebuilt by This Old House, and the rebuilt house that was supervised by our new pastor.

It was a great week of work. The volunteers were enthusiastic and worked hard. Everyone was friendly and willing to do whatever was needed to move the houses toward completion.

On the way back, I drove Jeanie through Ocean Springs so she could see the remaining damage and the ongoing work that was being done to rebuild. We also went through Gautier (pronounced go-SHAY) to see where I had worked last year. It was good to see fewer FEMA trailers in that neighborhood.

The coastal areas are being rebuilt, but the process is very slow and will take a long time.

Tim Reynolds

[Tim Dahl]

Nice!

Thanks for the update. I look forward to getting my church involved in a Habitat house.

Tim