Goshen, Litchfield, Salisbury & Warren Joint Church Youth Group Trip to New Orleans for Katrina Relief

Today we started on “gutting” a two story home in a very nice neighborhood.  The water in this house came halfway up the wall on the second floor, about 14 feet above street level.  On the same street, there were single family homes that were completely submerged when the water was at the highest.  When we opened the front door on this house, the smell came right out at you.  Everything was still in the house and all of the furniture on the first floor was on it’s side.  After we made a way through the living room, we made a way into the kitchen where the fridge was on it’s side and still full of food in storage containers. The smell just stays on us and never quite goes away.  The food left in the microwave was rotted and contained maggots.   All of the cabinets in the kitchen and the other rooms had fallen apart because they were under water for so long and the contents all over the floor.  When we first walked in, and until we began to clear the place, we were walking on almost a foot of solidified, rotten debris – impossible to know what it used to be, and able only to be removed by shovel.  By the end of this day, we were only able to remove the furniture, the bookcases and their contents, empty the closets, the garage and the storage rooms.  We even were able to get about half of the hardwood floor up on the first floor that was glued to the concrete.  We began to remove the shoe moldings and we will be able to pull the carpets out tomorrow.  Because this is a two story house, it will go a little slower because we will not be able to use the wheel barrows on the second floor and will need to throw everything out the windows, or carry it downstairs in plastic garbage cans.  The owner of the house was there and he was very glad to see us come.  He  bought us several cases of Gatorade to replenish us and said “he would be honored if we each took one thing home from his house to remember his family by”.  I thought that this was very touching.  One girl kept a New Orleans version of Trivial Pursuit, another boy took a couple of Led Zepplen albums, another Mardi Gras beads, another a child’s toy.  On one of the trips down the stairs with a garbage can full of stuff, I noticed that a baseball was rolling out into the road from the can I just emptied by the street.  I knew then that I had found my memento.  We were able to save the child’s drum set because it floated around on the second floor and was not harmed.  We also saved some girls toys.  Other items like Lego blocks, record collections, video games, exercise equipment, bedroom furniture, furniture full of folded clothes, Boy Scout uniforms, photograph albums, confirmation certificates and the list goes on and on.  As you can see, it is a very personal thing to go through these items and cast them away as trash.