"A time to tear down, and a time to build up..."

1/22/2007 11:42 PM

My second trip to New Orleans was for a very different reason and therefore a very different experience. The 6th of January 2007 I was lucky enough to call this city my home for an undefined period of time. I have two primary roles/jobs, if you can call them that.

The first, is to act as an on site liaison for the 5th year architecture studio developing a design/build project in Gert Town. The project centers around one women’s effort to restart her restaurant of many years. Coupled with this, is the effort of a destroyed community trying to revive and improve itself since the waters of Katrina have receded.

The second is to act as a project manager for the benevolent work of the Christ the Redeemer Presbyterian Church, a mission congregation focused almost entirely on rebuilding efforts. The amount of projects that we will be doing will make it impossible for me to document each and every one, but I will try to post some of them.

It is from this second group that I have found the most confidence in the hope that the city will be re-built. As you move about the city and talk to people there is such grittiness to everything. People are kind and pleasant but they are also frustrated and in pain. There is so much loss here and such a strong desire for just a little hope. Their frustrations are a reflection of the outstandingly slow paced rebuilding efforts and the lack of national attention. After 17 months the city doesn’t really look all that different than what it looked after the storm, and yet the entire nation seems to look the other way. There is a whole community of amazing people who have come post Katrina to lend their expertise to rebuild, but even they seem tired and over worked. The scale of the task is like nothing I have ever seen and more than most can comprehend. I have lived in 3rd world countries, but they did not prepare me for this. There is no precedent within our country on how to rebuild an entire city. Yet, I am lucky because every week I get to see fresh faces coming into the city to make whatever difference they can make. When someone says that nothing is happening I can respond that I know of 20 or more young people gutting 2 or 3 houses a day. Or that 8 men finished out an entire church building with sheet rock in a week: services will start soon. I find that the people are tired of the design committees showing them what their communities could look like in ten years. As one man told me, “we just want our houses fixed, we want our homes back…now!” Obviously there are just as many different roles to be played as there are problems down here, but from what I see so far, hope doesn’t come from beautifully rendered drawings produced by design committees but from dirty faces and aching backs. I have so much respect for those that give up a week of their time to come and tear out a family’s house. It is neither easy nor fun, but it is rewarding. We host different groups from all over the United States of all different ages and backgrounds. Our first group of the year was 26 students from the University of Virginia. They completed the cleaning out of 9 homes within one week! The second group was 8 men from Cincinnati who finished out the interior of a church. The following images are from the UVA group’s efforts.

Jared Hueter