tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-86820650603268460662024-02-07T16:12:49.931-08:00Rebuilding New OrleansDo the Work. Teach the Work. Tell the Story.David Kopra and Ann Drorbaughhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12152319227722283364noreply@blogger.comBlogger38125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8682065060326846066.post-38064974994975974002015-09-23T19:48:00.002-07:002015-09-24T08:51:06.823-07:00How Can You Mend A Broken Heart?<br />
Hello Everyone, and Greetings From New Orleans,<br />
<br />
Ann and I arrived here for our 25th trip on August 18th. A few days later, New Orleans would officially remember the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. We chose to come for a couple of reasons. The anniversary brought back a lot of corporate money and volunteers, and we wanted to be with our Rebuilding Together people to help spend that money and use those volunteers. Selfishly, too, we also wanted to reunite with some of our early volunteer friends we hadn't seen in years, to catch up and remember together the work we did so long ago.<br />
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Right after we arrived, we visited our friend Peggy Severe, who lives in a Hollygrove home we helped rebuild in 2007. On every trip home to NOLA, we get to visit with Peggy, often enjoying lunch at her favorite place to eat, Mandina's in Mid City. This time, we had the pleasure of bringing Liz Russell, the woman who headed up the rebuilding of her home, to Peggy's home to reunite and catch up. We haven't seen Liz since I can't tell you when, but we see Peggy frequently, and she never fails to ask us if we've seen Liz and how is she and so forth. Getting to watch the two of them go from room to room of Peggy's home, talking about the work and about life in general made Ann and me happy.<br />
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Several years ago, Ann and I decided that our 2 or 3 or 4 trips a year to help could be scheduled to avoid the summer heat. The summers here are murderously hot and humid, just like it was for thousands of New Orleanians stranded in the city after the floodwalls failed and the city filled with water. It is a humbling reminder. When the Heat Index hits 111 degrees, as it did on August 24th, you feel the same heat so many New Orleanians felt for days atop their roofs and on top of elevated freeways where they were stranded. If they were lucky. If they hadn't drowned in their Lower Ninth homes, or made the mistake of obeying instructions to flee to the Superdome or, worse, to the Morial Convention Center, where Hell waited for them. And we had water to drink.<br />
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We were assigned to two homes on the Westbank in Algiers. At Miss Marva White's home on Pelican Street, we set about to finish window trim on the outside and to build a back porch and stairs. We were paired up with a young architect who was visiting from France and wanted to spend a week helping in New Orleans along her way across the US. Lea was a great addition to the team, and we knocked our work out on time while showing her the joys of fried shrimp poboys. She also got to spend an evening with us at our pal Macon Fry's home on the river side of the levee. I hope we helped provide some memories.<br />
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Following that project, we went to work on Murl Street at the home of Mr. and Mrs. James Holmes. Mr. Holmes is wheelchair-bound, and our responsibilities included setting the foundation for a wheelchair ramp that will finally allow him to leave his home under his own power. Ann and Lea and I worked there for a few days ahead of the Katrina 10 Service Day team, getting the project laid out and ready for a productive Saturday with a large group of volunteers from Shell Oil, who also funded the project. In addition to the wheelchair ramp, we were also building a back porch and stairs, a new front porch rail, and setting hardwood flooring in the room adjacent to the wheelchair ramp. On Saturday, our team built the back porch and stairs (Ann ran that project, of course), set all of the posts for the wheelchair ramp, built the entire front porch rail, and laid a bunch of the hardwood floor. A productive day with a team of willing and fun volunteers.<br />
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As we worked on the Westbank in the usual summer heat and humidity, we thought often about just why we were there.<br />
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I listened to a podcast of This American Life, which restored some of my early Katrina memories. Podcast number 296 aired on September 5th, 2005, less than 2 weeks after the floodwalls broke, and reminded me what we were thinking when we decided to come to help. Paste this link into your browser and devote an hour to some fresh accounts of what happened and why....<br />
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<a href="http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/296/after-the-flood">http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/296/after-the-flood<br />
</a><br />
I've thought about how different the experience is for us volunteers and for our homeowners. Here we are, both in the same place, working toward the same objective, but often in different dimensions. What it boils down to is, we weren't there, and they were. The shocking things we saw on TV, and then in person, they lived through. The realities of life for poor, often African-American citizens here in this Deep South city that we read about, they lived with. Cops didn't even see us. They saw the residents of Central City. Or worse, if the cops saw us, they looked after us, and warned us about the residents of Central City. Central City became our home. These residents became our friends.<br />
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The work we did earned us a spot in the hearts of many people here. And a seat at their tables, where we enjoyed Sunday Dinners in the middle of the week. Soul Food. Their souls, poured out of ladles onto our plates.<br />
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This trip, in addition to the pleasures of seeing our friends Peggy Severe, the Bellanger family, Macon Fry, Gabe Sneller, our pals at Finn McCool's, our old HandsOn pals Nic, Liz, Kellie, and others, we also got to think about the juxtaposition between the tragedy wrought upon this city and its people, and the purpose we volunteers found by coming to help. They lived through the troubles, and we were given a gift. How can that be?<br />
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I think I know.<br />
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The work we did became part of the story our homeowners tell about their recovery. Slowly, we were woven into the lives of the people we served, and they into ours. Their troubles became ours, and our gift became theirs.<br />
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I was 49 years old when I first came to New Orleans to help. I laugh sometimes when I think about how much easier the work seemed back then.<br />
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Time marches on, for us and for them. Now, 10 years after the floodwalls failed, there are still thousands of homes left unrepaired. Many people are living in homes that have no water or no power, invisible from the street. They fixed the front of their homes to keep them off demolition lists, but had no other resources to go further. Their storm-damaged homes are all they have, and they are still hanging on. It's a complicated situation. Some of these homeowners received Road Home money from the Congress and gave it to unscrupulous contractors, or didn't use it for rebuilding, or didn't have enough to finish their home repairs. They are hiding out because the government might want the money back. Homeless in a home.<br />
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This is the kind of shit you get when a major American city is destroyed by a Katrina-class disaster. There is no simple, tidy epilogue. 10 years on, here we are, better in many ways, unchanged in others, worse in still other ways. And the people of this city persevere. I've still got a lot to learn.<br />
<br />
My Love to All,<br />
<br />
David/DadDavid Kopra and Ann Drorbaughhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12152319227722283364noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8682065060326846066.post-61749520797685660462014-03-12T09:05:00.000-07:002020-06-27T10:49:12.577-07:00Lean On Me<br />
Hello Everyone, and Greetings From New Orleans,<br />
<br />
Ann and I arrived here on January 6th, a few weeks earlier than we had planned. We came early because our friend Harold Bellanger had gone into the hospital, and his family was worried about his prospects. After over two weeks in the hospital, most of that time spent in ICU, Harold passed away late in the afternoon on January 20th.<br />
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Mister Harold was the patriarch of a family we worked for in the spring of 2008. At the time, they had moved back into their nearly-restored home in Gentilly, but didn't have the funds to complete the rebuilding of their upper level. Our son Kevan provided the funds we used to rebuild the floors and prepare the upstairs walls for paint, and Ann and I, with help from our NOLA brothers Reggie and Nic, worked with other volunteers to do the work necessary to essentially complete the rebuilding of their storm-damaged home.<br />
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In the process of doing that work, we formed a bond with the Bellangers that grew. On every trip thereafter, we visited with them, had meals with them, and basically became good neighbors with them. From the beginning, we were drawn to their bond of family. Harold and Baby Ray were anchors not only in their home, but in their neighborhood. They were the family that other homeowners in the neighborhood contacted after Katrina, to see if they were coming home to rebuild. If they came home to rebuild, other families would, too. If they weren't coming back, well.....<br />
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Harold Bellanger and his wife Baby Ray were both born and raised in Lake Charles, Louisiana. According to Harold, Ray was his first and only love. They married almost 50 years ago and settled in New Orleans. He had a career in Pharmacy Services for Charity Hospital in New Orleans, where Ray told me that Harold made it his life's business to make sure that no one went without their required medicines, regardless of their finances. "If he heard that a patient needed medicine but couldn't afford it, Harold would gather samples of medicines, and would work on pharmaceutical company representatives to get whatever was needed. He always made sure everyone had what they needed." In 1980, he was one of 10 Louisiana State employees who received the Charles E. Dunbar Award, given annually to state and local municipal employees who, "distinguish themselves through unselfish service to the citizens of Louisiana". Before we met, Harry was the guy who took the garbage can to the street on garbage day for older residents of the neighborhood. He was the guy who mowed their lawns and planted their spring flowers so their yards looked nice. He was a volunteer crossing guard at the neighborhood elementary school, long after his kids became adults. He did all of this because, well, that's what people do, right? He just did it because he was a member of his community, and he cared about the people who lived there.<br />
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Harold suffered from diabetes, and from the day we met him almost 6 years ago, his mobility was limited by the damage that disease had visited upon his feet. Sometimes when we saw him, he was mobile, and sometimes he sat on the couch. The Harry Bellanger we met had already lived a full and happy life, full and happy not because of what he owned or adventures he'd gone on, but full and happy in the most essential ways, deriving his joy of life from the love he gave and got from his family, his full participation in the life and happiness of his community, and his straightforward notions of fair-play, justice, and a person's obligation to his fellow human beings. Simply living his life as he knew it was supposed to be lived, and happy as a result. His parents must have really been something.<br />
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The man loved his family. By his family, I mean his wife and children, their children, his nieces and nephews, their children, cousins, and anyone else close to them. This man set a standard for love of family the rest of us can only aspire to. And he was all in. If a grandson needed a bit of guidance, there he was in the most positive and determined way. Self-esteem was earned, not awarded with purple participant ribbons in that home. And he did it with a light hand and heart.<br />
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His spirit lives on. His grandsons walk the neighborhood, taking care of garbage cans and lawns. Fine young men who were shown a way that's been lost in so many other places.<br />
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Awhile back, we spent part of an afternoon just shooting the bull, two guys. I remarked to him that he turned 20 in the Deep South in 1962, right in the heart of the Civil Rights movement. What was it like, I asked him, to be a young black man in Louisiana in the early 60's? His high school was segregated, of course, and I was curious what it was like at the time, how his consciousness was occupied. "Oh, it was alright," he told me. "We had what we needed, and everything was OK for us." I didn't push for more information. This man had a backbone of steel, and approached his life as a 20 year old in the same way he did at 70. I think he saw himself as a man, without further qualification necessary or desired.<br />
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We buried Mister Harold on Saturday, February 1st. Ann and I had the honor of sitting with his family, and we got to hear stories about him as a younger, healthier man. We saw pictures of him with Ray at their high school prom. We sat in the midst of a grieving family who loved and honored him, sharing stories that helped us laugh our way through our sorrow.<br />
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Hurricane Katrina, a terrible disaster, brought us together with Harry and his family. I am forever grateful for that awful event.<br />
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Rest in Peace, Harry. You have earned it.<br />
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My love to all,<br />
<br />
David/Dad<br />
<br />David Kopra and Ann Drorbaughhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12152319227722283364noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8682065060326846066.post-20621948959842722512013-10-19T13:36:00.000-07:002013-10-24T09:04:39.116-07:00Biloxi Black and Blues<br />
Hello Everyone, and Greetings From Biloxi,<br />
<br />
After our two weeks in NOLA, Ann and I set off on Saturday October 12th for a week working in Biloxi, Mississippi with our friends from Kaiser Permanente. Last year, we worked in Biloxi with Kaiser building a home for Jana Gonzales and her family. After that very intense and productive week, Ann and I couldn't wait to see what they had cooked up for us this year.<br />
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Our Biloxi work is anchored by the Women in Construction Program, a project of the Moore Community House (<b>www.moorecommunityhouse.org</b>), a 90-year old Biloxi institution focused on providing services to less-fortunate families. A few years ago, after providing day care for poor working women, the folks at Moore decided they wanted to do more than look after these women's children while they worked at often-minimum-wage jobs. They started a training program to teach building trades to these women, to help lift them economically. The program has since graduated about 100 students, 70 of whom now have jobs in private construction companies. They recently added a welding program, in response to discussions with ship-building companies down here. This is no do-gooder program. The people who run it have developed relationships with construction and ship-building companies down here, and ask them what skills and attributes help graduates become employees, and then feed that knowledge back into their training regimen. It's working.<br />
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Until now, the Women in Construction Program has operated out of make-shift space. Our project this past week was to help build an actual headquarters for them, with designed classroom space and a large, flex-space shop. We were asked to arrive in Biloxi on Saturday, which would allow all of us to spend Sunday seeing the space, talking about the projects we'd be undertaking, forming the sub-teams that would be assigned specific tasks, and allowing the less-experienced volunteers to learn how to safely and properly operate the power-tools we'd be using. The planning was good--we'd hit the road running early on Monday morning. We'd be managed by a commercial contractor, who sent 3 of his people and a site-supervisor to lead, help, cajole, or whatever was needed.<br />
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The shop space required 35 custom-built trusses, designed by an architect, and full of angles. The contractor's folks spent a few days before we got there thinking about just how the hell a bunch of volunteers were going to build these. 35 trusses, 5 different truss styles and sizes, all meant to fit together on the shop roof to look like a unified design.<br />
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Monday morning, we went to work. A crew worked at a jig set up by the contractor to build the first model of truss, a crew worked at the next station to put finishing struts and gusset plates on each truss after it left the jig, and a third crew drilled holes for and then installed large carriage bolts at key joints on each truss. 22 bolts in each of 25 trusses, and 23 in the other 10. Then each truss was carried by the team to a staging area, where they awaited installation later in the week. I estimate that each truss weighed between 350-400 pounds, and they were over 20 feet long. Those crews eventually settled into a fairly-balanced rhythm, and off they went. I got to work on the bolting crew, and Ann worked on the Stage 2 assembly team.<br />
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Other teams went inside to insulate the entire new classroom space, install drywall (12' sheets--yay) and do framing work, including moving a number of previously-installed windows to new locations, and framing a new double-door. Another team went outside and installed siding.<br />
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It was fun to watch Monday's progress as the teams jelled. The construction pros began with witheringly-low expectations. Having done these projects before, Ann and I knew they'd be blown away with the energy and productivity of the Kaiser folks. In the meantime, we quietly watched as the Kaiser teams stepped up and everyone took on their roles. As the week progressed, Thomas, Kenny, Willie, Steve, and Dan (the Big Cheese) were all converted. By Wednesday, everyone was on board, and the lines between the pros and the volunteers blurred.<br />
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On Thursday, the framing crew had completed the moving of the windows and had framed for the new door. The drywall/insulating crew had completed the insulation and were well along on the drywall hanging. Maritza Castro was the project lead for that team, and she really had them moving. Outside, the crane showed up to hang the 35 trusses. Ann and Nailah ("Doc" to most of us) rigged and guided the trusses as our crane operator lifted them to the teams that installed them. By the end of the day, there they were, 20 feet in the air, all in place. At the end of the day, the crane operator lifted all of the plywood sheeting for the roof into place, ready for the next day's installation crew. On Friday, everyone worked to wrap up as much of our work as possible. Hurricane ties were installed on the rafters, the siding on the main building was completed and painted, the subfloor in the classroom was floated, and a bunch of the roof sheeting was installed.<br />
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Then, as always, it was over. Way too soon for most of us. We had one serious accident on Friday morning, when one of our inside workers fell off a ladder and broke her leg in three places in addition to dislocating her shoulder. We always stress safety, and we've been very lucky until now. She had surgery in Biloxi on Saturday morning, and was on our minds all day. This work has its risks. The rest of us (especially those of us old enough to be taking our daily baby aspirin) had our share of bruises, but were otherwise none the worse for wear.<br />
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I can't say enough about the women who come out of the Women in Construction program. Ann had the opportunity to work with Simone, and I had the pleasure of working on a team that included CJ, Sharika, and Shauna, women who recently graduated from the program. At the end of a pretty long day on Thursday, CJ and I were talking. She told me that she'd graduated two months earlier, and had then been hired by Women in Construction to join the staff. I wasn't a bit surprised by that. She was experienced, knew her way around the job site, and worked very well with the pros as well as us volunteers. What did surprise me was that, prior to joining the program, she had no construction experience whatsoever. That was a stunner, because I had sized her up as someone who had done this kind of work before. CJ was an example of just how tranformative that program can be. From McDonald's employee (true story) to professional construction worker in less than a year. I think of it as "From $7 to $27". Both she and Sharika were great examples of what is possible when organizations like the Moore Community House and people like Johnny Gonzales and Julie Kuklinski come together with a purpose to lift people and families to new heights. God loves them all. So do we. It made me happy to see such an ambitious and loving objective personified in the faces of those people.<br />
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<b>Ed Hume Seeds/Parkway Partners Update</b><br />
<br />
In 2007, our friends here in Olympia, Jeff and Ann Hume, provided a large quantity of sunflower seeds my Ann had asked them for. At the time, sunflowers were being planted throughout New Orleans because they helped leach lead out of the Katrina-soaked soils. Kids would plant them, watch them grow and bloom, all the while the plants were quietly at work cleaning up the polluted ground. Following that, Jeff asked Ann if perhaps New Orleans could use other seeds. At the end of each summer, the Ed Hume Seed Company retrieves their retail racks from merchants all over the region, and recovers a lot of seeds, which will not be resold next year. Jeff offered us all of them. "All of them" turns out to be between 1000-2000 pounds per year. Ever wondered how much one of those seed packets you see in the store weighs? The answer is, not much. That first year, the Hume's shipped 1,541 pounds of seeds to Parkway Partners (<b>www.parkwaypartnersnola.org</b>) in NOLA, the organization I discovered when I went looking for someone who could do something with the thousands of seed packs the Humes were offering. Parkway Partners is a long-established NOLA organization dedicated to all things green in the city and beyond. After Katrina, there were so many spaces in the city left empty and destroyed that community gardens and wild spaces became a goal. Lots of that work was very grassroots, and came with dedicated neighbors, but often without a lot of resources. UPS shipped those seeds without charge that year, and a network developed to inform and distribute this mother lode of seeds. After Year One, FedEx stepped in and has picked up the tab for the shipping every year since. This has become a very big deal in New Orleans, and the Ed Hume Seed Company, Jeff and Ann Hume, and Federal Express make it possible. Ann and I ran into a number of people this past trip who gush with gratitude and excitement about how much this generosity has meant to them.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVuH843SleJUAH8r9EJ8rLlSXmW4MG_K2602R2dyCYrIcbH2IZUi_BboEoKV5_rewFja3VZp3RUjp1rYpIhhPWAFplizZDl-jCPC69WiZvpB6qwNLu9-XwiAzZcNFM3i8qSVWON2BBnqeI/s1600/Seed+Sorting+PP.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVuH843SleJUAH8r9EJ8rLlSXmW4MG_K2602R2dyCYrIcbH2IZUi_BboEoKV5_rewFja3VZp3RUjp1rYpIhhPWAFplizZDl-jCPC69WiZvpB6qwNLu9-XwiAzZcNFM3i8qSVWON2BBnqeI/s400/Seed+Sorting+PP.jpg" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgfZPBLJWZ2TbSwNCIC6JgoUeEcRBP7Wo0cDKzVVxAPZglIamBLXRIBrgrGfBuhv_rFVLO9ywmoF3WsVQ-blQkJYe8JLVTVMoJ9HeTRVJPNozJyt7THK9yZ3YwH_ay-ZicxLuBY3gHLgCux/s1600/Seeds+(3).jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgfZPBLJWZ2TbSwNCIC6JgoUeEcRBP7Wo0cDKzVVxAPZglIamBLXRIBrgrGfBuhv_rFVLO9ywmoF3WsVQ-blQkJYe8JLVTVMoJ9HeTRVJPNozJyt7THK9yZ3YwH_ay-ZicxLuBY3gHLgCux/s400/Seeds+(3).jpg" /></a><br />
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<br />
My Love to All,<br />
<br />
David/Dad<br />
<br />
<br />
David Kopra and Ann Drorbaughhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12152319227722283364noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8682065060326846066.post-29831552439585108692013-10-12T01:16:00.000-07:002013-10-21T17:04:14.471-07:00Long May You Run<br />
Hello Everyone, and Greetings from New Orleans,<br />
<br />
We spent our two weeks here on the ground working at Miss Mabel's home on Cohn Street, helping Rebuilding Together wrap up her work. We kept busy building deck and porch rails, patching drywall around new windows, casing and trimming those new windows, and getting her home ready for paint, which happens after we leave for Biloxi on October 12th. This project is part of Rebuilding Together New Orleans' annual October Build project, which is funded by corporate sponsors and involves volunteers from those corporations. After the exterior paint and drywall mudding and taping and paint, this lovely 91 year-old will have her home back. She's sharp as a tack, if a bit hard of hearing. It's better that way, considering my construction-site language. <br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAPrpLdbUPYZd62TxddiWYFITS9eR8uZtvE6w95aFOqvbLcho31Hm8pFBl1NIGZ6jJngK21YgmXDZejO9HCAbmusKZdrgjG3lWQHM0uWZRnPzesOWgzTbewthOeLfzoGkFoWyE8P1giodu/s1600/Miss+Mabel+New+Rails.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAPrpLdbUPYZd62TxddiWYFITS9eR8uZtvE6w95aFOqvbLcho31Hm8pFBl1NIGZ6jJngK21YgmXDZejO9HCAbmusKZdrgjG3lWQHM0uWZRnPzesOWgzTbewthOeLfzoGkFoWyE8P1giodu/s400/Miss+Mabel+New+Rails.JPG" /></a></div><br />
<b>Our Friend Phil</b><br />
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Three days prior to our arrival, our great New Orleans friend Phil Frohnmayer finally lost his battle with a pernicious form of mesothelioma.<br />
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Phil was our pal. Our morning coffee buddy. And he fought his cancer with a vengeance. Over the years, we saw him while he was undergoing a round of chemo, and he seemed fine. We saw him in between, and he seemed fine. He always seemed fine because he was a fighter. This man loved his life and his family and his work, and he wanted more of it, as much as he could get. He never bitched, because he was always happy to wake up to a new day.<br />
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Phil's fight reminded me in so many ways of the fight so many New Orleanians we've come to know fought after Hurricane Katrina. In the midst of so much loss, they hung in to fight whatever came next, always expecting the best in the face of shitty odds against them. Suffering so much loss from a calamity they didn't cause, they refused to give in, and fought instead. All the while, they expressed gratitude for their blessings. Phil did all of that.<br />
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Flash back to early 2008. Ann and I had found a morning coffee shop home at CC's on Magazine Street. It was just a few blocks from Reggie and Mary Ellen's home, which they shared with us when we came to work. CC's felt a lot like our Olympia coffee shop/home at Batdorf & Bronson's, and we had developed a routine of hanging there before work each day.<br />
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One Sunday morning, we were engaged by a regular customer who noticed my Oregon Basketball T-shirt. "Hey there! Go Ducks. I'm Phil. My brother works at the University of Oregon."<br />
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We introduced ourselves and told Phil that we were Oregonians ourselves. We sat down, had coffee together and chatted. The next day, he was there, and we sat together again. As those coffee shop relationships go, ours grew, and over the next few trips, we became daily regulars.<br />
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On our next trip later that Spring, we ran into Phil again. To eliminate any awkwardness that comes from running into someone you are so familiar with but don't quite remember enough about, Ann said, "Hey! I'm Ann Drorbaugh. We saw you last time!"<br />
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"Phil Frohnmayer! Good to see you again!", answered Phil.<br />
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<i>Frohnmayer?</i><br />
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Phil Frohnmayer, brother of the guy who "worked" at the University of Oregon? David Frohnmayer was <i>President<i></i></i> of the University of Oregon. The David Frohnmayer who was the Attorney General of the State of Oregon and almost the Governor. Since Phil didn't say that he "taught" at the University, we figured "worked" at the University meant maybe his un-named brother was a maintenance engineer, or helped in admissions or financial aid.<br />
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Phil led the Voice Program at Loyola University in NOLA. To the music world, he was a world-class baritone and recording artist and opera star. To us, he was our buddy. Every morning when we were there, he joined us in the comfortable chairs, and we watched as person after person ran in for their morning coffee, recognized and chatted up Phil, then went on their way.<br />
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As our trips came and went, we became close pals with Phil. He always asked when we were going to be back in NOLA, and sure as the sun comes up in the morning, he was always there on our first day back. We hung some lights in his home, and fixed stuff when he or his wife Ellen asked for help. After Hurricane Gustav, we were back in NOLA before Phil and Ellen, and they asked us to check on their home. Stuff like that.<br />
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In college, Phil worked in an Oregon lumber mill. There are lots of hazardous substances in lumber mills, including asbestos back in the day. In the mid-2000's, Phil was diagnosed with mesothelioma, a persistent and aggressive form of cancer, caused by exposure to asbestos.<br />
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This after a distinguished career as an opera star with his wife Ellen, a recording artist, and a beloved professor of music at several universities, with Loyola University his last stop, where he spent over 30 years teaching and mentoring countless students, including a number of future stars.<br />
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After our last trip in April, we heard from him, and he was having some trouble with his latest round of chemo. His cancer was aggressive, and his doctors were especially attentive to his need for whatever cocktail might work. This latest round upset him, and wasn't as easily tolerated. He had a not-so-good summer, and the medicine didn't do what he hoped it would do. He died on Friday, September 27th, in the company of his wife and daughter. There are many of us here in New Orleans who dearly miss our friend. As we work here in NOLA on this trip, we think often of Phil, and how much he loved this city and its people.<br />
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As we worked for Miss Mabel, I heard Neil Young sing a song that might have been written for Phil:<br />
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<i>Long may you run<br />
Long may you run<br />
Although these changes have come<br />
With your chrome heart shining in the sun<br />
Long may you run.</i><br />
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Rest in peace, Phil Frohnmayer.<br />
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My love to all,<br />
<br />
David/Dad<br />
<br />
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David Kopra and Ann Drorbaughhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12152319227722283364noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8682065060326846066.post-75965825071872755352013-04-22T09:52:00.001-07:002021-06-04T17:27:38.648-07:00Hello In There <br />
Hello Everyone, and Greetings from New Orleans,<br />
<br />
Ann and I arrived here on April 9th. The next day, we headed into the Lower Ninth Ward to see if we could catch up with Don Edwards at his home on St. Claude St. A few years ago, a Kaiser team helped him repair part of his home. At the end of the week, they realized a lot was left to be finished, and they hoped Hands On or some organization would be there to help see the project through to completion. We'd lost Mr. Edwards' phone number, so we were hoping to just drop in on him and find him at home. We did, and he spent a couple of hours with us showing us his home in its current condition, and telling us how it was going. It's still not finished, and Mr. Edwards has been victimized by burglars several times, losing his tools and whatever valuable materials he had stored inside the lower level of his home. "It's as if someone is watching, and when I leave, they make a call, and someone comes to quickly break in and take what they can", he told us. He is continually working on the weakest defense in his perimeter, constantly trying to stay out in front of whoever is coming next. Ann decided then and there that Mr. Edwards needed the money she'd received before Christmas from the sale of her Katrina Gator artwork. Ann has dedicated 100% of her Katrina Gator sales to directly helping homeowners here in NOLA, and Mr. Edwards fit the bill. So she gave that money to him. The next day we returned with a Ramset nail gun and installed a floor plate in the concrete slab of his lower level, and gave him enough stud lumber to finish a wall that had become the weakest entry point and probably the next target for thieves. He had the tools and the know-how to complete the framing with a friend. Mr. Edwards remembered all of the Kaiser team members who worked on his home in 2009. He'd been keeping a journal with the names and hometowns of everyone who came to help him.<br />
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We spent the rest of the week working for our friends the Bellangers in Gentilly. You may recall that we worked on a project our son Kevan funded for that family back in June of 2008 (See "I Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans"). During that project, we became friends with Harold and Baby Ray, their daughter Tynia, and her son Reggie. Later, Mr. Bellanger taught me how to barbecue baby back ribs, something I'd been trying unsuccessfully to do for several years. His ribs are always perfect, and he always makes me look good when I make them.<br />
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Anyway, we spent a few days repairing the posts that hold up the roof over their front porch. The original work included untreated lumber and some interior trim, none of which withstood the elements very well. We banged it out and finished it off late Friday, then said our goodbyes.<br />
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On Saturday, we got to spend a good chunk of the day enjoying the French Quarter Festival, a 20-stage music event that happens throughout the Quarter. It has become an annual affair for Lana and us as we take up our customary seats on the neutral ground at the end of Esplanade Street right next to the old US Mint and the stage set up right next to it. The entire festival is free and includes dozens of local bands. Many locals have told us it reminds them of how the Jazz Fest used to be before it grew so large.<br />
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We finished the weekend helping our host Lana Corll prepare and paint her TV room, then headed off to meet our new and old friends from Kaiser Permanente, who were arriving to begin their annual week in New Orleans helping to rebuild. Kaiser is still hooked up with Hands On New Orleans, who has shifted its focus from rebuilding homes to improving parks and gardens. Ann and I and many of our old-hands Kaiser pals are still deeply committed to helping families rebuild and return home, and Kaiser asked Hands On to find a couple of projects that involved individual homeowners.<br />
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Ann and I got to work for Mr. John and Miss Bert O'Neal, who own a double shotgun home in the Treme neighborhood. The home didn't take water during the flood due to its location on what Mr. O'Neal told me was the Esplanade Ridge, but was pretty substantially damaged by a fire that destroyed the home immediately next door. Funds were available to the O'Neals as a result, and they've been trying to find a way to get at least one of the two living units completed with what they've got so they can rent it and generate funds from the rental to fix the other unit, which has been gutted. The unit we worked on is probably 80% complete, but The Road Home program, which provided some funds to help rebuild, is insisting that it be complete, including a Certificate of Occupancy, by July 18th or risk a demand for repayment of the funds. Kaiser took this project on, knowing we wouldn't get it finished in the time we had, but wanting to pick the most difficult and challenging tasks remaining, so as to leave easier but no less necessary tasks for groups that will hopefully follow ours.<br />
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We elected to install the drywall firewall in the attic, repair a damaged floor in the middle of the home, and tile both bathrooms. Shawn Pascale, one of our earliest Kaiser pals, stepped up to take on the firewall project, easily the most difficult of the three jobs. He and our Kaiser project leaders and pals Alex Mustille and Alan Villatuya attacked the work with customary vigor. The attic was accessible only by a pretty rickety attic ladder. The HVAC ductwork had already been installed, which presented a large obstacle along the entire 60' length of the attic. But even though the sheetrock that originally arrived was not what we had ordered (specific material is required to meet the firecode for a wall separating two living units), and the correct stuff didn't make it until the next morning, Shawn, Alex and Alan and their team quietly attacked the work, piecing it together carefully and completing it just like the pros. A 1-hour firewall is required on a party wall separating two attached living units down here, and this team made sure this task could be checked off the list.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhpKz2IxKKABy2-aqmlhby831f1FocnPmbZOMgnkRAcysULasWrYkmixBTXhZoLDCtkI6ncPIV2UoIe3DUWGaZFIrHpF6BvHGZ3zQ3g7NjjQEEccBXRG-h4sBSverpXlhyxNQm2hRo5dIsJ/s1600/378289_10200943106209442_951200786_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhpKz2IxKKABy2-aqmlhby831f1FocnPmbZOMgnkRAcysULasWrYkmixBTXhZoLDCtkI6ncPIV2UoIe3DUWGaZFIrHpF6BvHGZ3zQ3g7NjjQEEccBXRG-h4sBSverpXlhyxNQm2hRo5dIsJ/s320/378289_10200943106209442_951200786_n.jpg" /></a><br />
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Ann and her folks had two bathroom tub surrounds to subsheet and tile. As always happens when she does tile work, new volunteers become experienced leaders themselves. Those two bathrooms look great now.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjuRESHGcTA79g5TNwVieS2O8akLqbDXQdcnIEuGhEDLsWcKYdBKi1df8pVym2oVBo6znWjKFsyJoAxACkb3cDofC1elZzIqGnTx9s7W1G1_2959n4U6RvpFt55qXMCu5qB_uz76GX1wjgJ/s1600/pic+044.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjuRESHGcTA79g5TNwVieS2O8akLqbDXQdcnIEuGhEDLsWcKYdBKi1df8pVym2oVBo6znWjKFsyJoAxACkb3cDofC1elZzIqGnTx9s7W1G1_2959n4U6RvpFt55qXMCu5qB_uz76GX1wjgJ/s320/pic+044.jpg" /></a><br />
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I got to work with volunteers who were charged with repairing a weak floor in the center room of the house. This room is the one that includes the bathroom and stairs to the second floor. It is not a living room or other family space. Fortunately, the framing under the floor was sturdy and undamaged, but the floor itself was weak and squishy. We fixed it by installing new subsheeting over the existing floor, gluing and screwing it, then installing finish tongue-and-groove flooring on top of that. Before we began, the room was a bit lower than the contiguous spaces, so the increased height the new floor added actually helped fix that problem at the same time. Led by Maritza, my co-workers worked their butts off from start to finish, including filling every screw hole and crack with wood filler, then sanding them all down, and finally mopping then papering the floor to protect it until the O'Neals stain and seal it. As is our custom, we all signed the underside of the last piece of flooring to be installed. Our PL Alex signed for Dakota, Kelli's late son, and we all added our names, Maritza installed it, and we left a bit of our hearts in the O'Neal house.<br />
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Throughout our workdays, we were ably led by Kaiser's Project Leaders, volunteers who had previously served as non-leading volunteers but who were chosen to lead future teams because of their heart, capabilities, and understanding of the meaning of and commitment to our work. These people, each of them, are such a joy to work for and to observe. They get it, and they are committed to making the volunteer experience for new volunteers equally meaningful and productive. Alex, Ashleigh, and Alan, our PLs this go-round, all have special places in our hearts. Their hard work and love for the people we serve make us happy and proud.<br />
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On Wednesday afternoon, we enjoyed two very-New Orleans treats. First, Mr. O'Neal made lunch for all of us and brought it to us. We all thoroughly enjoyed his red beans and rice, roasted chicken, and salad. Someone asked him how much of our lunch he cooked and how much Miss Bert cooked. "Miss Bert made the salad," replied Mr. O'Neal. The man can cook.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiz20K_4Cg3FHjQDE1nfl4nRWC8-osvW4VnhxpHtrDykoB3zgIOgyYLJyoXuAKoNaf3Bc56Vi8spptXKGb2zezfqljC3NMNuVpn7caWKeLydQcAgacN9jjVgWKxB2qO-Syl3UTReHNVpimc/s1600/pic+017.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiz20K_4Cg3FHjQDE1nfl4nRWC8-osvW4VnhxpHtrDykoB3zgIOgyYLJyoXuAKoNaf3Bc56Vi8spptXKGb2zezfqljC3NMNuVpn7caWKeLydQcAgacN9jjVgWKxB2qO-Syl3UTReHNVpimc/s320/pic+017.jpg" /></a><br />
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Next, around 1:30,Tynia Bellanger arrived with Baby Ray to deliver Huckabucks to our entire team. Huckabucks are cups with frozen Kool-Aid in them, and are a traditional treat in neighborhoods throughout New Orleans.<br />
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Tynia and Baby Ray came to share their love with us and to meet the new volunteers. We've known Baby Ray and Tynia for several years. We know where they live. We know how much they love their family members, how much they love Ann and me, and how they are the anchor of their Gentilly neighborhood. When they met our new volunteers and handed out the Huckabucks, Baby Ray touched me when she told them, "We just wanted you to know there is a lot of love in these neighborhoods. Not everyone here is a criminal. Most of us are good."<br />
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Imagine if what you led with when you met people was, "<i>We're not who you think we are</i>." Because you felt you had to lead with that. Not because everyone you met reduced you to a stereotype, but you'd seen enough TV to know that stereotype gets a lot of play. Because they'd had no actual experience with you. Imagine that.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTSYvDqA2UonKx_iH7J4YvmuAahNrpvaDgRCuwYEoQiuKrfbmUcxPPIbKTRr1IsxR4SNXLHYgtFdtRVGLLZPtI0pqYR829RNXOO6HAMUFkV3XQAkwRkMekMIGbEyJhqfhXxtnQpJxKWut7/s1600/photo+1+(2).JPG" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTSYvDqA2UonKx_iH7J4YvmuAahNrpvaDgRCuwYEoQiuKrfbmUcxPPIbKTRr1IsxR4SNXLHYgtFdtRVGLLZPtI0pqYR829RNXOO6HAMUFkV3XQAkwRkMekMIGbEyJhqfhXxtnQpJxKWut7/s320/photo+1+(2).JPG" /></a><br />
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At the end of Day 3, as we were wrapping up our work for the day, Mr. O'Neal was walking through the house to see our progress. He told me that, with the new floor and the bathroom tiling work, he thought that center room was the "showcase of the whole house". Not the parlor. Not the living room. Not the kitchen. The passage room between those spaces. He was so taken with the newness of the space that he concluded it was the space he was proudest of in their entire home. We were humbled.<br />
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On Day 4, as our jobs moved to completion, we extended our mission and picked other tasks that we could complete before our time was up. Bri O'Brien, one of the earliest Hands On members and our long-time friend, came down from her home in New York, where she now lives and works. She is good pals with a number of the old-hand Kaiser volunteers who come year in and year out at their own expense to continue their work. She was my team leader on my very first day of work in New Orleans back in September of 2006. Ann and I dearly love Bri, as she represents the doggedness and commitment to help homeowners that Hands On had in the beginning. Bri and Glenn Young, a Kaiser volunteer, teamed up to caulk the upper floor siding on the back of the house in preparation for paint. They also scraped and primed all of the door and window trim on the back side.<br />
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Other team members primed and touched-up interior trim, and generally cleaned up the interior, leaving it in great shape for the next teams we hope will arrive soon.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhPC3XTBWZdixpy0UpuidUTY0CM_QugLOJcCKZk0lH9YRWUiflGeDfJemdKdR_Dneloi__GP5T0KDmF9-q5qhu7Pk_gRT292iSUJEcla27k-Xl6alSmqKw882vwICo1aL7JsNq5SloSmQIB/s1600/IMAG0123.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhPC3XTBWZdixpy0UpuidUTY0CM_QugLOJcCKZk0lH9YRWUiflGeDfJemdKdR_Dneloi__GP5T0KDmF9-q5qhu7Pk_gRT292iSUJEcla27k-Xl6alSmqKw882vwICo1aL7JsNq5SloSmQIB/s320/IMAG0123.jpg" /></a><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj7J7YvvBXykaWrAyk1VRwKWZgJ4WIBfVqvsXGEpaJPjLpuMGdcvJSlHf9HRR4ANxoDpXhSRKNHgEALmjE7x7EZrLEbQRDw8vPpCcRbmP7djmdG6pX0qoOPjyQpEqDeziquBZRtSIx7ifpp/s1600/pic+028.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj7J7YvvBXykaWrAyk1VRwKWZgJ4WIBfVqvsXGEpaJPjLpuMGdcvJSlHf9HRR4ANxoDpXhSRKNHgEALmjE7x7EZrLEbQRDw8vPpCcRbmP7djmdG6pX0qoOPjyQpEqDeziquBZRtSIx7ifpp/s320/pic+028.jpg" /></a><br />
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The next day all of the Kaiser work teams came together to help finish a garden in honor of a late teacher at Success Preparatory Academy in Mid-City. After dinner and our goodbyes that evening, the week officially came to an end. Karaoke on Wednesday night at Kajun's Pub interrupted the rhythm of the work with a bang. Jamie Tam's Dance Party gave all of us a needed break in the middle of our work days.<br />
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On Saturday, Ann, Brenton Lee (who helps direct this effort with John Edmiston for Kaiser), Sue Giboney (one of our oldest and dearest Kaiser work buds), and I drove over to Biloxi to see the finished home we all worked on last October, when we spent a wild week with a team that built most of it from scratch. We spent a bit of time with the family who lives in it, and got to catch up with Johnny Gonzales and Julie Kuklinski, who run the Women In Construction program for the Moore Community Center in Biloxi. The program trains underemployed women in the construction trades, and we were honored with our Kaiser team to work alongside them last October in a very intense and rewarding week of balls-to-the-wall effort. You can read about that in my previous entry. It was very pleasing to see the home in its inhabited form. Turns out we built more than a house last Fall.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-5JxVbqgia8rYCqIYwIeDPTER_1mFSs97VT5DRalbULpbqdkPqel6SCL6-DWV4CuQwxBGPFt_bGXct9heMJQefxudZeV5isFz8JcN_G2d9_hTF7wlw4CurdeEXcBku8PrEKFDy5oU7YKW/s1600/pic+056.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-5JxVbqgia8rYCqIYwIeDPTER_1mFSs97VT5DRalbULpbqdkPqel6SCL6-DWV4CuQwxBGPFt_bGXct9heMJQefxudZeV5isFz8JcN_G2d9_hTF7wlw4CurdeEXcBku8PrEKFDy5oU7YKW/s320/pic+056.jpg" /></a><br />
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After a Saturday night celebrating Shawn Pascale's birthday, we woke up Sunday morning and had breakfast with Glenn Young, a Kaiser physician from Hawaii and one of our new pals. He was everywhere on the O'Neal project, doing whatever we needed, including becoming an instant master of the tile snapper for Ann and Teri's teams. A good-hearted guy with mad skills--our kind of Kaiser volunteer.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj0sPRdeOoA4PvWcfLoQWLD9OO8FaFb-lspO0IwweRpgbySPe9FM7pgkWtxGL2_cQBgpqZVBEZ2l-gpeIhLkgyDrUBbHJqDu00C3_e_6W1GwJAT5UyAytMU2poKFcWIM-YlhM1Ehq3bozCQ/s1600/pic+033.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj0sPRdeOoA4PvWcfLoQWLD9OO8FaFb-lspO0IwweRpgbySPe9FM7pgkWtxGL2_cQBgpqZVBEZ2l-gpeIhLkgyDrUBbHJqDu00C3_e_6W1GwJAT5UyAytMU2poKFcWIM-YlhM1Ehq3bozCQ/s320/pic+033.jpg" /></a><br />
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Then it was over. Two quick weeks. Lana Corll took great care of us, as she always does, while carrying the sorrow of losing Jake, her Labrador retriever of 14 years on Easter Sunday. Jakey was a great friend to all of us, and Lana does not mourn alone.<br />
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Lana had other company come to visit while we were there, and Phil and Ellen Frohnmayer, our Loyola University professor and coffee shop pals, graciously loaned us the use of their guest condo for a week. We are grateful to everyone who do so much for us when we come to New Orleans. Everyone we've worked for, and everyone who has helped us along the way have made us feel so much at home in NOLA. We are eternally grateful to y'all.<br />
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My Love to All,<br />
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David/DadDavid Kopra and Ann Drorbaughhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12152319227722283364noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8682065060326846066.post-18343513726922753602012-11-03T16:59:00.000-07:002012-11-16T19:16:55.918-08:00Our House is a Very, Very, Very Fine House<br />
Hello Everyone, and Greetings From New Orleans,<br />
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Ann and I are here in NOLA finishing up our 18th trip. After spending 4 weeks working here in New Orleans with Rebuilding Together on a handful of homes for their annual October Build effort, we headed over to Biloxi, Mississippi last Sunday to join our compatriots from Kaiser Permanente. Kaiser comes to the Gulf South twice each year to continue their efforts to help the region recover from Hurricane Katrina, spending one week in New Orleans and one week in Biloxi.<br />
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Biloxi, while a lot smaller than New Orleans, was severely damaged by a huge storm surge that directly hit them. The city is situated on the shores of the Gulf of Mexico, and US 90, the highway running directly along the beach, used to be home to scores of antebellum homes that enjoyed spectacular views of the Gulf. The storm surge not only wiped out many of those structures, it continued onshore for dozens of blocks, instantly wiping out homes far from the beach. Biloxi's damage was much like what the Lower Ninth experienced here in New Orleans--instant, total destruction.<br />
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Just a few weeks before Katrina hit, the family we were working for had just moved into a home over one-half mile inland. The home was tossed off its foundation in an instant, broken in two, and deposited on the neighbor's property. Our single-mother's daughter was 6 years old at the time, and suffered tremendously in the emotional aftermath of the storm. She was convinced she would never be safe in her home again, if she ever had her own home again. Like thousands of kids in New Orleans, thunderstorms brought back terrifying fears of death and loss and lack of control. We were building a completely new home for them, now 9 feet in the air to meet the post-Katrina building codes, on that same property.<br />
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Kaiser's team bet the farm this time, choosing to participate in their first Blitz Build, where the goal is to build an entire home in one week. They not only brought 30 volunteers, they also purchased the building materials for the home. A major investment by John Edmiston and his people, as usual.<br />
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This project came to us through the Moore Community Center, a Methodist-operated project that provides child care and other services to families in need in Biloxi. Awhile back, the good people at Moore realized that a lot of the moms they were providing child care services for would benefit from training opportunities that would lift them economically. They began the Women in Construction program, which provides free training in the construction trades to 10 or so women at a time. This project was anchored by them, and we were honored to work alongside these super-determined people throughout the week.<br />
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The majority of our volunteers come with very little construction experience, and are propelled instead by the size of their hearts and their determination to achieve whatever goals are set out for them. In the process, everyone gains skills and confidence in abilities they did not have at the beginning. Ann and I are familiar with Blitz Builds, made famous by Habitat for Humanity, but we've never participated in one. She and I and most of our Kaiser volunteers approached this week with cheerful optimism, propped up by this romantic exciting notion that this week would be magic and made-for-TV-movie-like. You know--a challenge here or there, a hangnail and a bruise for a few of us, but then, right before the credits roll, the home is somehow finished, with plenty of time to spare for showers, meals, drinks and laughs in between.<br />
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Yeah--just like that. Uh huh. It turns out that some editing takes place before that one hour show airs. Our week included the footage that never makes it to air. <br />
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Pollyanna was a no-show on Monday morning. We were scheduled to roll at 6:30 am, met quickly with our lead contractor at 6:45, started work at 7 am, and worked like whipped dogs until 7 pm.<br />
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The pros erected the 9-foot raised foundation prior to our arrival, and our work began with that and the floor in place, with a large inventory of lumber right next to it. We immediately split into several teams. One team climbed ladders onto the deck to frame the house, one team set about to paint all of the exterior trim and siding prior to installation, and Ann and I were asked to lead teams assigned to build the front and back stairs and porches. We were also asked to get them completely finished in one day, two days max. One minute after we'd met our bosses and been given our assignment, I felt a bit like I was in that recurring dream where I show up at my college final exam and realize I had never read the textbook or even attended the class.<br />
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The butterflies dissipated pretty quickly though, as the urgency set in and it became clear that it was indeed up to our team to build those porches and stairs, and to do it quickly and correctly. We split up, and Ann assembled a team to teach them how to cut stair stringers that fit while she simultaneously tried to figure out just where the posts that would hold up the switchback porch, steps and the upper landing were supposed to go so the holes could be dug and the posts could be set. My team had the easy job of the two, needing only to get going building two decks.<br />
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I felt a little bit bad that I got assigned to the deck team and Ann got the stair responsibility. I can't do stairs, and Ann does them beautifully. Stairs are much more work than decks, and I don't have the confidence that I could make them happen, and I was guiltily grateful that Ann had the job instead of me.<br />
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Reality began to set in for all of us as Monday turned dark. During the day, the framing team got all of the exterior walls and most of the interior walls up. Painting proceeded apace, despite the lack of real estate to stage painted boards while they dried. Ann trained two women to mark and cut stair stingers, and their work was impeccable. The porch deck team erected the frame of the back porch, and cut the joists. But, despite our sucker's notion that it wouldn't get dark before we decided it should, it did indeed get dark, the mosquitoes got mean, and at 7pm it was time to go. We trudged home, buoyed up by the shape of an actual home, held down by the weight of tasks unaccomplished, and now tempered by the reality that this is how the week was going to go.<br />
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On Tuesday, our goals were to finish the framing, install the roof trusses, sheet the roof in preparation for shingles, finish the front and back porches, finish the back stairs and prepare the front for stairs, and complete the painting. We did part of that, and then, go figure, it got dark again. Ann assembled a small team to stay late to site and dig the final holes for the posts that would hold up the back steps, and pour the concrete so those final posts would be ready by morning. Ann's team left for home at 8:30 that evening, and it occurred to us then that, by God, we were going to get our work done come hell or high water. Joaquin, John, Ann, and I left dead tired, but happily agreed on that fact.<br />
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Pizza, beers, a quick shower at 11 pm, then crash to bed and up again at 5 am. When we got to the work site on Wednesday morning, Ann's team kicked ass and those two extra hours we spent the night before paid big dividends, as her team quickly erected the switchback platform, installed the stair stringers, and bam! The back stairs were up. It was a moment for the entire group not unlike when the rest of us watched the framing team tilt up the walls on Monday. The day went like that--the porch team finished the back porch and installed the rail, the truss team got the roof trusses completed and began sheeting the roof, windows were installed, and at the end of the day the place looked like a house. We moved to the front to knock out the front porch, and got it all framed and ready to deck. Now it felt to us emotionally like we were really rolling. You could feel the momentum building as our collective confidence lifted us. By now, rookies were veterans, and the teams had subdivided into sub-teams, with new leaders taking on tasks that freed the other leaders to look forward and figure out how to move the big picture ahead. Wednesday ended with a shrimp boil and beers on the beach near our bunkhouse, hosted by our homeowner and her family and friends.<br />
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On Thursday, we rocked. We got all of the posts for the front stairs dug and poured and set, we finished the front porch and got the rail going, the siding was being installed at a furious clip, and the roof sheeting was completed. After darkness fell, we rushed back for a quick shower and a night out together. Only the adrenaline and our shared satisfaction about our progress fueled us that night, but we set off to finally be together for some eating and drinking and laughing that set the table for our final day on site.<br />
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On Friday, everyone decided to leave for work early so as to get started as soon as possible. We rolled at 5:30 or so, and set up our tools, power, and air in the dark. At the first sign of light, everyone dove in. Ann's team and my team came together to make use of our new skills to wrap up our projects. Joaquin, Katherine, Rosemary, Christine, Jackie, Michelle, Tanya, Susan and others all meshed so well that by then we knew each others' moves and needs that we were handing tools back and forth before they were requested. Sue Giboney, our longtime pal from the first project we worked on with Kaiser volunteers, and now a valuable team leader, joined us on Friday after completing her framing work, and she and Jackie Jones, our other longtime team leader and pal, led the rail team far beyond where they thought they could go. The rails on the back were completely finished, and the front rails were as complete as they could be considering I couldn't finish installing the posts in the time allotted. In addition, the front stairs were framed, the switchback was erected, and the stair treads were being installed. The roof team completed half of the shingles. The siding was completed, and the doors were installed. Insulation was installed inside. At night during the week, professional plumbers and electricians did their work after we left. At 4:30 on Friday afternoon, we stopped for a ceremony to present the home to Jana and her daughter Mia, and to collectively celebrate our accomplishment. Two seconds after the ceremony, everyone rushed back to their work stations to continue, trying to beat sunset. At the end of the day, that empty, bare floor deck we woke up to on Monday morning had been replaced by an honest-to-God home. It wasn't ready to move into, but the table is not only set, the meal has been served, and dessert is on its way. And our Women in Construction compatriots will see it through.<br />
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And just like that, it was over. 62 hours of work, sun-up to sundown, 5 days, see-through coffee and powdered eggs, showers at 10 pm, reveille at 5 am. At the end, we'd done 5 weeks of normal construction work. And we wished we'd been able to do more.<br />
<embed flashvars="host=picasaweb.google.com&captions=1&noautoplay=1&hl=en_US&feat=flashalbum&RGB=0x000000&feed=https%3A%2F%2Fpicasaweb.google.com%2Fdata%2Ffeed%2Fapi%2Fuser%2F115355642165919368304%2Falbumid%2F5808238892848014609%3Falt%3Drss%26kind%3Dphoto%26hl%3Den_US" height="288" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" src="https://picasaweb.google.com/s/c/bin/slideshow.swf" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="432"></embed><br />
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<b>Lessons Learned</b><br />
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Now that we've been through a Blitz Build, I think it's imperative that we now do it again, and the sooner the better. This past week, while still a blur, will present some very useful lessons on how to do it so much better the next time. That is not to say that we didn't do it really well this time (we did), but by going through this process having been thrown into it, we've learned a lot of tricks that make us ready to do it again, and even better than we did it last week.<br />
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An interesting irony of this past week was that, even though this was the first time all Kaiser Permanente volunteers worked together on the same site the entire week (as opposed to previous trips, where teams of volunteers were deployed on different projects in different locations), we probably did less collective bonding than we have in the past. The super-fast pace of the week caused all of the teams to focus so sharply on their specific tasks (and for so many hours of the day) that little time was left over for the bonding that takes place separate from the task. Conversely, the teams that did form to accomplish their specific tasks bonded up quickly. It's not that one way is better than another so much as it's simply the reality of the pace of the work. Turns out that Blitz Builds aren't like going to the prom. Our experience was more like <i>thinking</i> you were going to the prom, and then being told when you showed up that you were instead participating in an Ironman triathlon.<br />
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Ann and I have long said that the best volunteer efforts involved doing the work and teaching the work. Our mantra has been that, once you've learned a new task, the imperative was to teach the new skill to two other people, and to pass that ethic on to those we work with. In that way you'd grow the effort and leverage your skills. This past week, there was so much that could be taught, and so little time in which to teach it. The desire to accomplish the actual goal of moving a family into their home was, and rightfully so, the primary focus. The compressed timeline left little time to break down the work into discrete tasks that could be taught and passed on. We all did what we could, and our teams deserve a lot of credit for simply absorbing what they observed and participated in, but I hope we can do more next time. One element that apparently was taught very well was the language of the construction site. One of our very valuable team members, who will now go nameless in case she'd rather not see her name applied to this illustration, was hauling very heavy lumber to the saw to be cut. After a very strenuous afternoon of hustling 6 x 6 pressure-treated posts across the lot to the saw, she remarked to no one in particular, "These motherfuckers are heavy!" Lesson taken. I take full credit for it. And I'm proud of her for it. Do it. Teach it. Tell it.<br />
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John Edmiston and his team at Kaiser picked this job, taking it on faith that somehow we could all get this job done. The choice says everything about how much they care and how much they wish to accomplish. The faithful ambition John embraced reminded us so precisely of the early work that Hands On New Orleans took on. I think what happened last week raised the bar so high that Ann and I are excited to see what it translates into when Kaiser makes their next trip to New Orleans next April.<br />
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The final lesson we learned is that intense work on behalf of others makes for lasting friendships. This isn't news to us, but last week illustrated to us that a rapid, intense pace accelerates the bonding process. At our first group meeting last Sunday night, when no one knew anyone else and everyone introduced themselves to the group, I told them that by the end of the week, someone I didn't yet know would be exchanging phone numbers and email addresses with me so we could stay in touch. Of course that turned out to be true, and my circle is a bit wider and richer today. Joaquin, Katherine, Carl and Jim are just four of the people I am now honored to call friends. I know I'll see them all again.<br />
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Because I am so succinct, I'll close now by saying this: Last week was the most intense, most difficult, most problematic, most stressful, most tiring week Ann and I have had in the 18 months we've spent down here after the storm. And the most satisfying.<br />
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Ann and I send out our endless love to Lana Corll, our host for so many of our stays in New Orleans. She not only opens her home to us, she also tosses us the keys to her truck. Her generosity makes it possible for us to continue our trips to New Orleans, and her friendship makes our time in New Orleans feel like we are home. Thanks a lot, Lana.<br />
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My Love to All,<br />
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David/DadDavid Kopra and Ann Drorbaughhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12152319227722283364noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8682065060326846066.post-49080205732951945402012-05-09T14:06:00.000-07:002012-08-18T17:53:48.570-07:00Take These Broken Wings and Learn to Fly <br />
Hello Everyone, and Greetings from New Orleans,<br />
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Ann and I have made two trips to New Orleans since we last wrote you in April of 2011. We spent February here to celebrate and enjoy Mardi Gras with our pals down here, and then went to work immediately after that with Rebuilding Together New Orleans to work on Miss Ruby's home in a far corner of the Hollygrove neighborhood. Hollygrove is a section of New Orleans immediately east of the 17th Street Canal, and many homes took lots of water from the storm surge that stormed up the canal from Lake Ponchartrain. We helped install siding on her home, and made it ready for paint to be applied by a Spring Break group of college students who arrived right after we left.<br />
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Ann went home a few days before I did, and Kelsey was able to make it after that for her third trip to volunteer. Kelsey was a pro from the beginning, gutting a large home with me on her first trip in March of 2007. Kelsey and I got to prepare a large home on Gravier Street for exterior paint, supplied the following week by Spring Break college kids. We also discovered the joys of a shrimp po' boy at the Coye Food Store in the heart of the bleakest section of the Hollygrove. It felt good to do business with a local business in an area that still needs so much help. The woman who ran the kitchen in the back of the store made a mean sandwich for us, and we've returned a few times since.<br />
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Ann and I spent most of March in Olympia without unpacking. I flew back to NOLA on April 5th, and Ann joined me on the 10th. We joined up with Rebuilding Together New Orleans right away and worked on a few homes in the final stages of rebuilding. It has been a great pleasure for us to work on projects that are nearly finished. When we come to NOLA to work, we get plugged into whatever is going on at the time. This trip, we were able to work on homes that were nearly finished. That is a guilty pleasure. To be able to punch-list a home is a privilege we aren't often given, and it's a rare treat to back out of a home for the last time to make way for a homeowner to return.<br />
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<b>Chinese Drywall</b> </h4>
The first home Ann and I worked on was one of Rebuilding Together's 51 Chinese Drywall homes. After Katrina, the Southeast Region ran short of most building supplies, including drywall. To meet the huge demand that couldn't be met in time with American-made drywall, suppliers imported tons of Chinese-made drywall, and for-profit and not-for-profit organizations alike purchased and installed it. Rebuilding Together alone used it in 51 of their rebuilds. The product turned out to be tainted with contaminants that off-gassed toxic fumes, corroding copper wiring and plumbing, ruining electronic components like TVs and microwaves, and making residents sick, driving them from their rebuilt homes. After the storm, after insurance companies ignored claims, after two years in a FEMA trailer, after finding organizations like Rebuilding Together to come and help, after moving back into a newly-restored home, after all of that--they were forced to vacate their home so it could be gutted completely again, and rebuilt completely again. Each rebuild takes several months to complete.<br />
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What else could happen to these folks?<br />
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Rebuilding Together, Habitat for Humanity, Operation Helping Hands, and other organizations all chose to do the only thing they felt they could do--they committed to rebuilding each and every home at their expense. Doing so took down Operation Helping Hands, who, following the remediation work, shut down, exhausted and broke. Rebuilding Together estimates the cost of each rebuild to exceed $40,000.<br />
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One of the Chinese drywall manufacturers, Knauf Plasterboard Tianjin, has entered into a settlement that will provide some assistance to homeowners who can prove their product was used. Other Chinese manufacturers, because they are not subject to US jurisdiction, have simply ignored the lawsuits. Makes you wonder about the benefits of globalization, doesn't it? I mean, if foreign manufacturers are entitled by treaty and law to sell their products in our market, where is the reciprocity if their products cause us harm? <br />
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<b>Our Work</b><br />
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We spent a bunch of time at Miss Audrey's home on Spruce Street in the Hollygrove. Miss Audrey's son suffered a massive stroke, and is now confined to a motorized wheelchair. Ann and I had one of those "Aha!" moments at her home when the work was described for us. Miss Audrey's home is a solid single shotgun home, in pretty good shape, but when a wheelchair is added to the equation, the level of the floors becomes very apparent. Between the back bedroom, where Miss Audrey's son lives, is a bathroom/laundry room that he has to pass through to make it out the side door to his wheelchair ramp. That room was the place where all of the imperfections of the floors came together. The foundation had sagged, and her son could no longer traverse the floors with his wheelchair without Miss Audrey's help. Miss Audrey is several sizes smaller, and a number of years older than her son..<br />
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Our Rebuilding Together's boss' plan was to build a small ramp to get Miss Audrey's son from his bedroom to the bathroom/laundry room level (several abrupt inches below his bedroom). While we took a small break Ann and I were sitting on the floor and it came to us: the span from the edge of the bedroom level to just a few feet inside the bathroom level, WAS LEVEL. In other words, right there at the transition was a foundation sag that had added the drop between the rooms. Instead of building a ramp that acknowledged the sag, if we pulled up just a few square feet of floor, fixed the joists underneath, then installed new subfloor and tiles, voila! We'd have a level floor he could pass through on his own, without Miss Audrey's assistance. After proving our discovery, we all went to work on what turned out to be a really great solution, leaving all of us pleased with the outcome. Several times, Miss Audrey showed us her love with her wonderful lunches. Lunches we've been served so often during our time down here in New Orleans, lunches we've long referred to as Sunday Dinner.<embed flashvars="host=picasaweb.google.com&hl=en_US&feat=flashalbum&RGB=0x000000&feed=https%3A%2F%2Fpicasaweb.google.com%2Fdata%2Ffeed%2Fapi%2Fuser%2F115355642165919368304%2Falbumid%2F5740351838044372497%3Falt%3Drss%26kind%3Dphoto%26authkey%3DGv1sRgCLnUm8Pp9OysNA%26hl%3Den_US" height="384" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" src="https://picasaweb.google.com/s/c/bin/slideshow.swf" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="576"></embed><br />
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Ann has become the Tile Master on any Rebuilding Together team she is a member of. In fact, she is assigned to RT teams based often on the need for someone to do and teach tiling. On this trip, she worked on four consecutive tiling jobs, each time adding her skilled touch and her desire to teach others. Prior to Miss Audrey's job, she hid my errors and finished a bathroom tub surround at the project in the Lower Ninth I was working on before she arrived. She finished that one beautifully, moved on to Miss Audrey's floor, then was sent to Miss Hazel's home in Gentilly. Again, the subfloor there had a transition to the next room, which our RT team removed prior to Ann's arrival. Ann then set new tile on the entire bathroom floor, and another old problem for a homeowner was removed.<br />
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After three very productive weeks working for Rebuilding Together, Ann and I switched gears and joined our pals, old and new, from Kaiser Permanente. You may remember our earlier work with Kaiser Permanente back in January of 2008 (See "A Perfect Job With a Perfect Team") and last April (see "Praise for Jobs Well Done"). Kaiser has been sending teams to the Gulf Coast to help rebuild every year since Katrina, and, while each year includes a new group of first-time volunteers, each year also includes a very happy reunion with a core group of volunteers who now come on their own dime to join the effort. Between these now-named Repeat Offenders (a very apt name for a very lively group), the Project Leaders (who were volunteers the previous year and were chosen as official team leads based upon the success of their earlier experience and the size of their hearts), and the new volunteers, this group of very special people came together in New Orleans to throw themselves into the most challenging projects they can get HandsOn New Orleans to throw at them. They honor us by including us in their work and the fun that takes place after work.<br />
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Ann and I were asked to help with the team KP sent to Miss Doris Johnson's home in Gentilly. Miss Doris' home took 4 feet of water when the floodwalls on the London Avenue Canal failed. We came to help Miss Doris because she'd given all of her money to a contractor that not only failed to finish, but returned to sever the wiring above her new electrical panel when she refused to give them more money than the deal called for. Our team set to making her second floor livable for her granddaughter and great-grandchildren. Ann, Teri and Lisa went to work on the bathroom tile, and the rest of us went to work in the other rooms, dead set on finishing and/or fixing walls and trim. Her kitchen and laundry room had been drywalled, but not mudded or taped. In the other rooms, we removed and replaced battered paneling, rotten or missing trim, and then completely repainted walls and trim. At the end of our three days there, the place was ready for the electricians to finish their work. We arrived at Miss Doris' home a group of strangers, and left a team of friends.<br />
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On Wednesday afternoon, John Edmiston, the KP leader and heart-and-soul of this on-going KP effort here in NOLA, arranged for all members of the group to come together at Success Preparatory Academy, a charter school here in NOLA. At John's direction, KP purchased 40 new Specialized brand bikes of various sizes. Each teacher selected 2 students that best epitomized the spirit of effort, determination, and commitment that Success Prep seeks to instill in every student, and those students then joined their parents for a ceremony where they were awarded one of those bikes. We all got to spend the afternoon in small teams assembling all of these bikes, and KP volunteers were then each individually paired up with a student and his/her parents to select the bike, get a helmet and lock, and go outside to try the bike out, get pictures taken, and generally bask in the praise bestowed on them by all of us. It was an incredibly fun afternoon for all of us, and one I'm pretty sure won't soon be forgotten by those smiling kids.<embed flashvars="host=picasaweb.google.com&hl=en_US&feat=flashalbum&RGB=0x000000&feed=https%3A%2F%2Fpicasaweb.google.com%2Fdata%2Ffeed%2Fapi%2Fuser%2F115355642165919368304%2Falbumid%2F5740626009484034257%3Falt%3Drss%26kind%3Dphoto%26authkey%3DGv1sRgCJeip476v8S06QE%26hl%3Den_US" height="307.2" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" src="https://picasaweb.google.com/s/c/bin/slideshow.swf" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="460.8"></embed><br />
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We followed up that Wednesday with a wee bit of karaoke at Kajun's Pub on St. Claude Avenue. I went by Kajun's later that week to thank them again for their hospitality, and told them I hoped our beverage bill helped pay the rent for the month. "Oh, yeah, it did that, alright", was the bartender's reply. Those KP folks know how to light up a room.<br />
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Finally, on Friday, John arranged for all 4 of our KP work crews to come together one last time to work on a community garden being built in the Holy Cross neighborhood in the Lower Ninth. The garden sits on a side lot next to the home of Miss Arletta Pittman, and she had dedicated it to the senior citizens of her neighborhood. As we had become accustomed to doing throughout the week, the team all found their individual tasks and set about to accomplish the whole project in one very warm day. Even though it was Friday, the last of their 5 workdays, and even though it hit 90 degrees and was pretty humid, the team seemed stronger and more full of energy than ever before. By then, all of these strangers had become friends, and the day breezed by in gales of laughter, sweat, and dirt. Then, with a final goodbye dinner that evening, where we all got to say a bit about what we'd seen and done, and talk about the people we'd met, it was over. A very fine week with a very tight group of talented, good-hearted, and very hard working folks. And now the circle expands to include all the new folks, now veterans. <br /><embed type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="https://picasaweb.google.com/s/c/bin/slideshow.swf" width="460.8" height="307.2" flashvars="host=picasaweb.google.com&hl=en_US&feat=flashalbum&RGB=0x000000&feed=https%3A%2F%2Fpicasaweb.google.com%2Fdata%2Ffeed%2Fapi%2Fuser%2F115355642165919368304%2Falbumid%2F5740631905873074833%3Falt%3Drss%26kind%3Dphoto%26authkey%3DGv1sRgCOGFgOivmLblXw%26hl%3Den_US" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer"></embed>
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These past few trips have included a bit of a Magical Mystery Tour for me. Added to all of the work and the fun and the NOLA friends we've made along the way, I've experienced this accompanying nostalgia for the early days of our work here in New Orleans. Every job we've worked on has included this alternate reality for me, where I remember so well our earlier work for homeowners long since returned home, work accomplished alongside volunteers and dear friends no longer with us in New Orleans, 4 minute showers (OK, 8 minute showers when shared with Ann) in our outdoor showers at our beloved and only true bunkhouse on First and Dryades, and community meals and after-meal beers at Igor's with some of the finest people I'll ever know. Working alongside our friends from Kaiser Permanente opens these floodgates of memories for me. All the while, I'm so nostalgic for the early days of urgent work, managed by the original Hands On construction staff--Nic, Bri, Amy, and others, and executed by long-term volunteers--Reggie, Chandra, Sean, Eric, Liz, Caliopie, Bill, and so many others, set to the background music of zero creature comforts, little personal space, and even less quiet time. That said, we all give thanks for how much better life is for many New Orleanians now, and we keep plugging away on the homes still left to fix.<br />
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Happily, our NOLA reality now is based upon the incredible generosity of Lana
Corll, our hostess and benefactor, who so graciously opens her home to
us, gives us a wonderful space to live in, allows us to store our tools and work clothes in her home, tosses us
the keys to her truck, and does nothing short of making our continued
trips to New Orleans possible. This new reality is a wonderful one,
indeed, and includes unlimited shower time, cold beers an arms-length
away, plenty of New Orleans charm and hospitality, and more creature
comforts than we have any right to enjoy. Buzzing joyfully in the background is the happiness and satisfaction we, both volunteers and homeowners, have in our hearts and our memories for those early days when we counted on each other so fiercely and helped each other in ways we hadn't always expected.<br />
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My Love to All,<br />
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David/DadDavid Kopra and Ann Drorbaughhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12152319227722283364noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8682065060326846066.post-59527847617826640912011-05-03T09:51:00.000-07:002011-05-03T19:02:53.616-07:00Praise For Jobs Well DoneWe’re home from trip 15. It was short but filled with fun and work. <p class="MsoNormal">We started our trip with a great party- the Grant and Associates 16<sup>th</sup> Annual Crawfish Boil. They cooked 1200lbs of crawfish. 1200lbs! They were fat, spicy and delicious.<span style=""> </span>On Friday we attended the ordination of our friend Lance Eden.<span style=""> </span>It was a nice evening and we got to meet many of The Rev’s friends and family. It was also a chance to fulfill my need to make and wear a really BIG hat.<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjUaHSfhbK1rxaWNjWgLcCXSoIuIfC2egpzqGw1jeqqQIQSQimykJHnBXXMjY0F3f30K7aWkoJB9EatdboQ2mg9cTBVfBw12z_u0E29rfD721h4qDd5R6S4OGgi1wfMyJFDfehZeDwGy2z1/s1600/RevLance.jpg"><img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 164px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjUaHSfhbK1rxaWNjWgLcCXSoIuIfC2egpzqGw1jeqqQIQSQimykJHnBXXMjY0F3f30K7aWkoJB9EatdboQ2mg9cTBVfBw12z_u0E29rfD721h4qDd5R6S4OGgi1wfMyJFDfehZeDwGy2z1/s320/RevLance.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5602534232204419378" border="0" /></a></p><p> </p><p class="MsoNormal">Our work projects were to help build 2 wheelchair ramps with our friends from Kaiser Permanente. One ramp was for a community space in the Holy Cross neighborhood and the other one was for Mr. and Mrs. Sims. It was a great reunion of old friends and a chance to make new friends. Kaiser always brings their A Game. Since we only had a few days to get our work done Dave and I had to split up. We love to work together but it was a chance to share our experience with 2 teams. </p> <p> <a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjpSytwboaFu0q4I-IRY64eh3YgMfvIIaQFT0YfuG7C80c8qIZl3CuGqdiHYAfczYhHReqcIR-pF72mhTYfzIHee8yebWNU0FQvpnrM74Hg6RnVPRlazVMHNf2z6y59Wbn2eGbl-R8Ix4jo/s1600/ramp35.JPG"><img style="float: left; margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjpSytwboaFu0q4I-IRY64eh3YgMfvIIaQFT0YfuG7C80c8qIZl3CuGqdiHYAfczYhHReqcIR-pF72mhTYfzIHee8yebWNU0FQvpnrM74Hg6RnVPRlazVMHNf2z6y59Wbn2eGbl-R8Ix4jo/s320/ramp35.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5602606752985039330" border="0" /></a>I worked with 6 KP volunteers on the ramp in the Holy Cross. We had 4 days to complete our ramp. It was a great team and a fun build. The ramp had a 29-inch drop so that meant a 29 ft. ramp with a switch-back. We had a slow start because of generator problems but it gave us a chance to stain the 500 balusters and break concrete out of the ramp’s path.<span style=""> </span><span style=""> </span>We worked hard and got the job done. The Holy Cross neighborhood is in the Lower 9<sup>th</sup>. There is only one place to get food- a small corner market that also has hot food. There we found the biggest, cheapest po’boy I’ve seen- a 32 inch shrimp for $11.95.<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjltAoTpFP09ejxELBkOXo_JqBkBMPgMP-vbJUB7b6Mja48RcaWjW8j1YTC50CS1yBGW7i00lpd8xjvdrrT1GPB6uIqL5DpykRlvciucHAzVeCcApvltHsTfj1N9Qa9HtgUnDISym2n6_-J/s1600/bigPoBoy.jpg"><img style="float: left; margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; cursor: pointer; width: 172px; height: 217px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjltAoTpFP09ejxELBkOXo_JqBkBMPgMP-vbJUB7b6Mja48RcaWjW8j1YTC50CS1yBGW7i00lpd8xjvdrrT1GPB6uIqL5DpykRlvciucHAzVeCcApvltHsTfj1N9Qa9HtgUnDISym2n6_-J/s320/bigPoBoy.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5602602200514676626" border="0" /></a></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYge3Pn4cyPn0yN8k4KbDZL4YtfkFwbeep3j_5pi3yRKFuEVNbNI6vV_wgWOJw72qVIMCV-SWTY441viSYepORO1czNZYtRewbeNvEUAolXCrzeyTP0AeXOpJZKi4J1h-HvbxK1YrNll6C/s1600/Team1Ramp.jpg"><img style="float: left; margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYge3Pn4cyPn0yN8k4KbDZL4YtfkFwbeep3j_5pi3yRKFuEVNbNI6vV_wgWOJw72qVIMCV-SWTY441viSYepORO1czNZYtRewbeNvEUAolXCrzeyTP0AeXOpJZKi4J1h-HvbxK1YrNll6C/s320/Team1Ramp.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5602601813784614722" border="0" /></a></p> <p>David worked with a Kaiser team that built the ramp for the Sims.They built a long straight ramp in only 3 days. They fell in love with the Sims family and got that great feeling of helping someone who really appreciates the help. They also built a greenhouse for the Hollygrove community garden.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZFfqjWQ4UYEXH4ke8mhhTo67CTKK58DTExdQYx8C7Hz8mB21o6K_5Xap0Gi_ynqRGLjzwrTuyyPb0w4DRbSCiahZEkkGZt6itfzHFuIJi4Pnh3FB1DqcnvY8utGBjfKjKwPX8BBosDb9X/s1600/DaveShawn.jpg"><img style="float: left; margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 213px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZFfqjWQ4UYEXH4ke8mhhTo67CTKK58DTExdQYx8C7Hz8mB21o6K_5Xap0Gi_ynqRGLjzwrTuyyPb0w4DRbSCiahZEkkGZt6itfzHFuIJi4Pnh3FB1DqcnvY8utGBjfKjKwPX8BBosDb9X/s320/DaveShawn.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5602601556164166978" border="0" /></a>The whole Kaiser group came together on Friday to work on several projects for Success Preparatory Academy. This was Kaiser Permanente’s 5<sup>th</sup> trip to help rebuild- both in New Orleans and Mississippi. They always bring a great group of enthusiastic and FUN volunteers. This group was no exception.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:85%;">check out their web site:</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><a href="http://info.kp.org/communitybenefit/html/get_involved/global/gulf/index.html"><span style="font-size:85%;">http://info.kp.org/communitybenefit/html/get_involved/global/gulf/index.html</span></a><br /></p><p><br />We were happy to see some of our friends we met when we worked with Kaiser in 2008. One of the many wonderful things about volunteering is the friends you make. We have lifetime friends that we have met working to rebuild New Orleans. <span style=""> </span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJdVf1Cadc7ZFsAlEJdEp2BTjAoZPl34eLj2PEGu3NBjhioLJXzOUmetP6mSwTaOkZxo1YAOBbdCzEb6ZQ6rFdElfy3LPMoo-hTpWi4qFrZ15UrmMlawLpLnsUwPyM0G67-Z3owyBAOil8/s1600/lanasporch.jpg"><img style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJdVf1Cadc7ZFsAlEJdEp2BTjAoZPl34eLj2PEGu3NBjhioLJXzOUmetP6mSwTaOkZxo1YAOBbdCzEb6ZQ6rFdElfy3LPMoo-hTpWi4qFrZ15UrmMlawLpLnsUwPyM0G67-Z3owyBAOil8/s320/lanasporch.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5602559709891180962" border="0" /></a><em><span style="line-height: 115%;font-family:";font-size:11pt;" > One of those people is Lana Corll. She is our great friend who always makes us feel very welcome in her home. <span style=""> </span>Not only does she provide us a wonderful place to stay in New Orleans, she lets us use her truck AND she generously hosts parties at her home for our fellow volunteers.</span></em></p><p></p><p><em><br /></em></p><p><em>Without the help of volunteers like our friends from Kaiser, many people would not have been able to return to their homes in New Orleans.</em></p><p class="MsoNormal"><em><em><span style="font-style: italic;"></span></em><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfeaIdDg_lhPaTjrwV9EkV0CDVmtKW8OKJUdlKnk8_iNMO0ZNnP0LeUm-jddRREUv5C0Cf2y6QI8AhXPIP7V-7XMPSYU5lb4tIVSqe3pZYL-M2VisXGTK93RBCKC1h3xFyTSckgI6u1yAO/s1600/aloha.jpg"><img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 140px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfeaIdDg_lhPaTjrwV9EkV0CDVmtKW8OKJUdlKnk8_iNMO0ZNnP0LeUm-jddRREUv5C0Cf2y6QI8AhXPIP7V-7XMPSYU5lb4tIVSqe3pZYL-M2VisXGTK93RBCKC1h3xFyTSckgI6u1yAO/s320/aloha.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5602565178193564418" border="0" /></a></em></p><p style="text-align: center;" class="MsoNormal"><em>Kaiser says ALOHA to New Orleans.</em></p><p style="text-align: left;" class="MsoNormal"><em>thanks,</em></p><p><em>Ann<br /></em></p><em><em></em></em>David Kopra and Ann Drorbaughhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12152319227722283364noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8682065060326846066.post-19975849592214870262010-09-13T17:14:00.000-07:002011-05-29T18:29:45.653-07:00Sign, Sign, Everywhere a Sign.Hello Everyone, and Greetings from New Orleans,<br /><br />Ann and I arrived for our 13th trip to our adopted hometown on August 18th. We came to help Rebuilding Together execute their 50 For 5 project to commemorate the 5th Anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. Their project encompassed 50 homes in the Gentilly neighborhood, which is located immediately west of the Industrial Canal that destroyed the Lower Ninth Ward. Curiously, the Industrial Canal did very little damage to Gentilly. The flooding that destroyed large portions of Gentilly came from the London Avenue Canal to the west. The water in many areas of Gentilly was 10-12 feet high, and the destruction, while not as explosive as that done to the Lower Ninth, was every bit as total in many areas.<br /><br />We got to lead a project to help finish the rebuild of Mr. Enox Ragland's home. He purchased his Pauline Street home in March of 2005, just in time to get ready for the floodwaters to top his roof. 5 years later, we helped finish the siding, apply paint, build a porch and stairs, and tile his kitchen counters and bedroom floor, all while he lives in his small, unfinished home.<br /><br />The 50 For 5 Project is the largest ever undertaken by Rebuilding Together, and included volunteers from Rebuilding Together affiliates around the country. A number of very generous corporate sponsors participated, and the project was showered with a lot of media attention, which was especially useful, given that we are 5 years past the storm with years of work still to go. Ann and I are grateful for the work Rebuilding Together New Orleans continues to do, and we are really happy we have such a great organization to plug ourselves into when we come to work.<br /><br />Coming to work here in the late summer, as we've done three times, is a great opportunity to not only reflect and remember the damage and the loss caused by the storm, it's a first-hand chance to live with the same insufferable heat and humidity that thousands of New Orleanians had to live with in the aftermath of the storm. We think we are suffering until we pause to remember that they lived with it on their roofs, and in the Superdome, and on top of Interstate 10, and many did it without food, water, or necessary medicine. These people are tough.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Progress</span><br /><br />Over the four years Ann and I have been coming to work here, a common theme has been how much needs to be done vs. how much IS done. The corollary of that theme, of course, is always how much ISN'T done. On this trip, we reflected quite a bit about what we've seen, and how now compares to then. Every individual story has its own nuance, of course, and for every step forward for someone, someone else has a story of being left behind.<br /><br />Despite injustices and sorrows that can be witnessed and mourned, though, progress is being made here. We looked for milestones, for signposts that illustrate movement, even grudging movement, forward. Here are a few of those stories.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">That House on Jackson Street</span><br /><br />On our very first day here in September of 2006, as our van returned to the Bunkhouse, we passed a home on Jackson street that was nearly completely destroyed. A metal spiral staircase hung from the front of the home, but was no longer connected to the second-story balcony because the balcony was badly damaged. Out front, a sign proclaimed "I AM Coming Home. I WILL Rebuild." That statement, to me, was one made more of faith than cold-eyed reality. In March, when I returned for my second trip, the home had been partially destroyed by a fire, not an uncommon occurrence in abandoned structures here. The sign remained, as did the metal spiral staircase, which was now connected only to its concrete pad because the second-story balcony was now, well, gone. It seemed like a good breeze would finish this home off. One year later, we saw signs of life. A temporary power pole and meter arrived. Siding disappeared from one wall, and new framing appeared. As we came back for each new trip, this home rose from certain ashes, and now is nearly ready for occupancy.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjdTBZVR8tvxjj2em5idaggvK2eG6AoCSg0_voJNaBPHLRae2j5BqVh8IGkHueEmgeidMC0IovdPw5BZpa3B4PW10LioO0SiC1BA8pOwnyT1YVRmDSBhb08GYnUiVTM4zgqU85NJHE6zpIi/s1600/DSCN1497.JPG"><img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 240px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjdTBZVR8tvxjj2em5idaggvK2eG6AoCSg0_voJNaBPHLRae2j5BqVh8IGkHueEmgeidMC0IovdPw5BZpa3B4PW10LioO0SiC1BA8pOwnyT1YVRmDSBhb08GYnUiVTM4zgqU85NJHE6zpIi/s320/DSCN1497.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5518030138855603714" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Carrollton Street</span><br /><br />When you look at the picture below, try to figure out why I took it. It looks like a street scene you could see anywhere. And that's exactly what it is, except for the fact that it didn't look at all like this a year ago.<br /><br />It's the street itself. Newly paved, actually smooth, wheelchair cut-outs at the corners, striped, including a bike lane. Until it was completely torn up and rebuilt last year, it was a boulevard to be reckoned with. The pavement was dangerously interrupted by sinkholes and leaking water lines. The sidewalks were unlike any I have seen in this country, nearly impassable for the bodily-able, impossible for anyone with even a minor physical disability. And we took it for granted. This public works project was a long time coming, and it is, to me, a sign that perhaps, finally, maybe, possibly, the City has figured out how to deliver on one of its fundamental responsibilities to its citizens. New Mayor Mitch Landrieu may not have been in office long enough to be responsible for any of the Carrollton Street project, but it sure got completed at a time that extended his mayoral honeymoon and put the Ray Nagin hangover a bit further back in our memories.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivNAusj8Lum4I1MyEYgp0voNyFh9Nf9QVSQ_GnqT2XGh_ox0JJqxxWkGbfP88GJOp7-SJ6C20YkXaZb_wRIpSb0M3q3Kq6MvA8HZViqVSx49vBwy5eA3xYvnhRNKFNc3EnnImkhyYvCcUc/s1600/DSCN1508.JPG"><img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 240px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivNAusj8Lum4I1MyEYgp0voNyFh9Nf9QVSQ_GnqT2XGh_ox0JJqxxWkGbfP88GJOp7-SJ6C20YkXaZb_wRIpSb0M3q3Kq6MvA8HZViqVSx49vBwy5eA3xYvnhRNKFNc3EnnImkhyYvCcUc/s320/DSCN1508.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5518038577592656274" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Our Own Truth and Reconciliation Committee</span><br /><br />For over a year after the failure of the floodwalls damaged or ruined 80% of the homes in New Orleans, the Army Corps of Engineers stonewalled, obfuscated, or lied (pick your position--there are really only about three to choose from), then finally fessed up to inferior work on floodwalls and levees our tax dollars purchased to protect the city and its people. Levees.org was formed with the mission to hold the Corps accountable and to tell the truth about why and how New Orleans was nearly destroyed. Katrina largely bypassed New Orleans proper. Storm surges lifted and removed floodwalls that were not built to the Corps' stated standards. These floodwalls were designed to withstand surges in excess of those that Katrina delivered.<br /><br />As part of their work, the Levees.org folks sought official recognition and admission of responsibility. Further, they worked to ensure that the true story would be told to future generations. Ann and I got to attend the ceremony at which the official historical marker was unveiled at the site of a catastrophic failure on the 17th Street Canal Floodwall. To many, this effort may seem to be tilting at windmills, an insignificant little marker telling us what we already knew. But, that marker is a government marker, established by the state to tell all of us, presumably in perpetuity, what happened there, and why. And it belongs to all of us.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgA4IGGrNill61R5G13NNu8NK3SyFKESH0L6pfJiArTEFV0Dv1vLeqaXGtdB3PqTtNXO4B_gMcqC2bUH0hN1gCxIw2Ik7_mm6HDUxJ0uaxd3zeWUARt8uadYrxCZGc2Cg9UYPNqCLVbaY86/s1600/DSCN1415.JPG"><img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgA4IGGrNill61R5G13NNu8NK3SyFKESH0L6pfJiArTEFV0Dv1vLeqaXGtdB3PqTtNXO4B_gMcqC2bUH0hN1gCxIw2Ik7_mm6HDUxJ0uaxd3zeWUARt8uadYrxCZGc2Cg9UYPNqCLVbaY86/s320/DSCN1415.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5518038960100955266" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">The Projects</span><br /><br />Several of the public housing projects in New Orleans are now, finally, in the process of redevelopment. And not without a lot of controversy. Like every large American city, these projects engender strong opinions. After Katrina, they were closed, and people were not allowed to return to them, even to those buildings that sustained very little damage. And there they sat, empty reminders of both the failed ideas that spawned them in the first place and the sorrows of thousands of good, if poor, fellow human beings who lost their homes.<br /><br />The new thinking is to redevelop these properties into mixed-income apartments, with some units reserved for public housing, some with rent subsidies for limited-income people, and some for market-rate housing. Streets were daylighted through the properties, reconnecting them with the neighborhoods they belong to, amenities like swimming pools were added, and new buildings replaced most of the old.<br /><br />I don't know enough about this issue and the policies and realities that surround it to say anything more that this: they look great, they represent a physical improvement to the area, and I hope they lead to greater dignity, less human warehousing, and a brighter future for all who live there. They by no means solve every problem for those who lived there before. Indeed, the number of units available to public-housing clients is nowhere nearly equal to the number available before the storm. Further, the designs themselves seem to have come without much input from former inhabitants, or even from any New Orleanians, if only evidenced by the lack of front porches on many units. Front porches are the social center of many neighborhoods in this city, and they seem to have been left out of these new designs not out of malevolence but out of ignorance. Nevertheless, units are opening, and people are coming home. Welcome home.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKyvKqDpGcu3JgZQfjm5SEh1rfZxeM72Q-BQDyfLl753BwaPDFMfGG6NHYsC-Z7pBEa8nFsBAjJ5BgDWrdIkFeDU64p30IQvPcCpb_0T9HyZvRUSJeofolvhxW_CevEjUpRRCaT5MjiDyj/s1600/DSCN1504.JPG"><img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 240px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKyvKqDpGcu3JgZQfjm5SEh1rfZxeM72Q-BQDyfLl753BwaPDFMfGG6NHYsC-Z7pBEa8nFsBAjJ5BgDWrdIkFeDU64p30IQvPcCpb_0T9HyZvRUSJeofolvhxW_CevEjUpRRCaT5MjiDyj/s320/DSCN1504.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5518039517439537170" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhCBdlZUvxRcVFDUVVS_YOOl7XFgJfoED8OraDBO7-73hx8427Qrr9tH7708CabL4xGGNcxTfbNQpt_wJkA4z_3J8EXqhCLFdBshEhjYhZH7Gm6MYCCaHkKz7eesDklG7RnDH6yORh9RSV1/s1600/DSCN1505.JPG"><img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhCBdlZUvxRcVFDUVVS_YOOl7XFgJfoED8OraDBO7-73hx8427Qrr9tH7708CabL4xGGNcxTfbNQpt_wJkA4z_3J8EXqhCLFdBshEhjYhZH7Gm6MYCCaHkKz7eesDklG7RnDH6yORh9RSV1/s320/DSCN1505.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5518039772779750050" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">The Hollygrove Market and Farm</span><br /><br />Throughout the City, vacant lots and blighted properties dot nearly every neighborhood. One of the great challenges facing the people of New Orleans is what to do with them, and who should do it. Dedicated organizations and people are busy teaching citizens how to turn vacant properties into community gardens. With the help of people like Macon Fry, who used to help run Parkway Partners and now works with organizations like Hollygrove Market and Farm, people are learning how to start and operate their own neighborhood gardens. Macon handled the delivery and distribution of over 3,500 pounds of vegetable and flower seeds that have been donated by the Ed Hume Seed Company over the past three years, and that effort continues. When you see a community garden, you not only see a formerly blighted property that is now beautiful, you also see neighbors of all ages and races, working happily together on their project. It's one of those sights that universally raises a smile. There's a lot of vacant property in this city, and I think Macon will take a day off just as soon as it's all put to productive use.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjdoBG8pCX0DobeeUSCn4DQggIN3TfjFR3eh6nFfVUcxx8od9ArKA8RTFjuwg7HJIJH1yeyRAlYN1XMFrpiUIvImmdszfww0TExfwl8vBY8g2cHx-Yx_GTQYyViOILs3J3bmxQx8LRxeZ5E/s1600/DSCN1480.JPG"><img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 240px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjdoBG8pCX0DobeeUSCn4DQggIN3TfjFR3eh6nFfVUcxx8od9ArKA8RTFjuwg7HJIJH1yeyRAlYN1XMFrpiUIvImmdszfww0TExfwl8vBY8g2cHx-Yx_GTQYyViOILs3J3bmxQx8LRxeZ5E/s320/DSCN1480.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5518040171083564610" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">The Falstaff Brewery Apartments</span><br /><br />Back in the day, the good people of Falstaff Brewing made thousands and thousands of gallons of watery 3.2% beer for thirsty workers and high school kids nationwide. Their old brewery sits in Mid City, and until recently was a hulking, abandoned shell. It has now been renovated and converted into apartments, kind of a mini Pearl District of its own in the midst of a recovering Mid City. I cite this as a sign of progress because I had no idea this much private capital could be accumulated to undertake such a massive project to provide concentrated market-rate housing in New Orleans. By itself, it's a sign to me that demand of a normal kind is returning. It's a joy to see such a great building return to productive use, especially now that new NOLA Brewing is in New Orleans, making much better beer than Falstaff ever did.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJjywjLlJ-6HLG1W4Rh17Oiz_ZL_VM6ktbJLF6t552g30bwgLx6ElUwYzOioRpvBPVB6-NzOKlXQYC31d9BtYuIkm5rsHCPb64s7B1X9cHAvQswr9VT1TWMmIu34rcPQ-C2mlVmNVCgMjH/s1600/DSCN1507.JPG"><img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 240px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJjywjLlJ-6HLG1W4Rh17Oiz_ZL_VM6ktbJLF6t552g30bwgLx6ElUwYzOioRpvBPVB6-NzOKlXQYC31d9BtYuIkm5rsHCPb64s7B1X9cHAvQswr9VT1TWMmIu34rcPQ-C2mlVmNVCgMjH/s320/DSCN1507.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5518040453485728866" border="0" /></a><br /><br />So, you see, things are happening. Not always in the order we'd like to see, and certainly not always to the benefit of those New Orleanians still scattered around the country, wishing they could return home but having no legitimate prospect of doing so anytime soon. But progress begets progress, and the winds that are blowing through New Orleans these days by tireless people like Davida Finger, Macon Fry, and countless others who are doing something magnificent every day as they bang away on their nearly-destroyed homes give me hope that maybe, just maybe, we were right about it taking just 10 years to rebuild.<br /><br />My Love to All,<br /><br />David/Dad<br /><br /><object height="255" width="420"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/ncF29t8ThVo&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xd0d0d0&hl=en_US&feature=player_embedded&fs=1"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/ncF29t8ThVo&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xd0d0d0&hl=en_US&feature=player_embedded&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" height="255" width="420"></embed></object>David Kopra and Ann Drorbaughhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12152319227722283364noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8682065060326846066.post-25269898515038501242010-03-03T16:31:00.000-08:002010-04-21T19:36:41.852-07:00The Song Remains the SameHello Everyone, and Greetings From New Orleans,<br /><br />Figuratively, I've been sitting here at this screen for the past 5 months, staring at the salutation, trying to find the inspiration to write. Ann and I were here in New Orleans last fall, and I just had nothing to tell you that I hadn't told you many times before. Rather than phoning-in something just to say I'd written to you, I just put it away. I feel badly about that, because even though the story may have become a bit repetitive when I try to write it, that's only because I'm not very good at this.<br /><br />Here we are, 4-1/2 years past the storm, and 61,000 homes are still officially blighted. If anything, the story here is more urgent and compelling now. Yes, the debris piles are pretty much gone. Yes, a lot of rebuilding has occurred, and many families have come home and life has returned to normal for them. But as you see how much work is left to do all over the city, it becomes clear that time has played a cruel trick on us. It has become so normal to see homes that are not rebuilt that it's sometimes difficult to notice them as the tragedies and sorrow each of them represent. We should be shocked when we see them, but they are so omnipresent that our brains have reserved a place for them in the space where we remember things as they are, and they are no longer unexpected or out-of-place.<br /><br /><embed type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://picasaweb.google.com/s/c/bin/slideshow.swf" width="400" height="267" flashvars="host=picasaweb.google.com&hl=en_US&feat=flashalbum&RGB=0x000000&feed=http%3A%2F%2Fpicasaweb.google.com%2Fdata%2Ffeed%2Fapi%2Fuser%2Fdak98502%2Falbumid%2F5456407851015380705%3Falt%3Drss%26kind%3Dphoto%26hl%3Den_US" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer"></embed><br />On this, our twelfth trip, Ann and I got to work on the home of Miss Denise Henry. Miss Henry's Banks Street home is a double shotgun that prior to Katrina was home to Miss Henry, her brother, daughter, and granddaughter. The area took nearly 10 feet of water from the 17th Street Canal breech. The family escaped initially to the Astrodome in Houston, and then on to San Antonio for a longer stay. Miss Henry successfully navigated the Road Home path, and used that money in addition to insurance proceeds and savings to hire a contractor, who did not do the work and ran off with the money. Rebuilding Together took on her project, and when Ann, Bill Goslin and I showed up to work, the house was approaching the final stages of construction. Bill went to work rebuilding the back entrance to her home, sealing up holes in the framing and sheeting, re-hanging the back door, and building a new soffit above the back door. Ann and I worked inside. Ann got to work with some of the new leaders, showing them how to lay ceramic tile, this time in a very tiny, not square shower that was shoe-horned in under the stairs. Ann and I got to do odd jobs upstairs, hanging and trimming doors, plugging holes in the walls and floor, and building custom trim in the bathroom. The Rebuilding Together team, as always, was organized and determined. By the time we finished our time there, the home was much closer to completion.<br /><br />One afternoon, Bill, Ann and I drove out to the Bayou to visit the home of Mr. Ted White, who is a client of Davida Finger at the Loyola Legal Aid Clinic. Mr. White had a very leaky roof with no apparent leaky spot. We searched the roof and found several possible points of entry, and plugged them with a very effective roof patching material. After the first serious rain, Mr. White reported that the leak had all but stopped. We weren't very happy to hear that there is still a small leak somewhere, but short of stripping the roof off and replacing it entirely, we shot all our ammo doing our patch job. It's 99% better, anyway, and we did what we could.<br /><br />One of our great March pleasures has been that we typically run into the students who come annually from The Juilliard School in New York. During my first March trip 3 years ago, I got to work with these gifted and huge-hearted people, and they bring me joy every time I see them. This year was especially great because one of my 2007 team members, Meredith Lustig, was back as a Masters student and mentor to this year's group. Meredith and I got to frame the bathroom walls at Miss Peggy Severe's home in the Hollygrove, and we had a great time doing it. That group was and is very special to me, and Meredith's million-watt smile took me back to that great week we all spent together.<br /><br />The Saints won the Super Bowl while we were there, and the City was awash in joy. No cars were tipped over and burned, and crime virtually disappeared for a day or two as people celebrated. I heard more than a few commentators boil the Saints' win down by saying, "Now, finally, Hurricane Katrina is behind New Orleans, and life can go on."<br /><br />Oh, were it so easy. But, the Saints did provide an incredible amount of happiness to a City that sure could use it. It was a great pleasure for us to be here for the game and the celebration that followed.<br /><br />In the midst of all the rebuilding, there are people all over the City who go about their daily business of trying to make their neighborhoods and the lives of the people who inhabit them better. One such person is Reverend Lance Eden, who recently left the First Street United Methodist Church to start his own independent congregation in Central City. First Street was the site of our beloved bunkhouse, which was home to thousands of us volunteers over the course of nearly two years. The Rev was assigned to First Street only two months prior to Katrina. It was his first assignment following his ordination. Following Katrina, The Methodist Church hierarchy offered him another parish, outside New Orleans and away from the damage of Katrina. The Rev said no thank you, and went about cleaning the church and serving the people of Central City. Nic and Bri and others showed up from distant cities, armed with water, blankets and other supplies for people in need. Between them and the Rev, a partnership was born that spawned Hands On New Orleans. The Rev talked his superiors into converting the church's Social Hall into the Hands On bunkhouse, and for the next two years, we volunteers called it home, 100 volunteers at a time. Reverend Eden made it our home with his commitment to his congregation and to his neighbors in Central City. In doing so, he performed a loving and generous service to those we were able to help. He also performed an equally-loving and equally-generous service to those of us who came to help. His example and tireless efforts on behalf of his people set the table for us volunteers to share the lives and joys and sorrows of what became our neighbors, our friends, our families away from home. Every single person who has come and labored here knows exactly what I am talking about.<br /><br />And now we have a chance to help the Rev, our Rev, take the next step for his people and for Central City. His new, non-denominational congregation has begun a Building Fund to help them find and acquire a small church building of their own. At this time, they are borrowing space from a small Baptist church which has generously allowed the Rev to temporarily set up shop. Through their own efforts, they have already banked $10,000 toward this goal. They need $50,000 in the bank to establish their bona fides as a serious, if young, congregation. That number is thought to be sufficient to post as a down-payment on a piece of Central City property, hopefully with some structure already on it suitable for developing into their Church and other future structures that would help them live their mission of service to the poor people of Central City. Their goal is to raise this amount by the 1st Anniversary of their founding, which will occur in August of this year. They are already organized as a charitable organization, so all contributions are tax deductible.<br /><br />Ann and I, along with our long-term volunteer partner Bill Goslin, decided to get involved in this effort, and to hopefully bring along each and every volunteer who ever set their head on a pillow in our First Street Bunkhouse. We're reaching out to as many of them as we know, and asking them in every way possible to reach others they worked with, until we've networked our way into contacting every one of them. Ann spent a considerable amount of time getting a non-profit PayPal account set up for this purpose (If you click on the buttons above, that's where you go. Trustworthy and easy.) If each of us made a small financial contribution, in addition to a small time commitment to contact their fellow volunteers and all family and friends who didn't volunteer but have followed the rebuilding effort, we as a team could provide substantial assistance to the Rev's effort to put his stake in the ground and build his Church.<br /><br />To be honest with y'all, I'm not much of a church-goer anymore. But I do go to church when I'm in New Orleans, and that's because Reverend Eden spreads the Gospel in such loving and tangible ways. He does it in the pulpit, with his gifted preaching skills, making his biblical readings relevant to the realities of Central City life for his congregants. It is a gift I have witnessed and absorbed many times. As important to me, he has done it in so many ways outside the pulpit. Defending the bunkhouse and the volunteers from his superiors and congregants when they wondered what this young preacher was up to and when would they get their church back was just one way.<br /><br />As we arrived here for this latest trip, we dropped in for Sunday services with Reverend Eden, and in the three weeks we've been here, we seen him three times in front of his congregation. Seeing what he has already accomplished, I have every confidence that he will lead his congregation to their own church building soon. There isn't much room in their small borrowed space, especially when you consider the size of the Rev's heart.<br /><br />My love to all,<br /><br />David/DadDavid Kopra and Ann Drorbaughhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12152319227722283364noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8682065060326846066.post-10935119216662193512009-05-30T02:17:00.001-07:002010-04-05T17:57:08.301-07:00What Goes Around...<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjrqQS_2vhbgZBbTEN8zrQbqR9pYEN459vyViWGoC8WVcy_Zb8TEO8_v4afBaxdTF_iPde1IiAhWqJpRNRwEKas8JSo5jORroNL26b2z690mTTyZbBN44tR-9fEwFZYWnfbOPxlVgqTRAFt/s1600-h/Team+Nasty.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjrqQS_2vhbgZBbTEN8zrQbqR9pYEN459vyViWGoC8WVcy_Zb8TEO8_v4afBaxdTF_iPde1IiAhWqJpRNRwEKas8JSo5jORroNL26b2z690mTTyZbBN44tR-9fEwFZYWnfbOPxlVgqTRAFt/s320/Team+Nasty.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5343596766082430946" /></a><br />Hello Everyone, and Greetings from New Orleans,<br /><br />It's time to take stock of where we've been, what we've done, who we've done it for, and who we've done it with and been inspired by.<br /><br />In September of 2006, Ann and I made our first trip here to this richly-textured and wounded foreign land. At the time, we naively assumed we'd make that trip, and that trip only.<br /><br />Over the past nearly 3 years, 10 trips and 10 months here on the ground, I've seen a lot. A lot has changed, albeit glacially when you look at the pace of the actual rebuilding. Nevertheless, over that period of time, even a snail makes progress. It's a lot like watching your kid grow. Each day, nothing is apparently changing. Add a few years, though, and wow--what happened?<br /><br />On our very first day at work here, Saturday September 9th, 2006, Ann and I awoke for the first time in our bunkhouse at the First Street United Methodist Church on the corner of First and Dryades Streets. We had no idea where we were. "Central City", I heard someone call it. We wandered around the bunkhouse, meeting people and trying to figure out how this all worked. I walked out to our toolshed to see what it looked like. The first person I met there, whom I assumed to be a boss based upon his apparent knowledge of where everything was located and how everything should be organized (We later found out he'd been there two weeks ahead of us) was a foreign fellow (South African, we later learned) named Reggie Derman. In what I came to understand as Reggie's general high-energy and focused style, Reggie immediately got me involved in the gathering of tools for our job that day. When instructed, I got in the van with a bunch of other strangers, and off we rolled into the city. Our work that day was to gut a large home (I couldn't call it a double-shotgun because I didn't know what that was) on Robertson Street, just off Esplanade. I didn't know that "Esplanade" rhymes with "lemonade" here in New Orleans. All I knew was turn here, see a park full of FEMA trailers, turn there, see an entire block of homes with doors open and windows missing, jump on an expressway, see the Superdome and its huge sign "Superdome Reopening September 25th", jump off the expressway, see a huge homeless camp underneath I-10, turn again, pass empty storefronts, a shuttered car rental agency and an empty car dealership, then turn again, once more, and then once more. The van stopped, and we got out. My head was spinning. Red "X"s painted on every home, communicating messages I had no idea how to interpret.<br /><br />That day I watched and participated in some of the dirtiest work I'd ever done. All the while, I soaked up, and then, like everyone else, radiated the energy that group generated. I heard laughing, loud music, hammers banging, debris crashing from the ceiling to the floor, and wheelbarrows bouncing down the front steps. I wore a Tyvek suit, a hardhat, and a respirator, just like the big kids, and I was doing my best to emulate their work.<br /><br />That's all it took. At the end of the day, I was hooked.<br /><br />I'll speed this up. Caliopie. Jamie and Alex before starting their freshman year in college. Jim and Lindsey. After that, Mr. Gibson's siding project. Sushi. Ann went home. Miranda takes her place at the saw. AmeriCorps NCCC. Amanda. Miss Rose's foundation. Troy came. Brian came. Team Nasty is born. .38 Special kicks ass. Sod busting in the Hoffman Triangle. Nic. Steve Gleason blocks the first Atlanta punt in the Saints' first post-Katrina game home in the rebuilt Superdome. Saints score. New Orleans erupts in joy. Chandra. Prez. Steve. Pam. Beers at Igor's. Emma. Melissa. Jim assures Richard we actually landed on the moon. Gunshots at dinner time on Dryades. Troy and I see the Lower Ninth for the first time. Brian goes home to Alabama. Troy moves to Biloxi to work. I head home. Ann meets Lana Corll at the Houston Quilt Show. Ann returns to New Orleans for trip number 2 and roofs a house. I return in March for my trip number 2. Kelsey comes with me. Mr. Carter's gut project and fried chicken. Kelsey and I learn how to eat crawfish. Kelsey trades kisses on the cheek for roses at the St. Joseph's parade in the Quarter. Juilliard arrives, along with VCU, Appalachian State and Florida kids. Jamie Tam's Dance Party. Davida Finger of the Loyola Law Katrina Clinic helps Miss Rose after Lana introduces us. Miss Peggy's rebuild gets going. Liz leads. So does Miss Jessie's. Sean leads. Bunkhouse Goodbye Nights get tearier. Renee' moves from New York. Reggie leads the New Orleans East Super Gut, and inspires us all by telling us that "Good work, hard work--that's important. But what I really want today is for all of you to do your work <span style="font-style:italic;">with love</span> for this family you will never meet. Leave your love inside this home, and this family will use it to wash away their tears." He was 21 years old. We do 4 days of work in 1 and 1/2 days. Noah. Crystal. Ashley. Hands On New Orleans hosts the Hands On Network National Convention. Geneva tells us all to turn our Hands On shirts inside-out while we are drinking Hands On-provided beers at a Hands On-hosted private reception, to ensure that no one will know we are from Hands On. Alan. Ryan. Aaron. Todd. Red. Buck. Cat. Mary Ellen and her sister Lauren arrive to volunteer for a week. We all work at Miss Rose's, along with JJ and others. Eric stops Miss Rose's 5-month old water leak. I try to stop her $2,000 water bill. Mary Ellen (later "Teacher") and Reggie hit it off. Eddie. Chet. Public Enemy Number 2. I come back on July 31. Wyndham Resorts puts us up for the entire month without charge because the bunkhouse is shut down. Sad days leaving the old bunkhouse. The AB in the ME. Siding Miss Rose's home. Kudi. Jordan. Working to finish Miss Jessie's home. Teacher moves to New Orleans. Ann arrives and shows us all how to tile Miss Jessie's floors. Caliopie and Adam become the first Katrina Couple at Hands On when they return to marry. 2nd Katrina anniversary. We miss (by 5 minutes, when the police wave us through) a wonderful chance to tell President Bush how much we "appreciate" all he's done for New Orleans. Anderson Cooper joins us in Violet, LA with the summer bugs. Back for Halloween. Ann sends full-sized candy bars for the kids on Dryades Street, and Reggie, Teacher, Miranda I distribute them on Halloween night. Miss Jessie's FEMA trailer is bid goodbye, and Miss Jessie moves back into her home. The Hume Family and their seed company send 1,542 pounds of vegetable and flower seeds to the people of New Orleans. UPS ships 'em gratis. Ann, Kelsey, and Stephanie arrive, and we all help Miss Jessie hang curtains and assemble furniture. Miss Peggy feeds us Thanksgiving Dinner made in her FEMA trailer. The Tool Fund is born, and Kathie and Big Al anchor it. Ann and I, with Reggie and Teacher helping, lead a project in January to build the Douglass High School deck with our new friends from Kaiser Permanente. Doc. Nic. Teri. Shawn. Joe. Eddie. John. Edmiston Barriers. Our first real Mardi Gras. Small world as we meet Professor Philip Frohnmayer at our regular coffee place. Bill Goslin arrives again, and the NBA sponsors a number of service projects during All Star Week and we insulate a home in Gentilly under the leadership of Steve ("McStevey", if you get my drift, ladies). Davida asks us to see if we can help a family in Metairie finish up their rebuilding. In 3 days, Reggie, Emily and I complete it for Mr. Pat and Miss Laura, and the concept of The $500 Project is born. Sean and Eric install the cabinets and sink, and the Patterson's have their home back. Duke. Lucy. RIP Lucy. Sarah T. Reed High School in New Orleans East gets an external makeover. One year later, it's as beautiful as ever. Cousins' Creole Restaurant gets a paint job. Ruthie. Hanging with Teacher, Lana, and Reggie with Teacher's class at the Zephyrs' baseball game. Darryl and LiAnne banging it out day after day for United Saints, the Rev's rebuilding organization. People come and go, and come again, leaving their imprint on the lives of the people they serve. Amy. Sean. Erik. Liz. Chandra. Allison. Kristin. Bri. Teacher signs on for another year teaching at Audubon Charter School, and the school celebrates with us. Our son Kevan funds our work, and Baby Ray and Mr. Harold Bellanger's home gets a little help. Their home is the magnetic center of Gentilly. Others returned only after they heard Baby Ray and Mr. Harold had come home. Painting out their orange "X" with Baby Ray and Mr. Harold's help makes my Top 10 List of emotional highs. Gustav. John Jowers drives all night to get us to Baton Rouge from Atlanta. A Lady With a Chain Saw?!?! Road tripping in the Bayou with Ann and Reggie to clear trees off cars and homes. Bringing Jake home after another hurricane. Lana's lower level is completed, and Ann tiles her floor as only Ann can. Ann meets Christo Raines and his fellow Jesuit Volunteers who live across the street from Lana. Reggie and James Gandolfini. Miss Della's home gets tiled as Ann and I get introduced to Rebuilding Together. Kaiser puts $30,000 in to triple-match the $10,000 raised for the Tool Fund. Miss Fern. Ann. Miss Monique. Teacher. Reggie. The Humes send another 1,100 pounds of seeds to Parkway Partners for Macon Fry to distribute. FedEx ships 'em gratis. Back again in February. Our Jesuit Volunteers join Ann and me and do the Franklin Street Mini Gut for Miss Debra. Bill Goslin returns. Miss Pearson's home gets a lot of loving attention from the three of us and Reggie. Juilliard returns for a third year. Miss Antoinette K-Doe passes away on Mardi Gras morning. Todd and I button up the places at Miss Debra's where squatters have broken in. Ann, Reggie, Todd, Niko, and Niko's parents do some work and get Miss Cloud's home removed from a court-ordered demolition list. Mr. Ronald. Miss Wanda. Miss Anne. The faces and the names of people who still need help despite doing what they can to rebuild their homes and their lives. Mr. Hammond thanking God for help from Pennsylvania who saw his story in the New York Times and came to help him rebuild ahead of some FEMA functionary showing up to take his trailer. God Bless Davida Finger. Returning to join Rebuilding Together. Miss Janet's home in the Holy Cross. Miss Alice's home in Hollygrove. Reggie quits his job and joins the team for one last old-school workfest before he and Teacher move to Chicago. Tile a floor. Raise a wheelchair deck and ramp. Reframe a wall and fix the siding. The Finest Microwave Hotdog in the 1600 Block of Hollygrove Street. Rod Rian in the Morning on 104.1 FM, The Rock of New Orleans, live from Houston. Lots of water. Batdorf and Bronson Coffee all along the way.<br /><br />I know paragraphs aren't supposed to go on that long. Thanks for staying with me.<br /><br />On Friday, May 29th, Reggie and I finished up our work together in New Orleans. I was really happy that day. Reggie was with me on my first day in New Orleans, and I was with him on his last. There was something right about us being there, together, as it began for us and as it ended for us. Hopefully, we'll get a chance to work down there together again, but that Friday was the official end. What he's left and what he's taking away from his experience in New Orleans will live on, both for him and for his City. He is a true Son of the City. Someday, it will be my honor to attend the ceremony when he takes his oath of United States Citizenship. Reg, the Federal Courthouse is on the corner of Camp and Lafayette. We'll be there with you.<br /><br />Travel safely, Reggie and Teacher. Good luck in everything that comes after this. You are loved, you are remembered, and trust me, you will be missed.<br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzKE0x7PHcNHbaGEyXhrbiCENLg47iRDNzejyTnqPrMqHdzhup2wvtV1XdJulLJ_IU585au-3hvj1TnbeYZ-EB7mmzQzeVy2tXfonfqKxhwcw4XYSg0ub-7HYHuuqwP-g3bnQCJgAV-T3K/s1600-h/DSCN0220.JPG"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzKE0x7PHcNHbaGEyXhrbiCENLg47iRDNzejyTnqPrMqHdzhup2wvtV1XdJulLJ_IU585au-3hvj1TnbeYZ-EB7mmzQzeVy2tXfonfqKxhwcw4XYSg0ub-7HYHuuqwP-g3bnQCJgAV-T3K/s320/DSCN0220.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5343593785200818946" /></a><br />Go Cubs.<br /><br />My love to all.<br /><br />David/DadDavid Kopra and Ann Drorbaughhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12152319227722283364noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8682065060326846066.post-25004989408663340072009-05-16T08:28:00.000-07:002009-05-18T19:41:19.015-07:00Rebuilding. Together. Again.<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgqn6P76rl9kxXF7PbVa6fAUb3ia6gTqQ3TnyZ2Ydtp9VQEe48_4GAezx2zmd8fqzjoQRJX31o8AJuMW-gH2EDfq9XfdWdA9nXDoHDIZEuL77dxvl6zqDzi_eXlHvXZ0NqCrcy0s5dPgkdx/s1600-h/DSCN1212.JPG"><img style="float:right; margin:10px 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgqn6P76rl9kxXF7PbVa6fAUb3ia6gTqQ3TnyZ2Ydtp9VQEe48_4GAezx2zmd8fqzjoQRJX31o8AJuMW-gH2EDfq9XfdWdA9nXDoHDIZEuL77dxvl6zqDzi_eXlHvXZ0NqCrcy0s5dPgkdx/s320/DSCN1212.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5336816460810131778" /></a><br />Hello Everyone, and Greetings from New Orleans,<br /><br />As many of you know, our last trip here was difficult and problematic in a number of ways. After returning home from that trip, Ann and I vowed to put it behind us and find a way to get back to the work we originally came here to do. I'm happy to report that it seems we've done just that. We joined Rebuilding Together, an organization that is focused on rebuilding Katrina-damaged homes primarily for elderly and disabled people. We've worked a bit with Rebuilding Together in the past, and found them to be focused, organized, and very capable. It's been a very refreshing change to simply show up at the assigned address at 8:30 am and go to work. The tools are already there. The materials we need are already there. The AmeriCorps team is already there. There's a porta-potty outside. There's cold water in a cooler. All we do is walk inside, get our work assignment and go to work. At 4pm, we close it up and head home. In the morning, we get up and do it again. Our kind of gig.<br /><br />This week's work had us on Royal Street in the Holy Cross section of the Lower Ninth, working to finish one side of a double-shotgun home that belongs to Miss Janet and Miss Glenda, two sisters who have lived in that home for over 40 years. The Holy Cross neighborhood is at the southern tip of the Lower Ninth, up against the river and as far away as you could get from the Industrial Canal breeches that catastrophically destroyed homes closer to the breaks. Although the Holy Cross sits on some of the highest ground in New Orleans, homes there took water to the roofs of their porches.<br /><br />These two ladies grew up in this home, and lived there with their mother before the storm. Miss Janet told me that the three of them were evacuated to the Superdome, where they witnessed, "Everything you heard about. It was hell. Rapes, murders, deaths from exhaustion, stress, dehydration. It shortened my mama's life, seeing all of that."<br /><br />Miss Janet never wanted to come back home, afraid of what she'd find inside her childhood home. But her mama couldn't stay away, and one year after the floodwalls failed, they came home. With resources they had at hand, they had one side rebuilt, and the three of them shared it while they tried to figure out how to rebuild the other side, which the sisters would then occupy. Sadly, last fall, their mama died, having been the one who insisted they come home, but never seeing the rebuilding completed.<br /><br />On Mothers' Day, the sisters decided to go see their mama and leave her flowers. At the last minute, Miss Glenda couldn't do it. It was just too hard, this close to completion, to kneel at her mama's grave and tell her they were almost done, knowing she wouldn't be there when we finally packed up our tools for the last time. Miss Janet made the visit for both of them.<br /><br />Their home is very well kept, on a very well-kept street. This is a neighborhood in the truest sense. People know each other, look out for each other, and, dare I say, care for each other. This corner of the Lower Ninth got organized immediately after the storm, and there was never a doubt about what they'd do together--they were coming home. End of story.<br /><br />Royal Street is beginning to look recovered. There is still work going on at a few homes, and there is one derelict home across the street from Miss Janet and Miss Glenda's home, but the paint on all of the others is fresh, and life is beginning to return to normal. Normal, I guess, if you can factor in the loss of your mama after huddling with her in a dark Superdome concourse, protecting her from the dangers and the sights and the smells of death, and then lose her so close to finally finishing the rebuilding of your childhood home.<br /><br />That's what normal looks like now.<br /><br />My love to all,<br /><br />David/Dad<br /><br />Postscripts:<br /><br />1) Ann and I arrived on Saturday. On Monday, our dog Boo went into the emergency room, where the vets recovered a piece of gravel she had sucked all the way into her lung. On Tuesday, Ann flew home to care for her, to administer her antibiotics to fight back the risk of pneumonia from the procedure, and to keep her quiet and warm. We sure do miss you, Ann.<br /><br />2) Last Fall, we worked at the home of Miss Fern Kern. You can read her story in my November 9th entry, Falling Through the Cracks. Miss Fern has been away from her home for a couple of months, living in a convalescent center recovering from a fall. In advance of her return, Ann called Bill Goslin, our pal and fellow volunteer, and asked him to check the house out to see if everything was OK. Bill happened to be in New Orleans on his latest trip. Ann prepared him for the shock of seeing the condition of the structure, which is beyond basic repair. As we've come to expect from Bill, he didn't just fire up the water heater and make sure the fridge was cold. He saw the bathroom, and then brought another long-term volunteer over with him, and they spent days rebuilding the bathroom walls, ceiling and floor. Further, they decided that, with more help and some funds, they could do some wall rebuilding and roof repair throughout the house. Bill asked Amy Allen to see what could be done, and Amy got our friends at Kaiser Permanente involved. The Kaiser folks are arriving this weekend for their latest week of work here in New Orleans. They are going to provide time and money to help Miss Fern live in a bit more dignity.<br /><br />Thanks Ann. Thanks Bill and friends. Thanks Amy. Thanks Kaiser. I love you all.David Kopra and Ann Drorbaughhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12152319227722283364noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8682065060326846066.post-1983618056271667002009-03-20T15:16:00.000-07:002009-05-18T19:59:00.047-07:00Something's Happening HereHello Everyone, and Greetings from New Orleans,<br /><br />Ann and I arrived on February 19th. Once again we're staying in our friend Lana Corll's guest room and driving her pickup, and our volunteers are drinking the great coffee always provided by our pals at Batdorf & Bronson- thanks Lana and thanks Batdorf & Bronson. We are very grateful.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">The Work</span><br /><br />A couple of weeks before we arrived, we heard from our fellow volunteer Bill Goslin. He extended a business trip to Texas with a week in New Orleans before heading back to his family in upstate New York. We love working with Bill because he's a) very talented, b) very motivated, and c) is a great guy with a great heart. Our kind of fellow would-be New Orleanian. We spent a week with Bill (and Reggie on his day off) working at a couple of different sites. Bill just doesn't quit. Between the four of us, we repaired Miss Emma Pearson's home, which was full of drywall fractures that occurred because she had virtually completed the rebuilding of her Upper Ninth Ward home when she received a grant to raise the home several feet. The home got raised, and basically all drywall around the windows and doors fractured. With Ann's and Bill's skill mudding and taping, and all of our brawn sanding and painting, we knocked that job out. I went back last week with Reggie to re-hang all of the interior doors and to prepare the rest of the baseboard and trim for installation. Miss Emma and her daughter Miss Donna spent Sunday cooking an entire Sunday-Mom Meal for us, which we enjoyed with our friend and host Lana Corll.<br /><br />Bill spent his week in the bunkhouse with this year's group of volunteers from the Juilliard School. You'll remember Juilliard from my entries of March 2007, when I had the honor of sharing the bunkhouse with that year's group of very talented and very inspiring students. They have come back each year with a new group, but with an incredible institutional memory of the work and what their involvement means to it. There is something very special about the Juilliard students who choose to join this annual effort in New Orleans. This year's group was no different.<br /><br />Bill, Ann and I also spent the first half of our first day together in Hands On's new tool warehouse. They moved in on February 1st, but most of the tools save for rakes shovels and brooms were still not organized or available. We needed tools, so we decided to jump in and organize. By noon, we'd found and organized most of the power tools and most of the hand tools. Made our work a lot easier after that because we now knew where everything was.<br /><br />That Saturday, Ann and I took a group of Jesuit Volunteer Corps members to Franklin Street to do a mini-gut and clean up for Miss Debra. In 5 hours, they had completely cleaned out all debris left behind by the storm, and had gutted damaged ceilings throughout. These volunteers are in New Orleans for a year, assigned to a variety of full-time projects, but they joined us because they wanted to help with the work we were doing. It was old-school Tyvek and respirators, and they did their work very well. Last week, Todd and I went back to secure a few doors that allow access by squatters and thieves.<br /><br />In between, Ann and I headed to the Lower Ninth Ward to begin a 3-day project requested by Davida Finger of the Loyola Law Katrina Clinic. To get Miss Jeanetta Cloud's home in the Lower Ninth removed from a City-ordered Demolition List, there was a list of improvements that needed to be made to the exterior of the home. Ann and I removed rotten soffit and fascia boards one one side of the house. The next day, Reggie and I cut and primed the new material, and we then installed the new soffit. That Friday, I had a team of 5 people (Todd, Niko, and Emily from Hands On, and Niko's parents, Barb and Jerry, who were in town for a long weekend with their son). Todd and Niko installed the new fascia boards and trim, everyone painted, we repaired two damaged siding areas, and Jerry and I installed roof flashing on two sides of the house. Our work didn't rebuild the home, but we were pleased to hear last week that the court agreed that our repairs were sufficient to move Miss Jeanetta's home off the demolition list for two more months while she tries to move her Road Home application towards closing, after which she will do what she has long desired to do, which is rebuild and move home.<br /><br />After Ann went home on March 12th, I spent time at the home of Miss Doretha McCray, who owns a double-shotgun on the corner of Gallier and Roman in the Upper Ninth. We weren't able to get much work done for her, but Todd, Reggie and I installed a few light fixtures and made functional a half-assed handrail Miss Doretha's contractors partially installed prior to walking off her job and leaving her high-and-dry. When Ann and I arrived to scout this home a few weeks ago, Miss McCray and her daughter Wanda showed us through the home. They paid the contractor to complete her home, and it is nearly complete except the bathrooms don't operate yet (and the tile work is so bad I can't believe anyone would have so little pride that they could call what they did "work" at all), the kitchen has cabinets but no countertops or sink, the once-beautiful hardwood floors lie un-refinished, with the gouges, scratches, paint and other damage that comes from first being flooded and then being left unprotected from construction workers and the ancillary damage they cause in the normal course of their work. Miss Wanda just stood there, in my arms, and cried. She explained that they have no more money and no idea what to do next.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Endgames</span><br /><br />The first house Hands On asked us to scout on this trip was a large camelback double shotgun that belongs to Miss Anne Pinckney, who is living in her FEMA trailer in the driveway of the home her grandfather built on A.P. Tureaud Street. As has become a very common story these days, she used her life savings to hire a contractor to repair her home, which took a couple of feet of water. The contractor did not gut the house, but used the money she gave him to install a couple of doors and windows, and then paint the first few rooms. That's basically it, and then he was gone. The wiring had not been done, the roof had not been repaired properly, the camelback portion (the rear of the house) was open to the elements, with rotten siding and framing, missing windows and doors, etc. FEMA has given her and her cousin until May 1st to vacate the trailer for good. The materials needed to actually repair the home will probably cost in the $50,000 range, and that assumes the labor is free. She has no more money of her own. Hands On no longer does these types of projects, save for their involvement in trying to match up providers with those in need. The bottom line? She is screwed. The truth is, I can see no circumstance that would result in her getting her home rebuilt. When the FEMA trailer goes away, I have no idea where she will go or what she will do.<br /><br />3-1/2 years after Katrina, many flooded homes remain in post-storm condition, and time and the weather are getting to them. What might have been rebuildable/repairable structures during our first few trips down here have in many cases simply deteriorated and rotted beyond repair. Homeowners who are still waiting to resolve issues that are keeping them from getting their Road Home money continue to ask for our help. As Ann and I scouted potential projects Hands On had been asked about, in one case all we could do was to tell Miss Mary Wilson and her son (who had gutted her home himself and was attempting to shore up the foundation) the truth: her home is now almost certainly beyond repair. The roof had been tarped, but the tarp has long ago rotted in the sun and the rain, and the roof and roof frame were ruined. Inside, the water and sun had destroyed large chunks of framing. Below the floor, most foundation beams were rotted away by termites and the elements. We concluded that the only route to providing a home for her on that lot was to knock the house down and start over.<br /><br />Hope has always been a constant here. Residents, despite their financial circumstances, disabilities or other challenges, have always exuded a resilience and faith that things were getting better.<br /><br />When do you quit calling it Hope and start calling it Denial? Many people in this city are, in my opinion, nearing the end of the line when it comes to the possibility they might actually move back into their homes. We volunteers have ridden that tide of hope and done our work with the confidence that somehow, someway, it was all going to be OK someday. On this trip, we have seen a number of instances where it would be a lie to say that things are going to be OK. That's a hard fact to swallow. If it isn't the elements slowly hammering a structure to death, it's inept and dishonest contractors slapping some paint on it and demanding more money to continue.<br /><br />If it isn't that, it's a case like that of Mr. Ronald Tonth, whose home sits on the corner of Forstall and Robertson Streets in the Lower Ninth. Mr. Tonth asked two Hands On Americorps members to come look at his place to see if we could help. They asked me to come along. Mr. Tonth has a full-time job, a wife, children, and mother-in-law that he lives with. In his spare time, he's been rebuilding his home himself. When we arrived to look at the home, I was immediately impressed with the quality and quantity of work he had already accomplished. The exterior was basically complete, and well done. When he arrived, we went inside with him to see what needed to be done. A few rooms still need sheetrock, the sheetrock that has been completed needs to have the seams sanded, there is plumbing work to be done, floors to be installed, cabinets, etc. It wasn't a tiny amount of work left, but it was all doable by volunteers with a bit of money and the proper leadership.<br /><br />Mr. Tonth told us his story: He rebuilt his home on the slab of his flood-damaged home, which like many in the Lower Ninth took water all the way into the attic. His family had left before the storm arrived, but people directly across the street drowned when the floodwall broke. He had nearly completed the rebuilding, including having added a second floor to the home to accommodate his mother-in-law, when squatters caused a fire in the abandoned home immediately behind his home. Much of the work he'd already completed was destroyed by the heat and smoke of the fire that burned a few feet from his home. He hired a lawyer, and after paying the contingent fee, netted about $20,000. The State is paying rental assistance to help his family live nearby. That assistance stops for good in 4 months. This man has spent what he's got and is nearing completion, but is feeling the time pressure and the burden of worrying about whether he'll be finished before he and his family "End up on the street or whatever happens to people when the rent assistance runs out". He's paying the mortgage on his property, and can't afford to do that and pay rent.<br /><br />Here's what he asked us for (his words): "Anything. Any help at all. If you could come and paint a room. That would help. If you could help install flooring. That would help. If you could sweep a floor at the end of the day. That would help. Anything at all. I'm doing this by myself because that's the only way we are going to get this done. I'm running out of time and I'm worried I'm losing my mind. It's hard to balance all this, but it's all on me and I've got to find a way."<br /><br />That man has been at this non-stop since the storm, providing for his family, and spending every minute and every cent he has. As for kitchen cabinets, he has just the sink cabinet because, as he so correctly stated, "If I can get a sink hooked up, we have a kitchen for now". When I remarked that his work on the drywall was really good, and that the walls were going to look great after texture and paint, he laughed and said, "I can afford paint, but I can't afford texture". He has cut every corner he can just to find a way to move his family home in time. My heart hurts for this guy, who has done nothing but work hard to provide for his family, to bring them home after a largely man-made calamity took away every material thing they had, and another man-made calamity burned most of his work as he approached completion the first time.<br /><span style="font-weight:bold;"><br />Our Call to Action</span><br /><br />There is nothing I can do, and nothing I can ask you to do, to help people like Miss Pinckney, who needs thousands of dollars and has no time. Nor is there anything we can do to help Miss Wilson, who also needs thousands of dollars to first knock down her home of 35 years and build a new one.<br /><br />But, there is something we can do together for Mr. Tonth and Miss McCray, and for others like them all over this City who only need a few bucks and some donated expertise to finally get them home.<br /><br />We've asked you for financial help before, and we know the last year hasn't been kind to those of us with investments and savings. But I want to reach out to you again, to ask you to help Ann and me directly help Miss McCray and Mr. Tonth and his family. These two jobs can each be easily completed with a few thousand dollars and some skilled volunteer help. These two families are very close to completion, but might not be able to get the rest of the way without help. These stories are like thousands of stories in this City so long after Katrina. If we all pitch in, we can help some of these folks get over the top and get finished.<br /><br />You can contribute one of two ways: If you wish your contribution to be tax deductible, you can make your check out to Hands On New Orleans and <span style="font-style:italic;">send it to me</span> so I can direct it to these projects. If you don't care about the tax deductibility of your contribution, you can make the check out to me personally. In the former, I will restrict the donation for materials for those specific projects. It adds a bit of bureaucracy to do it this way, but it works. If you make the check payable to me, you don't get the deduction, but I get incredible flexibility to spend when we need to, with no delays or process. Either way, I promise that your money will be used for materials, and for materials only, for Mr. Tonth, Miss McCray, or for other small projects I don't yet know about but will inevitably discover when Ann and I return for our 10th trip in April. You can choose the project you want to contribute to, if you wish, or you can leave it to me to disburse the money where I think it is best used and most needed. <span style="font-weight:bold;">No matter what, I beg you to consider making a contribution, no matter the amount, and <span style="font-style:italic;">send it to me</span> today.</span> Hands On has a number of skilled volunteers scheduled to arrive there over the next few weeks, and the work that needs to be done is urgent. I will personally see that our money is spent for its best and highest purpose, and that we use it to move these jobs to completion as quickly and nimbly as possible.<br /><br />Thank you for giving this some thought. On behalf of those your contributions will help, I am grateful for anything we can do together to help.<br /><br />My love to all,<br /><br />David/Dad<br /><br /><embed type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://picasaweb.google.com/s/c/bin/slideshow.swf" width="600" height="400" flashvars="host=picasaweb.google.com&captions=1&RGB=0x000000&feed=http%3A%2F%2Fpicasaweb.google.com%2Fdata%2Ffeed%2Fapi%2Fuser%2Fdak98502%2Falbumid%2F5312692736216226609%3Fkind%3Dphoto%26alt%3Drss" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer"></embed><br /><br />Postscript: On Mardi Gras, Miss Antoinette K-Doe died. Miss Antoinette was the owner and operator of the Mother In Law Lounge, the first actual rebuilding project Hands On took on. Bill was involved in that project, along with Reggie and several other true believers and early Hands On volunteers. Miss Antoinette had one of the biggest hearts in New Orleans, and the lounge was a magnet for musicians and volunteers alike. After rebuilding the lounge, Hands On enjoyed a special status, and anyone with a purple shirt was golden. We have enjoyed many a Thursday night at the lounge when it was closed but available for band rehearsals. Imagine watching a popular band practice in front of you and a dozen of your friends while you enjoyed Miss Antoinette's red beans and rice. We've had many special times with Miss Antoinette. You can read a blurb about her life and influence on us and the City in last week's Time Magazine at <a href="http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1883364,00.html">http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1883364,00.html</a>.<br /><br />On Saturday morning after Bill arrived, we all donned our purple shirts and headed to Miss Antoinette's funeral. For those of you unfamiliar with New Orleans' funeral traditions, let me just say that Ann and I decided that, wherever we are when we pass on, we wish to be shipped immediately to New Orleans. There's a saying that New Orleans put the "fun" in "funeral". The service itself was joyful and uplifting in a way that, as you sit in attendance, it occurs to you that this is after all how Christian religions teach you to approach death. They've got it right.<br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6umpCH6xsacRMcYfWUKcq1ua_Zo-bqZw1Y4POWjIGxNDI3L8P1Lx-sUtyLysol4HUHidp3r0WHslZEgv4M8dX78c2CrUmb9CMcjWvY0XOOxFenBhZtsdtAKgDHq_gsdF_GbWtfgvFpRgy/s1600-h/2ndLine+018.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6umpCH6xsacRMcYfWUKcq1ua_Zo-bqZw1Y4POWjIGxNDI3L8P1Lx-sUtyLysol4HUHidp3r0WHslZEgv4M8dX78c2CrUmb9CMcjWvY0XOOxFenBhZtsdtAKgDHq_gsdF_GbWtfgvFpRgy/s320/2ndLine+018.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5313787589271215234" /></a><br />Following the service (and you are going to have to forgive me now for being such a novice in the tradition), we all lined up behind the mule-drawn wagon/hearse that carried her body and walked in the Second Line. Second Lines, if I've got this right, are the loosely-assembled folks that fall in behind the formal funeral procession. It's the hangers-on, the neighbors, the folks along the way who, well, just join in and follow what looks like a parade. There's an entire brass band ahead of us just behind Miss Antoinette and we join in, picking up everyone along the way that feels the urge, some with umbrellas, some dancing, some with beers in paper bags, everyone with a sense of belonging. In Miss Antoinette's case, the procession ended at the Mother In Law Lounge, where her pallbearers lifted her casket from the carriage, and hoisted it three times into the air as we wished her home to heaven. And then the dancing continued. Miss Antoinette's father and relatives were Mardi Gras Indians, and Mardi Gras Indians from many tribes joined us in celebratory respect and love for her.David Kopra and Ann Drorbaughhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12152319227722283364noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8682065060326846066.post-80725493220753525272008-11-24T09:44:00.001-08:002009-06-08T18:43:29.989-07:00Planting a SeedHello Everyone, and Greetings from Olympia,<br /><br />I arrived home on November 20th, having spent the past three+ weeks on a variety of projects. While Ann and I were here this time, we got to witness the arrival of more than 1000 pounds of vegetable and flower seeds donated to the people of New Orleans by our generous friends at the Ed Hume Seed Company. This is the second year the Hume Family and their employees made a huge donation of seeds to help New Orleanians. This year, the good folks at Federal Express (thank you Lisa Daniel) donated shipping services and hauled two complete pallets of seeds from the Hume warehouse in Puyallup to the warehouse of Parkway Partners in New Orleans. Parkway Partners then used its volunteers and staff to sort the seeds by type and distribute them to community and school gardens and to other grassroots organizations like the Food and Farm Network that distribute the remainder. Flowers and vegetables grown all over this city in the past year came from Hume seeds and Hume generosity. Parkway Partners has dubbed the coming harvest the "Hume Harvest" in honor of the Hume's generosity. <br /><br /><embed type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://picasaweb.google.com/s/c/bin/slideshow.swf" width="600" height="400" flashvars="host=picasaweb.google.com&RGB=0x000000&feed=http%3A%2F%2Fpicasaweb.google.com%2Fdata%2Ffeed%2Fapi%2Fuser%2Fdak98502%2Falbumid%2F5275679178868498929%3Fkind%3Dphoto%26alt%3Drss" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer"></embed><br /><br />People down there have noticed. Parkway Partners publishes a periodic newsletter and featured the seed donation in its latest issue. After it was published, one reader sent this along to Jeff Hume:<br /><br /><blockquote><span style="font-style:italic;">Dear Hume Seeds,<br /><br />I was just reading my newsletter from Parkway Partners in New Orleans, Louisiana and I saw that your company has, for two years, donated seeds to the gardeners of New Orleans.<br /><br />Thank you for keeping us in mind in such a thoughtful and important way. Of the many miserable thoughts I had during our evacuation from the flooded city during August and September of 2005, one was of all the beautiful gardens here in Orleans Parish. Your generosity really will make a difference here.<br /><br />Thank you.<br /><br />Cordelia Cale<br /><br />(If you are ever down this way drop me a line before you come. I'll buy you lunch!)</span><br /></blockquote><br />Trust me, Jeff, when she offers you lunch, she means it. That's the way folks are down there.<br /><br />Our eighth trip to New Orleans is now in the books, and each one of them has been buoyed by the generosity of others. In addition to the Humes and all of you who have made financial donations to help our fellow American citizens in New Orleans, we've made each trip down here a bit more productive and happy with coffee donations that have been sent by our pals at Batdorf & Bronson Coffee Company here in Olympia. Thanks to Larry, Cherie, Skot and everyone else there who have made sure we've been fortified for each visit.<br /><br />Happy Holidays to you and to your families. We hope 2009 brings you health, success and happiness, and that New Orleans and its people are showered with the help they so badly need 3+ years after they refused to let Katrina blow them away.<br /><br />Our Love to All,<br /><br />David and Ann<br />Dad and MomDavid Kopra and Ann Drorbaughhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12152319227722283364noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8682065060326846066.post-26552278865244184312008-11-09T09:14:00.000-08:002008-11-10T05:38:46.345-08:00Falling Through the CracksHello Everyone, and Greetings from New Orleans,<br /><br />Ann and I made a last-minute decision to make our latest trip to New Orleans. Honestly, the motivation to come now was two-fold: We wanted to be on Dryades Street in our old Central City neighborhood for Halloween to cement our tradition begun last year to give candy to the kids who live there, and Ann wanted to spend some time helping Lana Corll, our great friend and benefactor, finish setting up her finally-restored-from-Katrina-flooding first floor sewing and quilt room. We knew there would be other work for us to do while we were here, but we just didn't know for sure what it was going to be.<br /><br />Awhile back, our teacher friend and New Orleans-transplant Miss Mary Ellen Bartkowski wrote us to engage us in trying to help the friend of a friend who needed some help restoring her home. Miss Mildred asked if she knew of anyone, anywhere, who might be able to help one of her fellow parishoners at Blessed Sacrament Catholic Church. Miss Fern is a single woman in her 80's, living alone in her single-shotgun home which she has called home for 35 years. Her home sustained a bunch of wind damage during Katrina 38 months ago, and was hammered again by Gustav in September. Miss Fern isn't a woman of means, and she is proud but in the humblest manner you can imagine. She is also without any family to call on for help. The closest kin she might have is a rumored distant cousin somewhere in Kansas.<br /><br />We met her on Sunday when Miss Mary Ellen and I went to scout her home to see if there was some way we could help.<br /><br /><embed type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://picasaweb.google.com/s/c/bin/slideshow.swf" width="600" height="400" flashvars="host=picasaweb.google.com&captions=1&RGB=0x000000&feed=http%3A%2F%2Fpicasaweb.google.com%2Fdata%2Ffeed%2Fapi%2Fuser%2Fdak98502%2Falbumid%2F5266796329366386481%3Fkind%3Dphoto%26alt%3Drss" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer"></embed><br /><br />The pictures tell a little bit of the story of the current condition of her home, but, like all pictures I have sent to you from New Orleans, they are two-dimensional and don't show the true extent of the damage in any useful manner. Even if you were here in New Orleans, if you drove by her home, you would think everything is alright. Inside, you would find the truth.<br /><br />In the pictures, the window you see that is blue-tarped blew out during Katrina on August 29th, 2005. The tarp is clearly not the original tarp. They don't survive in this climate for that long. Someone has replaced it for her, at least once. The black mold you see in two pictures is in her bathroom, which was open to the sky due to roof damage, which lets the rain in and feeds the mold. Unrelated to the storms, the frame of her home is so termite-damaged that it's very difficult to find places for nails to hold. As a result, there are holes in the walls, and the windows are falling out.<br /> <br />Miss Fern is occupying this home, and has been since she returned from her evacuation to Shreveport after Katrina. Her fellow congregants at Blessed Sacrament Catholic Church have looked after her, led by Miss Mildred, the mother of Miss Mary Ellen's fellow teacher. The Archdiocese of New Orleans has suffered hard times since the storm, and the Archbishop has decided to close parishes to save money. Blessed Sacrament was closed in August. If you want to open a window on the condition of the Catholic Church down here in a seriously-Catholic stronghold, start here:<a href=" http://www.nola.com/news/index.ssf/2008/08/blessed_sacrament_parishioners.html"><br /><br />http://www.nola.com/news/index.ssf/2008/08/blessed_sacrament_parishioners.html</a><br /><br />After Blessed Sacrament was closed, her parishoners were "assigned" to St. Henry's, which was itself subsequently closed two Sundays ago. So, Miss Fern's congregation is scattered to the wind now, and Miss Mildred is worried that they won't be there to help continue to keep the lights on for her, not to mention come together to help her make her home livable again. But there Miss Fern was, living in an open-to-the-elements home. And she isn't going anywhere. There is no place for her but her home as far as she is concerned. After Katrina, her home was tagged "uninhabitable" by the City inspectors. When she returned, she just took the sign down and moved back in.<br /><br />In surveying her home to see what we might be able to do to help, I noticed her kitchen didn't have a stove or a microwave. She told me she had a hotplate, but it didn't work anymore. Later, I found out that her hotplate quit working a year ago. She has been eating raw vegetables and living on cold food from cans since then.<br /><br />I am not making this up.<br /><br />Miss Mary Ellen and I went right out and purchased a hotplate and returned to set it up for her. She said thank you, and we went outside right away so as not to make a big deal of it. We stood outside talking with Miss Mildred about the next steps, and we heard Miss Fern from inside the house say through the screen door, "Mildred: Do you want to come inside and see my new hot plate?" Later in the week, Renee' sent along an electric teapot, after seeing Miss Fern's neatly-organized tea bags next to the single pot she used for cooking and heating water.<br /><br />On Monday and Tuesday, Ann, Mary Ellen, Reggie, Cobus (Renee's father, who is visiting from South Africa. By the way, his name is pronounced "Kwibbus") and I got started trying to plug up the openings in the exterior of her home, and to try to beat back some of the mold that is growing in her bathroom and her kitchen. During those two days, we were able to patch several holes, and secure one of her windows, which was getting ready to fall out of its frame due to extensive rot around it. Ann attacked the bathroom mold, and Reggie and I cleaned off her roof and one side of her home, which had been overgrown with vines. Shortly after we arrived, we discovered that she did not have any hot water, since her gas water heater had burned out some time ago. We also discovered that her only toilet was not attached to running water due to a tank leak. She flushed it with a bucket of water. Her refrigerator, which was virtually entirely covered on the outside with visible black mold, also had significant mold inside, and was only cool at best, which caused her milk to routinely spoil shortly after she purchased it. We all stopped at that point and began making phone calls to anyone we knew in the City who might be able to provide a fridge and/or a water heater.<br /><br />The network of people who know each other solely because they came to New Orleans to help is pretty impressive and inspiring. Each of us knew at least one possible resource, and there we were, all on our cell phones, looking for help. On Thursday, Reggie's contact, Woody, who works for the Volunteers of America, called to say he found a nearly-new fridge at the New Orleans Recovery Project warehouse, and they were willing to part with it. On Friday, we picked it up and delivered it to Miss Fern's. It's white, it's cold, and it's hers. They also gave her a new dining table (she didn't have anything) that a church congregation in Pennsylvania had designed and constructed 100 copies of for donation to people in New Orleans who need them. Miss Fern was duly impressed with the fridge, as she commented to me "Glass shelves--I've never seen them before. And "Spillproof"? That's very nice." <br /><br />Back to the house work. Miss Fern had hired a contractor years ago to do some repairs, but we can't find any. She took out a mortgage to pay for them, and we can find that. Among other things, they installed some cheap cabinets in her kitchen, and all of the upper cabinets have since fallen off the walls. Ann invested some time and love into rebuilding one of them and then properly hanging it from an interior wall, which had some unrotted studs. When she showed it to Miss Fern, and told her she could put her canned goods in it instead of stacking them on the floor, Miss Fern asked her "Will this cabinet stay on the wall?" Later, Ann found she had stacked her cans on a counter top instead. She was used to the workmanship of her contractor. She didn't yet know that Ann knew better.<br /><br />During the week, we called upon other help. Bri O'Brien came with Todd and Niko, two other Hands On folks, to continue trying to clean up and repair. The frame of the house is so far gone that there are not many places you can actually attach nails or screws. The window problem was more extensive than we had earlier thought. Cobus and I devised a method for holding them in place with a two-by-four at the top and another one at the bottom. With some luck, we were able to find enough non-rotted studs to attach them to, and voila, they were saved from falling out of their openings. Ann designed a method to button-up the two openings that didn't have windows in them any longer. The tarped opening was sheeted and sealed, and the other opening was sealed up so animals and the wind could no longer get in. On Thursday, LiAnne and Bri came to lend their roof-tarping expertise to the bathroom roof, which had been open to the sky for who knows how long. Todd and Niko returned to attack the mold inside. At the end of Thursday, the work that was needed to close any openings in exterior surfaces was completed, and what mold remediation was possible had been completed. Early in the week, Miss Fern told us that many of the electric plugs in the house no longer worked. Eric Caldwell, a volunteer whenever you ask him and a builder when he needs to pay the bills, answered that call on Wednesday. As he trouble-shot the problem by tracing the wiring under the house, he nearly literally put his hand on the problem when he found burned wiring leading into the last plug in the line that worked, followed by burned wire coming out of that plug and heading to the next plug in the line. The floor beam that the wiring contacted was scorched, and the wiring itself had clearly burned down to the copper. Eric and Reggie pulled new wiring, and the problem was solved.<br /><br />As of now, we are still looking for a gas water heater so we can give her hot water. I was able to fix the toilet, and that now works again. Our team killed what mold we were able to kill, although without gutting the house, getting rid of it isn't possible. We just labored to beat it back for the time being.<br /><br />When we realized the house is beyond structural repair without totally rebuilding it, we shifted gears to triage repairs, and also to see if we could find an organization that might be able to provide her different housing. Lana Corll grabbed this one by the horns, and spent a good chunk of her week on the phone with various groups to seek help. At the end of the week, Davida Finger of the Loyola Law Katrina Clinic had been able to get a Catholic Charities case worker assigned to the case. We're not sure just where this is going right now, since Miss Fern told Miss Mildred this week that she had decided she was just going to stay put, even after being told her home really couldn't be repaired any more than we had been able to repair it this week. "That's alright", she said. "I've been here 35 years, and I'm alright."<br /><br />Miss Fern is a clear-eyed, reasonably healthy woman in her 80's. She doesn't seem depressed, nor does she seem crazy. Further, she probably wouldn't be very happy to know I am writing to you about her. But, when you see the condition of her home, when you grasp just how close it actually is to collapsing, when you realize that there's nothing you can do to repair it short of totally rebuilding it, and in the face of all this she is placid and OK with it all, your heart can't help but hurt.<br /><br />I was really proud to work with the group that threw themselves into this project. And not just showing up to work at the home. Hitting the phones, calling each other at night to keep trying to see what we had found out and what we were still trying to find out, and staying with our work until we found whatever resolution we could was the way the week went. Each person did what they could, and between us all, we accomplished a lot, although every one of us will tell you we didn't even scratch the surface of what this woman really needs to live in dignity. I've been humbled many times down here to see how little so many people in this City have and the conditions their means force them to take for granted, but Miss Fern's home topped it all. <br /><br />Juxtapose this with post-election Talk Radio, which I often tune into out of a combination of wanting to hear what that side is saying to its listeners and simple morbid curiosity. On Wednesday, I heard one of these people talk in absolute certainty (as they always do) that the "Income Redistribution" our new President will ruin the country with is nothing more than taking from those of us who care enough to work and giving it to those of us who are lazy and unwilling to work. This guy had the ignorance and cruelty to suggest that poor people (every single one of them) are poor because they just don't want to work as hard as those of us with means.<br /><br />I'll pass that along to Miss Fern.<br /><br />My love to all,<br /><br />David/DadDavid Kopra and Ann Drorbaughhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12152319227722283364noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8682065060326846066.post-63764623541553468212008-09-20T10:02:00.000-07:002008-09-22T20:19:16.475-07:00Wrapping Up Our 7th TripHello Everyone, and Greetings from Houston,<br /><br />Ann and I are on our way home from our latest trip to New Orleans. Our last week, as has become our tradition for some reason, was a great one. After working with Reggie out in the Bayou helping with trees, we were recruited to help on a home-rebuilding project by a pal at Rebuilding Together. This organization is working in New Orleans to specifically assist elderly and disabled homeowners who do not have the resources to complete the recovery of their homes. Ann, Reggie and I went off to Miss Della's home on Louisiana Parkway Drive, in the heart of the Broadmoor neighborhood of New Orleans. Broadmoor is a very large neighborhood that organized its citizens early and fought the City back when Mayor Nagin suggested that Broadmoor be razed in its entirety and turned over to greenspace. They said thanks, but no thanks, and the area has been a web of activity ever since. Miss Della is a 70-something wheelchair-bound woman living alone in her FEMA trailer next door, and Rebuilding Together has nearly completed its work restoring her home. The three of us were asked to tile her kitchen floor, so we cleaned the subfloor, installed the Hardibacker underlayment, and then laid about half the tile that day. On Friday, Ann and I went back and were joined by two volunteers, Maggie and Mary. Neither had laid tile floors before, so we showed them what we knew and then helped them finish it. By 1pm, we were completely finished, and the result is a kitchen floor ready for grout. This was a really good gig for Ann, Reggie, and me, and it reminded us of so many projects we've worked on with Hands On. Hands On too is gearing up to do more of these types of projects now that they are an independent affiliate of the Hands On Network. Having both of these great organizations scaring up these projects means we'll be busier than ever on our next trip down there in February. The chance to help someone get back into their home 3 years after the storm isn't nearly as rare as we hoped it would be, but there it is, and we're going to keep coming back as long as we can find this work in this wonderful city we call our Home Away From Home.<br /><br />My Love to All,<br /><br />David/Dad<br /><br />P.S. Update on the Tool Fund: For those of you who gave so generously to the Tool Fund, I promised to keep you up to date on our progress towards finding a matching sponsor. I'm very happy to report that Kaiser Permanente not only agreed to match the $10,000 you gave, they matched it 3-for-1 with a $30,000 gift to Hands On New Orleans. Thanks to all of you, from Kathie and Al Faccinto, who got this whole effort started with a very generous seed donation, to all of you who followed and got us to our $10,000 starting goal, and finally to our pals at Kaiser Permanente, who saw what we do with those tools, did it with us, and backed up their efforts and commitment with such a generous matching donation. Tools and volunteers are the lifeblood of our effort to rebuild this very American city of ours, and I'm very grateful to all of you who have joined this effort. Thanks again.David Kopra and Ann Drorbaughhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12152319227722283364noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8682065060326846066.post-49979032317723783312008-09-17T06:29:00.000-07:002008-12-08T16:53:53.312-08:00Road Tripping in the BayouHello Everyone, and Greetings from New Orleans and Places Beyond,<br /><br />We've been on an odyssey around the state to cut trees wherever we were sent. Ike hit the Houston/Galveston area directly, but it was such a huge storm that all of the lower parishes of Louisiana were inundated by the tidal surge and the winds that brought it inland. As information seeped in, there were organizations and individuals far-and-wide that collected names of neighbors who needed help. Thousands of trees down on homes, across driveways, in the way of powerline repairs, and so forth. Ann and I took Valerie, a young volunteer who found us via the State's volunteer hotline, and we headed off to Lafayette with our gloves, water, gasoline, and chainsaws. We were dispatched by United Way Acadiana, and worked usually as a team of three at individual homes in the area. Boy, oh boy, is that area Mosquito Country these days. They were plentiful, big, and aggressive. All of that wet ground made for one big mosquito bog across the entire region. <br /><br /><embed type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://picasaweb.google.com/s/c/bin/slideshow.swf" width="600" height="400" flashvars="host=picasaweb.google.com&captions=1&RGB=0x000000&feed=http%3A%2F%2Fpicasaweb.google.com%2Fdata%2Ffeed%2Fapi%2Fuser%2Fdak98502%2Falbumid%2F5246001699144108241%3Fkind%3Dphoto%26alt%3Drss" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer"></embed><br /><br />At the end of the week, we were sent to the Houma/Raceland area to do the same tree removal work. Reggie joined us for these days, and we cleared a pretty big list of mostly older folks who didn't have the ability to do this work themselves.<br /><br />I'll tell you, there's no American poverty like Deep South American poverty. We met some really nice folks out in the rural areas we have visited over the past couple of weeks, and we've been humbled by how little so many of those people have. Every stop along the way, though, people were welcoming, tripping over themselves to make sure we were fed and watered. On our first evening in Lafayette, we worked until dusk cutting trees out of Miss Edna's yard. Miss Edna is an 82-year old widow who had been gathering branches by herself, and I asked her to please let us do it. As the sun went down, we hadn't finished, and I knew she was waiting for us to leave so she could come back out and continue working. I told her that we needed to quit because it isn't very safe to operate a chain saw in the dusk hours, but that we weren't going to leave if she was going to come back out and drag branches herself. She laughed because she knew she'd been busted. We went home, and came back the next morning with a few AmeriCorps members to finish. She smiled at me when we arrived, and told me "I waited. I told you I would. I almost couldn't stand it, you kids working so hard while I didn't. But I waited, Baby."<br /><br />I love it when women call me Baby.<br /><br />On a job in Breaux Bridge, we jumped out of the truck and began unloading our saws. The woman we were helping saw Ann and I each grab our saws, and she was taken aback. Her words, exactly: "A lady with a chain saw?" I just smiled. Yep, that's a lady alright, but that lady is Ann. What a laugh we had later. People just don't know until they've worked with Ann.<br /><br />Back to New Orleans for the rest of our third week here. More later.<br /><br />My love to all,<br /><br />David/DadDavid Kopra and Ann Drorbaughhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12152319227722283364noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8682065060326846066.post-33588290502016614792008-09-08T05:05:00.000-07:002009-09-05T20:07:42.229-07:00Gustav Hits Hard, But Largely Spares New OrleansHello Everyone, and Greetings from New Orleans,<br /><br /><embed type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://picasaweb.google.com/s/c/bin/slideshow.swf" width="600" height="400" flashvars="host=picasaweb.google.com&captions=1&RGB=0x000000&feed=http%3A%2F%2Fpicasaweb.google.com%2Fdata%2Ffeed%2Fapi%2Fuser%2Fdak98502%2Falbumid%2F5243298093837204289%3Fkind%3Dphoto%26alt%3Drss" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer"></embed><br /><br />Gustav hit Baton Rouge pretty hard. We watched it from inside our makeshift bunkhouse. 95 mph winds trimmed the trees there with fury. The power was off in most of the city and outlying areas for a couple of days, after which it came back on in small areas, and slowly at that. Baton Rouge was largely spared by Katrina, so its 100-year old trees hadn't had a recent trimming. As a result, they came down by the thousands in Baton Rouge and all across the lower part of the State, and made a real mess. Add to that the fact that not only did residents of Baton Rouge not evacuate (no one expected the storm to hit them very hard at all), many people from lower parishes, including Orleans, evacuated themselves TO Baton Rouge. This made for a traffic nightmare as one or two gas stations came back to life, and everyone (and I mean EVERYONE) hit the streets to fill up (or try to).<br /><br />After helping to set up a Search and Rescue database of qualified volunteers for the government folks we were working for, Ann and I went out with Nic and Todd and a chainsaw to remove a tree from a home outside town. On Thursday, Ann and I were sent on a road trip to scout the Houma area, which is located about 50 miles southwest of New Orleans. That area was really hammered, and since New Orleans was largely spared significant damage, Hands On may be setting up some volunteer effort down there. Then, we returned to New Orleans. There's a lot of debris to clear, but the floodwalls all held, and the city was coming back to life pretty quickly. Some power was already back on, and the utility crews worked furiously through the weekend to keep it coming back on. While it's an understatement to say that the people of New Orleans are significantly relieved, it's equally true that they are weary and broke. The evacuation was pretty impressive--1.9 million people participated (said by many in the media to be the largest evacuation in American history), and it went pretty smoothly until the very end, as people tried to return home. Ray Nagin kept New Orleans closed while neighboring parishes reopened, and Nagin had the NOPD stop cars on I-10 as they tried to enter Orleans parish on their way through to Jefferson Parish next door). That caused a shitstorm that blemished what was otherwise a very well planned and extremely well executed evacuation. People from Orleans Parish were told to turn around and wait another day. Kids crying, parents dead tired, out of money, out of gas, out of food, out of water, out of patience. Nagin gave up a couple of hours later, and the repopulation went on without a hitch after that.<br /><br />Now, with Hurricane Ike on its way into the Gulf, with New Orleans again inside the probability arc, people are worried. Ann and I can't help but wonder if many of them simply aren't going to leave if another evacuation is called for this week. After all, they already spent a bunch of money they didn't have to get out for Gustav, then Gustav fortunately turned out to hit New Orleans with a much smaller punch than expected (hammering nearly everyone else in the lower part of the State). It just seems like human nature might tell them to go ahead and stay. Whether they do or whether they don't, here's hoping Ike turns around and heads off aimlessly to the sea.<br /><br />We're off to Lafayette with a chain saw crew today, and planning to be there all this week. Assuming Ike doesn't chase us out, we ought to be plenty busy helping those folks dig out.<br /><br />My love to all,<br /><br />David/DadDavid Kopra and Ann Drorbaughhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12152319227722283364noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8682065060326846066.post-12100901654730758272008-09-02T05:41:00.000-07:002008-09-08T05:27:27.818-07:00Gustav Day 2Hello Everyone, and Greetings from Baton Rouge,<br /><br />Just a quick update on what's going on down here. Ann and I flew to Atlanta on Sunday (as close as we could get) to help with the initial response to Gustav. John Jowers, our pal who formerly worked for Hands On Network in Atlanta, and his pal Sherrie met us at the airport, and we all hit the road at 11:30 pm for the drive to Baton Rouge. Road Trip!<br /><br />We arrived in Baton Rouge at sun-up Monday morning, and met Kellie Bentz, Hands On New Orleans' Executive Director, at GOHSEP, the Governor's Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Planning Center here in Baton Rouge. As the storm moved into the Baton Rouge area Monday afternoon, we hunkered down at our makeshift bunkhouse at a local rehab center. On Monday evening, we magically caught up with Lana Corll's pickup truck, which she has so generously loaned us time and time again. This time, it was already in Baton Rouge, having been borrowed by a friend of hers for last weekend's LSU football game. We then went back to GOHSEP to begin the process of vetting potential search and rescue teams who have called to volunteer their services. We'll be on that until they are all deployed.<br /><br />We're fine up here. A big blow came through here for sure, with lots of trees and signs blown down, and a bunch of related property damage, but other than no electricity anywhere here (except for GOHSEP, which has giant generators running all over campus), Baton Rouge is OK. We're just starting to get detailed reports from parishes in Southern Louisiana, but things look far worse down there. Cajun Country got hit pretty hard. The levees in New Orleans all held up.<br /><br />More later.<br /><br />My love to all,<br /><br />David/DadDavid Kopra and Ann Drorbaughhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12152319227722283364noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8682065060326846066.post-73430310659217078802008-06-23T15:59:00.000-07:002008-12-20T14:55:57.727-08:00I Know What It Means To Miss New OrleansHello Everyone, and Greetings from Olympia,<br /><br />Our last week of this trip to New Orleans was our best one.<br /><br /><embed type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://picasaweb.google.com/s/c/bin/slideshow.swf" width="600" height="400" flashvars="host=picasaweb.google.com&RGB=0x000000&feed=http%3A%2F%2Fpicasaweb.google.com%2Fdata%2Ffeed%2Fapi%2Fuser%2Fdak98502%2Falbumid%2F5215916532210476993%3Fkind%3Dphoto%26alt%3Drss" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer"></embed>Davida Finger of the Loyola Law School Katrina Clinic hooked Ann and me up with a family in Gentilly who used their insurance money to rebuild the 5-foot-flooded first floor of their home, but ran out of money before they could finish the upstairs. Miss Ray and Mr Harold Bellanger are in their 80's, and live with their daughter and her son and 18 year old nephew, who just had a kidney removed. The Road Home money hasn't trickled down to Miss Ray and Mr Harold yet, so they all have been scraping wallpaper off the upstairs walls by hand, all of which were damaged when the winds tore off part of their roof. Our son Kevan kicked in a very generous chunk of money for materials, and Ann and I got to lead a team of volunteers to finish the wallpaper removal, texture the walls in preparation for paint, and level and repair the sagging subfloor in the upstairs hall. Ann and I spent Monday pulling up and disposing of the carpet and pad in the hallway, and got a look at the subfloor underneath. It had a high peak that ran down the entire center of the hall, and had several very squishy spots at the sides. On Tuesday, Reggie and several other volunteers joined us to get to work. While Ann and I shimmed and strengthened the floor, they all set about to remove the wallpaper in the other rooms. Miss Ray and Mr Harold's daughter Tania and her son Reggie had spent a lot of the previous week removing all of the wallpaper in the hall so it would be done when we got there to repair the floor. We purchased a wallpaper-removing chemical and special scrapers, and took it along with safety gear to them the week before, and they've been at it ever since. We spent all day Tuesday and Wednesday with this work, and went home Wednesday with the floor completely leveled and set with underlayment in preparation for new flooring, and the walls clear of wallpaper and ready to texture. On Wednesday, we were joined by Eric and Steve, two old Hands On volunteers who now live and work full-time in New Orleans. They provided the expertise to skim-coat the walls to make them smooth in preparation for texture. On Thursday, Nic Bonsell came along with us to show us how to use a texture gun and how to "knock down" the texture once it was applied. I asked a new regular volunteer, Bill, to learn the texture gun, since he was planning on spending the entire summer here to work. By 2pm, we were all finished, and the walls are now ready for paint.<br /><br />On Friday, Ann and I went back to complete little stuff. We reinstalled the door trim we had to remove in the hall, installed transition strips between the hall and the rooms, and generally cleaned up. We also got to give Miss Ray and Mr Harold a $200 Home Depot gift card as a jump-start on their paint and flooring, compliments of our son Kevan. I had the honor of bringing along a gallon of white paint to finally cover up the orange "X" that was painted on the front of their house. I asked Miss Ray and Mr Harold if they would like to help, and they each took their turn covering up the X that was painted by searchers days after the storm. There we were, 1020 days after the X was painted, finally putting it to rest. It took 3 coats of paint, but I wasn't packing up until none of it could be seen on that home.<br /><br />For the record, here's what the X read, clockwise from the top:<br /><br />9-5 (Searched on 9/5/05)<br />- (No hazards located)<br />0 (No bodies found inside)<br />AE (Team that searched)<br /><br />Now the front of their home just says "4532" (their house number). A great way to end our 6th trip down here. Mr Harold told me that they had been contacted by lots of neighbors before they returned, asking if they were coming back. All of those neighbors said that if Miss Ray and Mr Harold weren't returning, neither were they. The Bellanger home is that home on Feliciana Street that serves as the magnet for others who weren't sure they would return. Today, about half of the homes in their vicinity are either occupied or in the process of being repaired. Lots of Xs are still painted on the outsides of homes here in the shadow of the London Avenue Canal. Hopefully, that white spot on the outside of Miss Ray and Mr Harold's home will serve as another reminder to their neighbors that they too can come home again.<br /><br />Mary Ellen Bartkowski and Reggie Derman have continued, for some reason unexplainable to us, to open their home to us when we visit, and to treat us like family. We are so grateful to them for their generosity and love. It seems so long ago that the three of us worked together on Miss Rose's siding way back in March of 2007, which led to Mary Ellen leaving her Chicago home to teach at a New Orleans public school.<br /><br />I've found myself nostalgic in many ways during this past trip. Ann and I invited our pals for a last-evening beer at Igor's, our old hangout on St. Charles Avenue, near our beloved old bunkhouse at the First Street United Methodist Church. I looked around the tables that evening and realized that many of the truest friends I've had in my life were there with me. We saved a seat for Chandra, but Boston was too far to come. Even so, I thought of her that evening, in the humidity of another hot day in that wonderful city in the Deep South, enjoying stories and laughs with Ann and our pals, and I felt that familiar sense that I was home.<br /><br />Catfish is still $39.99 for a 15-pound box at the Chicken Mart (which still doesn't sell chicken), Gold Teeth are still 2 for $150, Six Flags is still closed, the streets are still ruined, but the city looks better now than it did when we visited in February, when it looked better than it did when we visited in November. Each time we visit, we notice some new signs of life. One time it's the St. Charles streetcar, now fully operational along its entire course, another time it's Charles Brown's home in the Lower Ninth, now occupied and FEMA-trailer free. <br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiq4XG2FpFTOlSLHXG1_vRzxxkKXIKhQvzV9NjxXXjlIrcg8IIyJsuFU2TLCH0RdHl2y2m5SJwgALL-JCEJO40lX3FXuZUJjTQQd7Niuq3PYgDLJpFjV_a3fKUM_uJx-6jkIkneAv2zlQbz/s1600-h/New+Orleans+East+Super+Gut.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiq4XG2FpFTOlSLHXG1_vRzxxkKXIKhQvzV9NjxXXjlIrcg8IIyJsuFU2TLCH0RdHl2y2m5SJwgALL-JCEJO40lX3FXuZUJjTQQd7Niuq3PYgDLJpFjV_a3fKUM_uJx-6jkIkneAv2zlQbz/s320/New+Orleans+East+Super+Gut.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5215918714280394114" /></a><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCjFul8UVHa71Ik3WiownaWrCmJb6crLiOdA6TfRaaIL7gaJz0lMmfoswO-4kyklCH3B-WrzgwIa4HTinvfo41R4tV9IRhz_lg1AfpxDzkVXw6jtAbKXZoEA4gOhJn8Xk8kLcvernY8oEP/s1600-h/DSCN0435.JPG"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCjFul8UVHa71Ik3WiownaWrCmJb6crLiOdA6TfRaaIL7gaJz0lMmfoswO-4kyklCH3B-WrzgwIa4HTinvfo41R4tV9IRhz_lg1AfpxDzkVXw6jtAbKXZoEA4gOhJn8Xk8kLcvernY8oEP/s320/DSCN0435.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5215918290572278482" /></a>Last week, it was a visit by Reggie and me to see whatever happened to the New Orleans East Super Gut that he led in March of 2007 (you can read about it in my 3/18/07 entry "Back Home in New Orleans"). We drove out to New Orleans East to see if we could find it and see what, if anything, had been done to it since we gutted it 15 months ago. The first photo shows our gut pile outside the home, and the second shows what we found last week. Both Reggie and I were pretty taken by the transformation.<br /><br />And still another time it's a homeowner banging away on a once-decrepit, burned shell of a home on Jackson Street, its new framing now nearly complete, and its wrought-iron circular staircase, once hanging by itself in the air and connected to nothing but the ground, now being used by him and his crew as they rebuild his home. The sign on that stairwell has said, for as long as I've been coming here "I AM Coming Home. I WILL Rebuild". <br /><br />I now believe it.<br /><br />My love to all.<br /><br />David/DadDavid Kopra and Ann Drorbaughhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12152319227722283364noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8682065060326846066.post-33926268698341895262008-06-11T08:47:00.001-07:002008-12-03T17:03:52.783-08:00Hot Town. Summer in the City.Hello Everyone, and Greetings from New Orleans,<br /><br />After completing the Sarah T. Reed High School project, I got to work trying to help Hands On get legs under its rebuilding program. They are currently busy becoming an independent Hands On affiliate, after these past 2+ years as a project of Hands On Network. Becoming an independent 501(c)3, finding your own money for operations, building a local board of directors, and so forth is a full-time job in itself, all the while trying to keep hordes of volunteers busy and productive. Hands On has found itself concentrating on corporate projects lately, i.e., working with companies who want to bring money and people to New Orleans to help, usually sandwiched between a convention or meeting that brings them to New Orleans. Ann and I are doing what we can to help them also hang on to the on-going daily construction jobs that we have seen make a difference in the lives of the people we have worked for. We are beginning to partner with a volunteer group in Central City that has a backlog of projects but not enough help. We're doing what we can to cement a good partnership with them (<a href="http://www.UnitedSaints.org">www.UnitedSaints.org</a>) in order to ensure a regular supply of manageable Katrina-restoration projects for our daily jobs' board. Spending a week or two at many of these homes results in a huge step forward for the families that live in them.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdu9cXe3GOcjB2tDHZUGb4_uk2K56A00bjRP-fIUUyxkvsJmUSEQUTrJmBlqMDbKQTwcyuCOwcJBN8d3-KdhglFsLdvJHcuGTY768xwqG9Cd3GS3Iv4M06K_fxEOpHHXJADXhGAK4UMl1C/s1600-h/DSCN0412.JPG"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdu9cXe3GOcjB2tDHZUGb4_uk2K56A00bjRP-fIUUyxkvsJmUSEQUTrJmBlqMDbKQTwcyuCOwcJBN8d3-KdhglFsLdvJHcuGTY768xwqG9Cd3GS3Iv4M06K_fxEOpHHXJADXhGAK4UMl1C/s320/DSCN0412.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5212163022799402706" /></a><br />On Memorial Day, I got to go to the New Orleans Zephyr's baseball game with Mary Ellen and her class. About half of our kids got baseballs that day, and we had a really good time.<br /><br />The next day, Ann arrived. We spent our first day together over at Sarah T. Reed High School performing a minor modification to the picnic tables we built. After that, we spent a couple of days with our pal Miss Peggy Severe, hanging the final curtain rods, pulling a phone line, and, using money provided by Jan Matzelle and Sherry O'Connor, my loving 1st Grade teachers at L.P. Brown Elementary School in Olympia, mixing and pouring lots of concrete to fill a large hole which sat squarely in the center of her now-FEMA-trailerless driveway.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8zj1jsiTMgn6FoWtnBwxq5sHgkHPIBvxOadGUNOrxPSMsOaSaOrrqsDEv056tuJPGL7eYL7IH9_97RS5wUmw9ky7KwEEn_AmUhnzECKbAxK_gcVFLMHJaJeEOa-QT_an2aP5oPqEflmdq/s1600-h/cuz+paint+009.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8zj1jsiTMgn6FoWtnBwxq5sHgkHPIBvxOadGUNOrxPSMsOaSaOrrqsDEv056tuJPGL7eYL7IH9_97RS5wUmw9ky7KwEEn_AmUhnzECKbAxK_gcVFLMHJaJeEOa-QT_an2aP5oPqEflmdq/s320/cuz+paint+009.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5212168852954717986" /></a>On Saturday, May 31st, we went with Nic and Bri and a group of Credit Suisse folks from New York to paint the exterior of a new family-owned restaurant in Gentilly. It's appropriately named Cousins, and 10 seconds of observation would tell you why. Family members, young and old, filled the place as they prepared a lunch of good old fashioned Creole cooking for us grateful volunteers. Kyle and his family leased this space and have been doing the renovations themselves in preparation for their opening on June 16th. We painted the entire exterior and built several benches and planter boxes to spruce up the outside. As we wrapped up, Kyle pulled us all together, made daiquiris and served beers, and broke down crying as he thanked us for coming together with his family to help them start this business that he hopes will sustain them all. Once in awhile when I tell someone we are helping a business, people ask if that seems OK to do, i.e., helping a for-profit business instead of a needy homeowner. I tell them that when we help a small business get back on its feet, we <span style="font-style:italic;">are</span> helping a needy homeowner. Small businesses are a big part of the lifeblood of this city, and are often the best opportunity for people to restore their economic lives (not to mention the economy of the City). Rebuilding homes is my first love here, but jobs are the most important thing for these people. Doesn't really matter, after all, if we've fixed their home if they can't afford to turn the lights back on. Seeing Kyle up there in front of us, this big gregarious man, unable to hold back his tears for the help we provided underscored all of that for me. As this City continues its long slog back to whatever they will someday call Normalcy, it's becoming easier and easier to take the pace of recovery for granted, to see things getting slowly better. Then a Kyle comes along and reminds us all that every sign of recovery comes with a human face, and every day between now and recovery is one more day since the storm took away everything except their optimism and their resilience. You can find dignity all over among these ruins down here, and today his name was Kyle.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgmCOfndq_DxhwnUYcPiGg1wD-volvfoR2GNX4_WazZBg_w8BPPphMzxiznb6Z5cZsluZzOB_J6OAYE7AqdtvPlDEGofRkQr8ROHEOXb4EgJN0TsPFRvviAaB-eVBlmkMMd1U1WPWHcKjIT/s1600-h/boston+cares1.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgmCOfndq_DxhwnUYcPiGg1wD-volvfoR2GNX4_WazZBg_w8BPPphMzxiznb6Z5cZsluZzOB_J6OAYE7AqdtvPlDEGofRkQr8ROHEOXb4EgJN0TsPFRvviAaB-eVBlmkMMd1U1WPWHcKjIT/s320/boston+cares1.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5212170800468211362" /></a><br />We got to experience a bit of New Orleans nostalgia when Boston Cares sent people down for their fourth trip to help. Ann ran into them for the first time when she was here in November 2006, and they've just kept coming back. It was my first opportunity to meet them, and they were as Ann promised: hard-working and lots of fun. We got to buy them a round at Henry's while we watched the Celtics send the Pistons home. Go Celtics, and thanks to Boston Cares for their determination, commitment, and good humor. Hurry back, and let us know when you are coming.<br /><br />We finally got to see Davida Finger, our lawyer pal from the Loyola Law Katrina Clinic. She's been very busy lately, having become the sole lawyer in charge of all cases heading for court, after her partner moved back to Lafayette and left her alone. Every parish down here now has a deadline for getting rid of their FEMA trailers, and those deadlines are making life busy for Davida and scary for some residents for whom the FEMA trailer is the only alternative to homelessness. Yes, there are some trailer residents who just need a push to get going, but there are many hardcore poor, disabled, and elderly who just aren't able to rebuild without more time and help. Davida is out there fighting every day for them. Thanks, Counselor.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxN62VAGdtQo2RTI9tgg8u6NfU7ARbGkPkjwosCkrOzjv6PiaU3OwfWX5-32ZLdKTJYtyNui-bOqe88Jwo-HxSwnr6InB1lflV8c_4Dip0uLUtxzzw6qMJV-pOYB3Wxv9aPiitE9RDio8-/s1600-h/miss+lana+012a.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxN62VAGdtQo2RTI9tgg8u6NfU7ARbGkPkjwosCkrOzjv6PiaU3OwfWX5-32ZLdKTJYtyNui-bOqe88Jwo-HxSwnr6InB1lflV8c_4Dip0uLUtxzzw6qMJV-pOYB3Wxv9aPiitE9RDio8-/s320/miss+lana+012a.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5212171266108949762" /></a><br />In between projects, we've been working on the first floor of Lana Corll's home, which took two feet of water when the levees gave way. Lana also works at Loyola Law, and has been a constant source of local color, Southern hospitality, and friendship. Oh, yeah--she also tosses us the keys to her Ford F-150 as soon as we arrive, so we have wheels to get where we need to go. Once we got started on her place, Ann did her usual creative work tiling the new bathroom floor, and Reggie and I insulated and installed drywall in the large living area. Lana hired a local guy and his crew to do a bunch of other work, and it's coming together pretty quickly now. It's never a surprise for me to see Ann take what could have been a pedestrian, vanilla tile job and turn it into her canvas. It was surprising though, and a little scary when I realized I'm actually getting pretty good at drywall. I always thought I'd be able to say I just wasn't very good enough at it, and should find other projects to contribute to. Can't use that excuse anymore.<br /><br />Since we're on a Loyola University theme here, let me also add that we've become pals with Philip Frohnmayer, a Professor of Music at Loyola. Phil found us one day when I was wearing my Oregon Ducks Basketball T-shirt. Phil is Dave Frohnmayer's brother, who is the President of the University of Oregon. Phil and his wife have been down here many years now, and he's become another one of our New Orleans friends. <br /><br />As has become their custom, our pals at Batdorf and Bronson Coffee Roasters again made sure that we had their great coffee in our coffee pots down here for our entire stay. I can tell you how much our volunteers appreciate really good coffee in the morning, and I can also tell you how much I appreciate that familiar smell in the morning. Having a bit of home here with us in New Orleans makes me feel like we're all in this together. Which we are.<br /><br />My love to all,<br /><br />David/DadDavid Kopra and Ann Drorbaughhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12152319227722283364noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8682065060326846066.post-47858669954508313802008-05-20T14:44:00.000-07:002008-05-22T12:42:42.346-07:00An Oasis Rises in New Orleans EastHello Everyone, and Greetings from New Orleans,<br /><br />I arrived here on Tuesday, May 6th, having come three weeks earlier than Ann because I had been asked to share leadership of a greenspace beautification project at Sarah T. Reed Senior High School in New Orleans East. We got involved in this project thanks to funding provided by Cable Cares, the charitable foundation associated with the cable TV trade group, who was in town for their convention. As you will see from the pictures, the school is probably 10-15 years old, but there was pretty much no vegetation on the site save for grass and overgrown or dead trees. When you add the post-apocalyptic bleakness that is found throughout New Orleans East, it's pretty difficult to look anywhere and not be constantly reminded of Katrina. While the school itself took no water during the storm, it sustained wind-related damage and a good deal of vandalism after the storm. You can't see any evidence of either as you look at the school today.<br /><br />New Orleans East was created 40 or 50 years ago from reclaimed swamp land, and was settled quickly by middle-class families escaping the inner city. The majority of the homes out there are brick-frame, and the place, if you can imagine it before the storm, was tidy and well-cared for. The storm trashed the entire region, which is about half as big as New Orleans proper. Today, nearly three years after the storm, much of it is an overgrown wasteland. Six Flags has a large theme park out there, and it sits empty and alone among the dead trees, its sign still saying "Closed for Storm". The area has thousands of trees that died, and that view is the predominant image you see as you drive to Sarah T. Reed. Pockets of homes have been rebuilt and are occupied, and entire neighborhoods, shopping centers, and strip malls sit empty and ruined. None of the infrastructure or buildings out there are very old, and to see so much of it abandoned or hiding amidst dead or overgrown trees and bushes is unsettling and eerie.<br /><embed type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://picasaweb.google.com/s/c/bin/slideshow.swf" width="600" height="400" flashvars="host=picasaweb.google.com&RGB=0x000000&feed=http%3A%2F%2Fpicasaweb.google.com%2Fdata%2Ffeed%2Fapi%2Fuser%2Fdak98502%2Falbumid%2F5202600379860007969%3Fkind%3Dphoto%26alt%3Drss" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer"></embed><br /><br />But Sarah T. Reed is alive and kicking. <br /><br />When I arrived, Tim had completed the budget for the project, had specified and ordered all of the plants, trees, and flowers, soil, gravel, and paving stones. He quite nicely diagrammed the areas we were to attack, right down to which plant went where in what quantities. All I had to do was direct the work itself. The plan was for 100 volunteers to do the bulk of the work on Saturday, with another 75 or so to come in for two-three hours on Sunday to wrap it up and present it to the school. Prior to the weekend project, Reggie, several Americorps NCCC members and I invested 5 days of hard labor to prepare the site and set the table for the weekend work. To do these large service projects successfully, a lot of prep work has to be completed in time to work the kinks out of the process and to leave a manageable quantity of work for the one-day-only volunteers. We set the first three rows of paving stones around the perimeters of the raised-beds after working very hard to dig trenches and level footings. 1500 of these 40 lb blocks were moved into place, 1 by 1, and my small team installed 1000 of them, leaving the last two rows for the weekend warriors.<br /><br />My team leaders for the Saturday full workday were the 10 members of one of our current Americorps NCCC teams. During the week, Mike, Laura, Aurelia, Olivia, and Kerry killed themselves on site to complete the prep work. On Thursday, Laura then led a team that pre-cut about one thousand board-feet of lumber in one day to create the components for 6 picnic tables and 4 garbage can surrounds for the courtyard. I really dropped the ball on cutting day by forgetting to take photos, because it was really something to see. The day started with intense thunderstorms that began around 2 am. The rains came, too, and by sunrise, it was abundantly clear that our day's worth of lumber cutting wasn't going to happen in the yard next to the tool shed. But, that work had to be done that day, and the rains were not predicted to let up until after midnight. Somewhere around 9 am, it occurred to us that the dining hall in the bunkhouse was plenty big enough to accommodate the saw, the workers, and the lumber. A few quick calls to seek permission from the right people, and we were on our way. Laura and Aurelia went right to it, Douglas and Mike jumped in to ferry lumber, and they went to the races. That was the day I realized this NCCC team was special. There was no question about quitting on time. When Kerry's work on a different project was done for the day, she jumped in as well, and they worked until 7:15 that evening, with every piece of lumber cut, sorted, re-checked for quality, and taken back to the yard. The saw was removed, the tarps that caught any loose sawdust (virtually none after another NCCC member who was watching us set up suggested we duct-tape a shop vac hose to the saw's exhaust and run the vac when we were cutting) were pulled down from the walls and picked up off the floor, folded and put away, the entire dining hall was swept, the tables were put back in place, and they left only when the dining hall looked like we had never been in there. We were lucky because dinner was being held in another location that day, so we were able to work until we were finished. It was a sight to behold, and I watched that team come together that day as teammates and leaders.<br /><br />On Friday, Mike and Olivia spent the day ferrying tools to the school, organizing and counting the plants, and making sure all was ready for Saturday. Once Saturday came, we were ready, and all there at 7:30 to take two hours to get organized, assign the individual project areas to the team leads, and be ready for the arrival of the volunteers. Cable Cares sent about 40 that day, Sarah T. Reed sent about 40 staff and students, and 20 volunteers from Susquehanna University in Pennsylvania who had spent the week working other projects joined us for the day. During opening remarks, I asked all of the volunteers to mix themselves up, to find someone in the crowd they had never met, and to stand there with them. I then filled the work groups with these new friends, and sent 'em off to work. Those 100 volunteers, along with our 11 team leaders, including Mary Ellen Bartkowski, the transplanted teacher I've spoken about in past posts, and the entire NCCC team, including Adam, Risa, Lindsey and Erin, basically finished the entire project in one day. 1500 bedding plants, over 100 bushes and trees, 30 yards of drainage gravel and soil, 500 paving blocks, 6 picnic tables, 4 garbage can surrounds--all finished. As teams completed their areas, they moved to other projects that needed help, and we invented a couple of other projects we didn't think we'd have time to include in the original plan. They knocked them all out. We had a couple of large tree stumps next to one side of the gym that were supposed to have been removed on Friday by a stump grinder, but the rain kept him from that work, so I told Dave, our guy in that area, to just skip it because the grinder was coming Monday, and we'd landscape that area later. Nope, said Dave. He took 'em both out by hand, and we finished that area on Saturday as well. Everything swept clean, all tools recovered and hauled back to the bunkhouse. It was a very good day, to say the least. The volunteers and our leaders really had a lot of fun while they attacked this work with fury.<br /><br />A team from DIY Network, led by Wynn Pastor, the star of Trading Spaces, flew in on Friday and came to do a tile mosaic (which includes a hand-cut tile Sarah T. Reed logo) on the wall of the courtyard. They were a really fun group that did a very cool job that added a lot of color and character to the courtyard, and their enthusiasm, good humor, and lack of star pretense added to the good vibes of the day. They came back the next day, and took it on themselves to repair a very cool, but very damaged New Orleans-themed tile mosaic that laid neglected in one of the parking islands. They not only repaired it, they moved it to a prominent place on a slope against the school, built and planted another raised bed with surplus blocks and flowers, and finished the whole thing in time for closing remarks.<br /><br />All that was left for the rest of us on Sunday were tasks that couldn't be accomplished on Saturday. We repainted 300' of red fire lane curb in front of the school (which was done barn-raising style, when I lined up every one of our 75 Sunday Cable Cares volunteers, had them stand at arms-length to each other along the entire length of the curb, and then paint the space in front of them. We did it in about 10 minutes, and people loved the process). Mary Ellen's team stained the picnic tables and garbage can surrounds that spent the afternoon and evening drying out after construction on Saturday, another team swept and washed down the courtyard, and another one still moved the unused soil out of the parking lot. Our team leaders for Sunday (in addition to Mary Ellen, who burned her entire weekend for us) were Hands On staff working on their day off. We knocked all of this work out in two hours. When we left, the transformation was something to see. I went back first thing Monday morning to see the reaction, and it alone made the work worthwhile.<br /><embed type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://picasaweb.google.com/s/c/bin/slideshow.swf" width="600" height="400" flashvars="host=picasaweb.google.com&RGB=0x000000&feed=http%3A%2F%2Fpicasaweb.google.com%2Fdata%2Ffeed%2Fapi%2Fuser%2Fdak98502%2Falbumid%2F5202592799242728561%3Fkind%3Dphoto%26alt%3Drss" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer"></embed><br /><br />One of the coolest things I've ever seen here in New Orleans happened during this project. As Tim walked me around the grounds to familiarize me with the project right after I arrived, we stopped in the courtyard to look at the three very large planter boxes that were overgrown with weeds. Our plan included weeding all three of them, trimming the trees up, and planting them with flowers and shrubs. Unbeknownst to us, the Special Ed kids and their teachers, whose classrooms are right next to the courtyard, decided on their own to do one of the planters themselves. The teachers spent their own money to buy flowers, and the entire group transformed one of those planters themselves that same day. The next day, when I was looking around campus trying to get my mind around the project, one of the teachers asked me to help her carry a 5 gallon bucket that was full of water out to the courtyard. When I took it out there, I saw their work for the first time. It was done, and they were now out there to water their new area. I went right out and bought a hose and a hose faucet key for them so they wouldn't have to lug water from the cafeteria anymore. On Saturday, we left them more plants and shrubs that they wanted to plant themselves in "their area". I then asked them if they would take the responsibility for watering and caring for all three areas, and that's exactly what they are doing now.<br /><embed type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://picasaweb.google.com/s/c/bin/slideshow.swf" width="600" height="400" flashvars="host=picasaweb.google.com&RGB=0x000000&feed=http%3A%2F%2Fpicasaweb.google.com%2Fdata%2Ffeed%2Fapi%2Fuser%2Fdak98502%2Falbumid%2F5202611594019617985%3Fkind%3Dphoto%26alt%3Drss" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer"></embed><br /><br />That kind of stuff will keep you coming back for more work down here, let me tell you. It's no secret to y'all how much I love this city and this work, but nothing tops seeing the people you are working to help take your idea and extend it with their own sweat and pride. When that happens, anything is possible.<br /><br />My love to you all.<br /><br />David/DadDavid Kopra and Ann Drorbaughhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12152319227722283364noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8682065060326846066.post-41679443409194052722008-03-01T17:55:00.000-08:002008-03-25T14:56:01.277-07:00A Little Effort Goes a Long WayHello Everyone, and Greetings from Olympia,<br /><br />After the NBA Service Project week, I had one last gig to see through. When Ann and I first arrived for this trip back on January 14th, Davida Finger of the Loyola Law Katrina Clinic asked if we could scout a project for a couple out in Metairie who needed some work done. Don't tell Davida, but anytime she asks for help, the answer is going to be yes. Ann and I went to the home of Pat and Laura to check it out. The area in Metairie where they live didn't flood, but their home had serious roof damage from the wind, and the water damage from that was enough. Pat and Laura are in their 60's, and very self-reliant people. Pat had done a lot of repairs himself, but he had a couple of jobs he just wasn't up to. Laura is sick, and Pat spends a lot of his time getting her to the doctor appointments she needs to keep. Their home is small, modest, and well-kept. They needed our help to repair a sagging kitchen floor and to replace rotted fascia boards behind the gutters. They had insurance that covered a lot of the damage, but they ran into a Catch-22 with these last two projects. They have a mortgage on the property, so the bank is the actual loss payee for insurance. It's reasonable for a bank to meter-out insurance payments along the way to make sure that the money is actually used to repair the property. What happened to Pat and Laura at this stage of the game was a little extreme, though. There is $2500 of insurance money left to pay out. The bank told Pat and Laura that, in order to get the last of that money released to them, they'd have to first repair the floor and replace the bad fascia boards. Pat told them, well, I would, but I need the money to buy the materials to do the work. The bank said sorry, we need the work done first. The mental picture I have is of some punk kid working in the Collateral Review group at this bank. He doesn't care that Pat and Laura have faithfully made their mortgage payments on time for years, that they have clearly cared for their home with pride, that Pat has done good work repairing the home as he was able, or that Laura is sick. For 2500 lousy dollars, this kid was going to hold these folks over a barrel.<br /><br />Ann and I went to visit. Their home is small, but OK for two people. However, when we visited, we were also introduced to their daughter and her two sons, who were also living in the home with them at the moment. In the aftermath of the storm, her husband left his family. Pat and Laura took them in, and put them up in the FEMA trailer they had in their front yard. Pat hustled to repair their home as quickly as he could, and when it was habitable, he and Laura moved back in and left their daughter and her sons in the trailer. All they had to share was the FEMA trailer bathroom because their bathroom hadn't yet been repaired. Last Fall, Jefferson Parish said enough is enough, and had their trailer removed, forcing mom and the kids into the home with Pat and Laura. Pat got the bathroom fixed, and that's the state we found them in. Ann and I knew that we could fairly easily do the kitchen floor replacement (the total kitchen space measured about 9 x 9), even assuming there was some structural damage we couldn't yet see under the floor. We pitched Hands On, hoping they could find the $500 or so we needed to do this work. They weren't able to fund it, given their current budget, so Ann and I told Davida that we'd fund it. For that amount of money, we'd be able to repair the entire floor and replace the damaged fascia boards outside. We wouldn't be able to replace their kitchen cabinet, which was falling apart, but we told Pat and Laura that we'd do the rest, and would re-install the original cabinet, which would work OK until they could get their money and replace it themselves.<br /><br />When it came time to do the work during my last week in New Orleans, I was talking to Lana Corll one evening about the project, and, as I talked, she pulled out her checkbook and bought the kitchen cabinet and countertop. Now we've got a complete project. On Thursday, I went over there and did the demolition by myself. Pat worked alongside me all day, removing all of the debris and taking it to the dump. I completed the demo work in the afternoon, and was then able to see the extent of the damage below the floor. I made a materials list and went home. On Friday, Reggie, Emily (a long-term Hands On Volunteer Leader) and I went over there to put it all back together. After replacing some rotten floor joists and repairing a rotted foundation beam, we laid the subfloor plywood and finished the day by installing the underlayment on top of it. We were ready for linoleum. On Saturday, Reggie and I laid the linoleum. On Monday, Erik and Sean, two long-term Hands On volunteers and now construction partners, came in as volunteers to install Lana's cabinet, cut the countertop for their new sink, install the sink, and complete the job inside. In three days, we did the entire inside job. Another Hands On crew went back after I came home and installed the fascias and painted them.<br /><br />After we finished, I heard from Davida. Laura had emailed her this:<br /><br />"<span style="color: rgb(153, 0, 0); font-weight: bold;font-family:courier new;" >Hi Davida,</span><br /><br /><span style="color: rgb(153, 0, 0); font-weight: bold;font-family:courier new;" >Just a quick note and some photos to show you how great everything is..and so fast! We have had the kitchen sink/faucet and all the plumbing pieces and the vinyl flooring in our living room for a year and a half with nowhere to put them...just not having to climb over it all is such a joy! We have met so many wonderful people because of this. I am not really good at expressing how I really feel and I'm not used to it but please believe me when I say that this has changed our lives forever and given us hope for the future. As soon as we finish up(walls,painting,etc) and call the mortgage people and get them to come out I will let you know what they say. Thank you so much, Laura</span>"<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">A year-and-a-half.</span><br /><br /><a style="left: 0px ! important; top: 15px ! important;" title="Click here to block this object with Adblock Plus" class="abp-objtab-03604541122882019 visible ontop" href="http://picasaweb.google.com/s/c/bin/slideshow.swf"></a><a style="left: 0px ! important; top: 15px ! important;" title="Click here to block this object with Adblock Plus" class="abp-objtab-03604541122882019 visible ontop" href="http://picasaweb.google.com/s/c/bin/slideshow.swf"></a><a style="left: 0px ! important; top: 15px ! important;" title="Click here to block this object with Adblock Plus" class="abp-objtab-03604541122882019 visible ontop" href="http://picasaweb.google.com/s/c/bin/slideshow.swf"></a><embed type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://picasaweb.google.com/s/c/bin/slideshow.swf" flashvars="host=picasaweb.google.com&RGB=0x000000&feed=http%3A%2F%2Fpicasaweb.google.com%2Fdata%2Ffeed%2Fapi%2Fuser%2Fdak98502%2Falbumid%2F5181766919499034993%3Fkind%3Dphoto%26alt%3Drss" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" height="192" width="288"></embed><br /><br />I came away from this project seeing New Orleans' recovery in a whole new way. I knew we fixed their kitchen. I knew we had removed the last obstacle to getting the rest of the money from the bank. I just didn't know our little-bitty project gave Pat and Laura some closure and peace of mind, and the opportunity to get up in the morning and resume their Katrina-interrupted lives.<br /><br />I'm pitching Hands On to create a new focus on these smaller projects, which we do particularly well and have such great impact for such a small financial outlay. I would like to see us do a lot more of this work, serving perhaps as a subcontractor of sorts, moving quickly and nimbly from house to house, doing projects that exist all over this city. It would have been easy to overlook this project. There are thousands of homes in New Orleans that need far-greater help than this. But when you think about how many of these projects we could accomplish, how much we could teach volunteers to do, and what a difference they make for folks trying to move beyond Katrina, it seems really clear to me now that we could make a huge difference for a lot of people. Stay tuned.<br /><br />Ann and I head back for trip number 6 in May.<br /><br />My love to you all,<br /><br />David/DadDavid Kopra and Ann Drorbaughhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12152319227722283364noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8682065060326846066.post-41186543344480172042008-02-18T16:42:00.000-08:002008-02-24T10:43:29.572-08:00The NBA Comes To Town<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgNp2rRcad2eIYI2ErQNT4lV1XpOfy7p5jqdGAfIAPdYh4am7C3w54dnM1PmyYY21-wCup0SBnei6kD3zqPTLEN-fw1-GSrPvrRrzHQsGzXrlsctVO7s-KzstZV1Vxzak8GtpSPqhx_oK7K/s1600-h/group.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgNp2rRcad2eIYI2ErQNT4lV1XpOfy7p5jqdGAfIAPdYh4am7C3w54dnM1PmyYY21-wCup0SBnei6kD3zqPTLEN-fw1-GSrPvrRrzHQsGzXrlsctVO7s-KzstZV1Vxzak8GtpSPqhx_oK7K/s320/group.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5170619122913328290" /></a><br />Hello Everyone, and Greetings from New Orleans,<br /><br /><br /><br />Following a small hiatus for Mardi Gras, when the City basically shuts down for a week of parades and merriment, it was back to work preparing for another Hands On-coordinated Day of Service project, this time brought to you by NBA Cares and the various sponsors of the All Star Game, which is being held here in New Orleans this year. Ann and I were asked to help Steve get Ms. Gibson's home on Mandeville Street in Gentilly ready for a day of painting and insulating. We spent the first four days of last week with a great team of AmeriCorps/NCCC folks replacing damaged siding, then scraping and caulking the exterior of her home. Inside, we banged up the nail stops around all the wiring and plumbing in advance of insulation. After over a month down here helping, leading, and making friends, Ann returned home on Wednesday, and I stayed on for Friday's service day. We've worked on a number of Service Day-type projects, and the one thing we know about them is that you never know just what will happen. There's always a rock-solid headcount given to us in advance, but it's always a crapshoot as to how many people will actually show up on Work Day. Further, people who volunteer for a half or whole day for these types of projects come with all sorts of skill levels. Many are suits by day, some are VIP's, some are celebrities. You never know just how much actual work you are going to get done until you see the whites of their eyes.<br /><br />I am very happy to report that we had a very good day at work. After a few opening comments and a fun visit with Bob Lanier (Old Size 21 Shoe himself), we let our team divide itself up into an exterior painting crew and an interior insulating crew. I worked inside, and after showing our folks how to cut and hang insulation, we went to work.<br /><br />I'm a Pop Culture illiterate, so it was pretty funny meeting the folks we were working with. I was in the back half of the house with my team, which consisted of Temeka and Nikki. Both went quietly and carefully to work, and I started chatting them up with the usual questions--Where are you from? I asked Temeka. Kenner, she told me. Oh, I said, there are a lot of local folks here with us today, and I was surprised because I had assumed there would be lots of folks from other cities, given the NBA had marshalled their players, staff, and sports media to help with this project. So, Temeka, what do you do? She quietly told me "I play for the Los Angeles Sparks". OK, this is going well so far. Sorry, I told her, I don't pay a lot of attention to basketball. Nikki, who works for the WNBA office in New York told me Temeka Johnson was the 2005 WNBA Rookie of the Year. There was lots I apparently didn't know about Temeka, but I did know this: she came to work. She and Nikki banged out an entire room of insulation in the short time they worked on our site. Nice young women, both of them, and hard workers too.<br /><br />After Temeka and Nikki left, in came our next team, Seth and Bill. Since I'd done so well when it came to knowing everything about Temeka, I kept the same line of questioning. Hey, Seth, what do you do for a living? I'm an actor on an HBO show. Really? Which one? The Wire. Hey, Seth, I've heard of The Wire, but I've never seen it. Sorry about that. Are you a good guy or a bad guy on the show? He just smiled. Turns out even the good guys on The Wire have issues.<br /><br />I'm batting 1.000, so I turn to Bill. OK, Bill, I give. What do you do?, I ask. I used to play Doogie Howser MD on TV, he says. Get outta town, I say--really? No, he responds. Everyone who had gathered to listen had a good laugh at You Know Whose expense, and then Seth, "Doogie" and I went to work. Like Temeka and Nikki, those two hit it hard for a couple of hours. Bill is actually Taylor Hicks' road manager, and we had a fun chat about life on the road. He doesn't have a home. He's been on the road with Hicks for a year and a half, with very little down time. Riding the wave while they can. Hicks came by at the end of the morning shift, said hi, took a few pictures, then moved on. Even I recognized him, and I've never watched American Idol.<br /><br />Right around noon, the rains came, and our exterior work came to a halt. We got about half of the house painted before it rained, and we'll finish it ourselves this week. Our interior work didn't suffer, though. They started sending us more and more people to insulate in the afternoon, and by the time we finished, we had teams in every room. We did all of the walls, and 95% of the ceiling. We ran out of ceiling insulation before we were able to finish, but the place looks great.<br /><br />Like I said earlier, you never can tell how those Service Days are going to turn out. This one was a real winner. A lot of fun, a lot of work accomplished, and another good chance to send the real story of New Orleans home with our volunteers. The NBA and its sponsors picked up all of the cost for this and 9 other projects around the city. We're talking big-ticket stuff, too. Basketball courts and play equipment at schools, paint, insulation, and sheetrock for Ms. Gibson's home and several other homes, etc. And New Orleans gets all of that media exposure, too. Hands On's coordination made it all work.<br /><embed type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://picasaweb.google.com/s/c/bin/slideshow.swf" width="450" height="300" flashvars="host=picasaweb.google.com&RGB=0x000000&feed=http%3A%2F%2Fpicasaweb.google.com%2Fdata%2Ffeed%2Fapi%2Fuser%2Fdak98502%2Falbumid%2F5167623911505344385%3Fkind%3Dphoto%26alt%3Drss" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer"></embed><br /><br />You can see more pictures of our crews at www.nba.com. Click on the NBA Cares picture at the bottom of the home page. If you watched the All Star Game last night, you could also see us if you caught the NBA Cares commercial.<br /><br />Bill Goslin, an old Hands On pal of ours, spent the week with us for his fourth visit to help. He's a very capable guy who gets started early and finishes late. It was a lot of fun to see and work with him. I snuck into the bunkhouse and spent Thursday and Friday nights there with him, and then saw him off at 4:30 am on Saturday morning. Pick your next dates down here, Bill. We'll be here with you.<br /><br />On Sunday, I went back to our old home on First and Dryades to attend church with Rev. Eden. It's always a memorable experience to be in that church with those great people and with the Rev in the pulpit. I caught myself choking up during the service as I watched and thought about his congregants. As the Rev talked about thanking God for the people in our lives who didn't believe in us or held us back in some way, I couldn't help but remember that many of these folks are descendants of slaves. Here we were in that 175-year old church, and these people were thanking God for the tough times in their lives as well as the good times because they fervently believe that they are blessed by both. As I watched them all nod their heads in agreement with the Rev, I also saw their ancestors 100 years ago doing exactly the same thing in exactly the same room. Katrina was just another bump in their long road, the road they know leads to their salvation. If you ever need a dose of humility or if you ever think your troubles are unfairly laid upon you, I have a church I'd like you to visit and a Reverend I'd like you to meet.<br /><br />My love to all.<br /><br />David/DadDavid Kopra and Ann Drorbaughhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12152319227722283364noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8682065060326846066.post-85450184747565352752008-01-30T07:46:00.000-08:002008-03-12T08:36:22.209-07:00A Perfect Project With the Perfect TeamHello Everyone, and Greetings from New Orleans,<br /><br />Ann and I arrived for our fifth trip to our adopted city on Monday, January 14th. To celebrate the memory and the work of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Hands On and other groups in the city organized a number of work projects. Hands On asked Ann and me to lead a project at Frederick Douglass High School in the Bywater neighborhood of the Upper Ninth Ward. The project was to transform an empty, ugly portion of the schoolyard into a 1000 square foot deck that was to be dedicated to those seniors who had successfully completed their test requirements for graduation. The space would become theirs, and serve as a point of pride for them and a tangible symbol for younger students. While we were en route to New Orleans on the 14th, a team of volunteers dug and poured the footings, so when we showed up for work on Tuesday, they were complete and ready for us to begin framing. After completing the design and getting a feel for the layout and the sequence of work, we were unceremoniously rained out on Wednesday when a couple inches of rain turned the yard into a lake, and gave us a better look at the challenge ahead. We used Thursday and Friday as our days to frame the entire substructure in preparation for a mass of one-day volunteers to show up on Saturday and again on Monday to lay down the decking and complete the job. A team of students from Wellesley College picked up hammers for the first time in their young lives and set about, with the help of Reggie and Ally (a new and very capable long-term volunteer) to install 204 joist hangers (Simpson LUS26's for you fastener junkies) on the beams we then hung to the posts we attached to the footings. Very early Saturday morning, after another night of heavy rains, we got the word that our project was canceled for the day, so we moved inside to support a large mural painting project for the school. Again, the yard was completely under water.<br /><br />It turned out that the Saturday rain-out was meant to be. At the pace we were moving, we most likely would have completed the deck on Saturday, leaving us without much to do on Monday, the other scheduled service day. On Sunday, a large group of Kaiser Permanente employees arrived for a week's work with Hands On. Ann and I were lucky enough to have a team of their folks volunteer to do the deck with us. We went right to work installing the joists, and watched with great interest as this team of folks, many of whom did not know each other before an earlier visit to help in New Orleans, quickly began to work together. Before our morning break, it was very apparent that this was going to be a very productive and fun group to work with. Some of them had no building experience whatsoever, and some had very good skills. Soon, we weren't able to tell the experienced from the unexperienced. Their willingness to work (indeed, their insistence at being super-productive), their individual and collective sense of humor, and their uncanny ability to perform individual tasks that wove together seamlessly into this big job gave this project legs very early on. Nic, Brad, Doc, Teri, Jackie, Joe, Shawn, Big Ed, Sue, Marina, Rod and Russ, together with Ann, me, and Mary Ellen Bartkowski (our newest New Orleanian who moved from Chicago to take a teaching position here after volunteering with her sister over Spring Break 2007) formed one very cool team. Over the course of the day, they set the goal to finish the entire main deck surface, leaving only steps to be completed later in the week. They insisted on working until the sun went down, and we walked away at dusk with just a few rows left to deck. The plan was for Ann and me to spend part of Tuesday screwing around figuring out how and where to put the steps, and then to have our team come back on Wednesday to finish up.<br /><br />First thing Tuesday morning, Ann and I were back on-site looking at the deck. A few of our team members had been asked to pitch in with mural work still going on inside the school, and, around 9 am, a couple of them filtered out to see what was up with us. Mural painting wasn't getting it done for them, and they asked if they could just finish up the few rows of decking that were left over from yesterday. Since the mural project was going on without them, we said OK. As the morning wore on, a few more folks filtered out, and were tickled to re-join the effort. They finished the decking by themselves while Ann figured out the step plan. Brad asked what else he could do, and Ann and I ruefully informed him that we had two massive concrete piers that used to hold large steel poles that held up an old natural gas line that crossed our deck space that needed to be removed. Brad set about to breaking one of them up with a sledgehammer, Jackie and Teri and others jumped in to haul off the broken concrete, and Jackie and Teri then broke the other pier up themselves. Problem solved. Mission Creep then set in. After seeing the deck area under water, we developed the idea of a couple of smaller decks that we could build next to the large structure, to create a useful space and a good transition from the deck to the sidewalk, covering an area that would otherwise flood during heavy rains. OK, said our teammates--we're on it. So, they dug footings and set about to frame these two smaller decks. Then someone said, hey--what if one of the seniors was confined to a wheelchair? Shouldn't we find some way for them to use the deck? No argument there, so we designed a wheelchair ramp to be built at one end of the deck, with stairs at the other end.<br /><br />Over the course of the rest of the week, we built the two smaller decks, a set of 16' long stairs which also serve as bleacher-type seating, and the best damn wheelchair ramp you've ever seen. The team simply decided we'd get it all done before they left on Saturday, so work they did. As the final structures came together, part of the team found some surplus gravel left over from another project at the front of the school, and they thought it would look nice if we used it to adorn the foot of the stairs. Before they finished, they had done that, but also created paths from the deck stairs to the stairs leading into the school, and to the sidewalks that abutted the deck space. Straight lines, raked completely smooth, right angles, etc.<br /><br />Are you getting what I'm saying? This team just would not quit. As the week progressed, it gelled into this absolutely-rock-solid unit, gaining momentum and ownership of a very cool project. On Thursday afternoon, Joe and Doc suggested that we find a way to get the seniors outside on Friday to dedicate the deck. The principal thought that was a good idea, so at 1pm on Friday, the seniors came out and went up there onto that deck (which feels solid enough to land a helicopter on). We exchanged some high-fives, took a few pictures, and Doc spoke for our group when he told them that we didn't just come here to build a deck, we came here to build a deck <span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">for them</span></span>. It was a pretty cool moment for those seniors, and a very proud moment for what had become the best team I've ever worked with. <br /><br />OK--we had some fun along the way, too. For Healthcare professionals, these folks sure knew how to let their hair down. I admit I was expecting white wine ("just a half-glass for me, please") and alfalfa sprouts on whole wheat. Instead, it was pitchers of beer and fried catfish. I'd better not say anything more. I would happily tag along with them to any party they decided to crash, though.<br /><br />It was sure hard to say goodbye to our team over the weekend, along with their leader, John Edmiston, and all of the other Kaiser people who came and threw themselves into their work with purpose and joy. We miss you.<br /><br />A postscript about Kaiser Permanente: Kaiser has no presence in the State of Louisiana, yet sent these folks, professionals all, here at corporate expense simply to help. It's not uncommon at all to have corporations pitch in on volunteer projects that allow them to show the world how great they are, to burnish their image, to create a media campaign. There's nothing wrong with that, but Kaiser just sent these people because they felt that helping was part of their mission. There aren't any Kaiser billboards up in New Orleans showing their people swinging hammers, with a tie-in to selling health insurance. They just came because they could. God Bless 'em for that. And God Bless 'em too for sending along the very best team I've ever worked with on a volunteer project anywhere. I've worked with some really fantastic people--Troy, Itokawa, Brian, the students from the Juilliard School, VCU, the University of Florida, and Appalachian State, but this group from Kaiser was like having every one of those All Stars on the same team at the same time. The week we spent at Douglass together will never be duplicated. And that deck will probably stand long after the school falls down around it. And those seniors will always remember the day in their young lives when they realized that people who don't even know them care about them and did something for them just because they could.<br /><br />Did I mention how much I love those Kaiser folks?<br /><br />That's it for now. The weather is very unsettled here. Makes me miss the predictably-fatal heat of August.<br /><br />My love to all, and Happy Mardi Gras,<br /><br />David/Dad<br /><br /><embed type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://picasaweb.google.com/s/c/bin/slideshow.swf" width="450" height="300" flashvars="host=picasaweb.google.com&RGB=0x000000&feed=http%3A%2F%2Fpicasaweb.google.com%2Fdata%2Ffeed%2Fapi%2Fuser%2Fdak98502%2Falbumid%2F5162137172136204225%3Fkind%3Dphoto%26alt%3Drss" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer"></embed>David Kopra and Ann Drorbaughhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12152319227722283364noreply@blogger.com4