I have returned! Sort of victoriously!

Above is a fountain that's in the French Quarter. Notice the woman and her little girl playing at the edge-- so cute!

Alright. I am back to regular blogging. There was a little lag there in which I was very tired and started watching Lost online due to Bryna's suggestion (read: mistake).

I literally did nothing last weekend. That is, homework, nothing by myself, or nothing in the sense of lying on Balint's floor with Balint and Petra for four hours in a row. It felt great and it needed to be done.

This week at work has been interesting. My boss is fairly busy, so it's been up to me to be in the field with the volunteers. My day is split in between taking the volunteers to the site, doing physical labor while directing them on how to do their own physical labor, coming back at lunchtime, covertly bathing myself in the bathroom sink, and changing into business attire before returning to my newsletter duties. I feel like a sweatier, less heroic Clark Kent in reverse.

This week's group is a thirty-member Presbyterian youth group from Colorado. Getting to spend every day with them has been awesome. I think it's hard to know the meaning of volunteerism until you see a bunch of high school kids clear six feet of grass from a lawn in half an hour while enduring 100-degree weather. They go into their work with enthusiasm, smiles, and lots of intelligent questions, and it's great to be a part of it.

The newsletter has hit a snag, unfortunately. While one higher-up approved it fully, another has now decided that it needs to be reformatted in order to be mailed out. This makes my job fairly complicated, as neither higher-up has spoken to the other and both are too busy for me to speak to either of them. The story is incomplete for now, so I'll refrain from saying more. All I can know for sure is that there will be a NENA newsletter, and it will be good.

A kitten ran into work today. The Job1 kids were terrified of it; I think they thought it was a rabid stray or something. I picked it up, if only to stop them from yelling, and it immediately relaxed in my arms and started purring. Needless to say, I took an inordinate amount of time "putting it outside." Worth it.

It was 107 degrees today with the heat index.

My glasses fogged up immediately when I went outside.

Unfortunately, I am exhausted right now and really can't bring myself to write. I promise this will be the last entry (at least for a while) that basically says nothing. . .But a big one will come tomorrow!

In the above picture is me, Balint (from Budapest), Will (from New Jersey), and Buttercup (from my bed). Will and Balint work at the Broadmoor Improvement Association and are also in the program with me.

This entry coming to you from a very sleepy girl

Long day. The ones with work and class always are. I was up quite late last night chatting with a certain older brother, so my energy is very limited at this point.

Today: Finished newsletter mock-up and submitted it for review. Oriented surprise volunteers from Georgia. Took Job1 kids out to pick up trash. Entered various data. Discussed the term "snow bunny" with Will. Made fun of Morgan's abysmal high-fiving skills. Taught Balint how tall a six foot person was (Hungarians suck at non-metric measurements, apparently).

Good night y'all.

Existentialism on lunch break

This morning I was making the rounds with the volunteers. If I've met them already, I usually greet them, ask them how their day was, etc. We have three groups at the moment: Eight undergraduates from Berkeley, ten folks from a Baptist church in Ohio, and ten high school and undergraduates through the Job1 program (which, as far as I can tell, is a decades-old initiative run through the local government to employ youth during the summer).

I was talking with a middle-aged man from the Ohio church. He told me how he had met the homeowner at the house they were working on the day before, and how he'd had a long talk with her about her recent experiences moving back in. We agreed that listening to a homeowner's story is just as important as tiling or sheetrocking or flooring their house. I commented that I believed that the silver lining of Hurricane Katrina (I believe I referred to it as "the beauty of the storm" in a speech I gave in my freshman seminar for a certain favorite professor) involved the interaction of people across the country-- and the globe-- who otherwise never would have met. He immediately began nodding, and related that he felt that that was God's work. I found myself saying, "I agree."

My thoughts on God are complicatedly simple. I believe I spent most of elementary school liking that being, most of middle school angry at it, and most of high school and college being unable to believe in its existence but unable to discount it either. (Sorry for referring to God as "it," but the whole gendered deity thing throws me for a loop.) An idea that struck me while talking to that tattooed stranger was that God is what makes us do what we believe is right. That necessitates that God is in everyone. It also opens up a lot of wormholes and maintains the complicatedly simple quality of my beliefs. I'm not sure if this is an idea I'll accept, reject, hold onto. . .But it's the first one that's made some sense in a while.

- - -

I've begun work on the NENA newsletter. I became quite excited about it the more I worked on it. Spreading information is one of the critical things that is necessary to help people recover from the storm. I hope to do that with the newsletter and, ideally, have people come to NENA and receive its service as a result.

We got about ten Job1 kids who started work for us today. Job1 is a government-run program focused on employing New Orleans citizens. As far as I can tell, it employs any youth who applies in an organization of their interest for $8.00 an hour (75 cents above the current Louisiana minimum wage; the minimum wage will actually be changing to $7.50 in October). In any case, the kids who are now working for NENA are awesome. Today I chaperoned them as they took censuses for the 9th Ward Beautification Program and got to watched as they charmed 9th Ward residents. They added a hefty number of applicants to our list and did it with incredible spirit. . .In the 105 degree weather.

Two silly and unrelated things:
1) I now understand the stereotype of Southern women having large hair. My hair is about four times more voluminous here than in Massachusetts.
2) Strangely, instantaneously, unbelievably, I stopped biting my nails (literally for the first time since I mastered the ability to chew) upon arriving to New Orleans. It was entirely subconscious. Now, however, I've started grinding my teeth. Problematic. (Suggestions?)

The setting sun

I stood up from my bed to take a shower and gasped out loud in amazement at the orange of half-sun that stood on the horizon. Hey, Angela was playing and I stood with my palms on the windowsill while it dipped lower, slower over the city until it was gone. I knew watching it that I was happy and that I am supposed to be here and that I miss the people I love but that they're here with me in this place that I need to be.

---

Today was good. I finished my Excel manual, which was a huge weight lifted. I wish I knew that it was as good as my Word manual, but I'm almost as new to Excel as the people I was writing it for. A group of girls from a Catholic school in Baton Rouge arrived unexpectedly, so we put them to work clearing the NENA-owned yard that happens to be next to Fats Domino's house. They did a fantastic job. It's incredible what ten people can do in two hours.

Tonight my classmates and I had the pleasure of watching a panel discussion between Trisha Jones, the founder and president of NENA, and the president of the Holy Cross Neighborhood Association (Holy Cross is a section of the Ninth Ward). Both were brilliant but reserved, passionate but resolute. It became clear that it's people like them who prevented neighborhoods like the Ninth Ward from becoming the city's drainage system after Katrina, which, I'm sure, mattered worlds to both people I work with every day and hundreds I'll never meet.

Picture from: http://images-0.redbubble.net/img/art/size:large/view:main/2971608-2-sun-setting-on-a-louisiana-rice-field.jpg

Weekending!

Above is one of my favorite architectural characteristics of New Orleans: Plants spilling over beautiful balconies that are attached to pastel houses. Mmmm, the Big Easy.

This weekend was great! Friday at work was pretty typical: I met with my boss, worked on my Excel manual, caught up on our 9th Ward Beautification Project (the free plants and trees initiative I mentioned a few entries ago), and entered some volunteer data into the system. I found out that I'll be assigned to creating the first ever NENA newsletter. NENA feels that part of the problem with rebuilding the Lower Ninth is the lack of distribution of information, so this seems like the obvious next step. I'm thinking I'd like to interview as many Lower Ninth Ward residents for the publication as possible; doing so would service both my interests and the integrity of the newsletter itself.

On Friday, some group members and I were invited to a Shabbat dinner by a friend of a friend. The group of people at the dinner represented a wide swath of America; there was literally no region that was not represented. Strangely enough, it was still quite a small world in that house-- I ran into one of my coworkers and met two people from my (fairly small) hometown! The unebelievable connections between people in New Orleans are one of my favorite things about the city. Unfortunately, while the dinner was supposed to be a potluck, almost everyone brought beer. Needless to say, it was unlike most Shabbat dinners I have been to.

Before hitting the city on Saturday, I decided to check my mail on a whim. Inside my mailbox, I found a package from Bryna:



(Jenna-
The murder rate is only high in New Orleans because of the gators.

Look out.
Love, B)





















A friendly warning and gator socks. I have the best friends.

We left for the French Quarter in order to attend the combination seafood, tomato, and Zydeco festival that was happening that day. The streets were bustling with good food, good music, and sweaty, stinky humanity. It was wonderful. We ate at The Gumbo Shop (I forget the street name, but it's right near the Cathedral near the French Market). My roast beef poboy was indescribable. A few pictures from the day:



Morgan (sideways!) enjoying some spicy crawfish rice. . .














Tents with delicious, delicious seafood beneath them. . .




















The Zydeco band, complete with voluntary dancers. . .



















And Alex and Oleg (stubbornly sideways) with a new friend.

Two days together

The last few days haven't been entirely eventful, so I thought I'd just lump them together. Yesterday I wrote an entire manual for Ninth Ward residents to learn how to write a business letter. I also started a Microsoft Excel manual, which I continued today.

My Urban Geography of New Orleans class was fascinating; we learned about how New Orleans was founded and why it was created where it was. Interestingly, it was almost a Spanish or British colony at different times, but the French won out in the end.

We also spoke about what our research papers might be on. I'm thinking about studying how a town or city (either in Lexington, MA or Athens, Greece) formed around a historical landmark.

Today an all boy's Catholic school (I sense a theme!) from Philly arrived. They and another group from Berkeley did yard clean-up. I spent the rest of the day working on the Excel manual.