Brian Biros dot com

I decided to spend the rest of my brief time before I finally go back to work in New Orleans volunteering with the Katrina Relieft effort. My former co-worker and traveling buddy Chris has been volunteering with a group called Common Ground Relief, so I decided to join him. As of now, I’m spending nine days here, and I am ending my fourth. So far I’ve helped finish gutting two homes, and worked from start to finish gutting one. The last job was one of the few salvageable houses in the lower 9th ward which was probably the worst hit area in New Orleans. The owners were a middle-aged black couple who were in no physical shape to be gutting their own house, but no financial shape not to. My group of 12 worked with them and in two days their house went from the same state it was in when the flood waters receded (minus 8 months of mold) to completely gutted. They were a wonderful couple, and feeling this rewarded for my work makes me wonder why I don’t do this sort of thing more often. The picture above is also in the lower 9th ward. All four of those houses were swept off their foundations and still block that road. I have so much more I could write and so many more pictures to show, even worse than above, but there will be time for that when I get back home. Check back next week.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 6th, 2006 at 7:49 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.