Week 13

At a park for a cookout on Friday that our sponsors
put on for us. I'm near the back in this pic.

As of last Monday, I am officially a resident of New Orleans for the next 2 months. So far, getting to know the city has been a really neat experience. Where to start…hmmm.

Well, for starters I live in the office of a non-profit organization called The Phoenix Project, or PNOLA. PNOLA’s focus is to help people rebuild their dilapidated homes when they aren’t able to afford it themselves. All labor is free for the home owner, but they put as much of their own money into the project as possible.

For instance, if a homeowner is in desperate need of home repairs, and the materials alone are going to cost $20,000, and the homeowner has $10,000 to contribute, PNOLA will review their case, and if they find that it’s a project they can take on, they will direct the homeowner to government grants that they might be eligible for to cover the remaining $10,000, then PNOLA will do all of the labor for free. For the most part, their permanent staff members (there are less than 10) are employed directly through state AmeriCorps programs, and then they supplement the labor with volunteers and NCCC teams when they can get them. It’s a really cool program, and I’m excited to be a part of it. The guy that runs the program and all of the sight supervisors are very nice, and they seem to really know what they’re doing.

Last week at the art gallery party.

As far as the living situation goes, it’s as unique as any I could try and imagine. Two blocks off of Canal St., on the corner of Bienville and Niro, there sits a small, two story brick building with a PNOLA sign by the front door. There are bars on the windows of both stories, and each doorway contains two doors, each holding two heavy locks. The neighborhood is not really that dangerous, I’m told, but to a girl who was raised in Wilmore, KY, a Mayberry type town, where locking your front door before going to bed is a superfluous action, four locks in conjunction with barred windows is slightly intimidating.

This building houses the PNOLA office in the bottom story and bedrooms in the second. The upstairs living space has three bedrooms and two bathrooms: one bedroom designated for boys, one for our TL, and the largest is for us girls, of which there are now 5 in total after losing one of our female teammates last week for reasons I don’t wish to discuss. One of the bathrooms is part of the girl’s room, and PNOLA went above and beyond their sponsor responsibilities by buying us a bunch of things that girls need in bathrooms and fixing it up really nice. The bedroom itself is a little crowded with army style bunks, but they are surprisingly comfortable once you figure out how to sleep in them ie stick to the middle, and don’t flail about too much.

Were we told to stay in our rooms during our free time in the evenings, it’s quite likely we’d kill each other due to the close proximity. However, after the office folks go home, which happens at about the same time we get home from work (our work week is now 9-5, Mon-Fri), all of the downstairs is ours to utilize however we want. Not only does this give us plenty of space, we also have access to a wall projector and speakers that we can hook up to laptops and watch shows from Hulu or DVDs. It’s like having our own personal movie theater, which needless to say, is a giant luxury.

Another perk is that we are only about a mile from downtown. For PT on Friday, we jogged along the Canal street car line, so that was pretty cool. Yesterday morning some of the other girls and I walked down and got coffee at a shop on Canal, and then went to Jackson Square in the French Quarter and watched the world go by. There are street performers everywhere you go, and really neat artwork to boot. Sitting in the square, I felt like I was in some faraway European town. Everything around me is like nothing I’ve ever experienced before. People are friendly everywhere you go, making it easy to start a conversation, or just say hello. I’m excited to spend time getting to know this city better.

Love,

My team in front of our house in Mobile just before we left.

 k