Posting from Raissa

Today was our first day of work. After an interesting orientation (to say the least ...), we headed out for the first house that we would be working on. Upon arrival in the neighborhood, I didn't think that the exteriors of most of the houses looked all that bad. However, I know that the insides of the houses had to have been destroyed since the neighborhood was flooded with three or four feet of water. We finally saw evidence of this damaged as we entered the house that we would be working on. A crew had already been to the house, so the only things left inside were the studs from the walls, some hardwood flooring, a bathtub, part of a bathroom wall, the ceilings, and all of the ceiling fans. We worked all day on tearing out the hardwood flooring, removing the nails from the subflooring, cutting away the inside wrap from the exterior walls, and removing the remaining bathroom floor and wall. We were also to sanitize the remaining 2x4s, but we won't get to that until tomorrow. The house we were working in was really very tiny -- three small bedrooms, a small kitchen, and a small living room. It took us all day to finish a "small" amount of work that the other crew left behind (there were 12 of us total). Between all of the houses that we saw in the New Orleans neighborhoods that were flooded and damaged, the houses along the Gulf Coast that were flooded and destroyed, and all of the other houses that were mostly just flooded, I can't even imagine how long this whole process is going to take ... surely that time will be measured in years.