There's something about digging through someone else's ruined stuff that makes you reevaluate your life.
Last year I spent my Spring Break in New Orleans. A group of people from my church drove down in a big blue bus that belonged to a Vincennes University student church (the Vincennes students came along). We spent the next six nights sleeping on green canvas cots in the freshly drywalled classrooms of what was once a school.
There was a church attached, too, but it hadn't been used since five feet of floodwater had paid a visit. The only electricity was a generator that worked when it wanted to. I had one hot shower the entire week.
We spent our days mudding out houses in the New Orleans suburb of Chalmette. Mudding out consists of going in, carting away everything in wheelbarrows, pulling up the carpet and stripping the walls down to the studs. It's both easier and harder than it sounds.
It's easier because when everything's ruined, you don't have to worry about breaking things. You just pick stuff up and toss it out. I spent that Friday afternoon passing ruined craft supplies and video cassettes out a broken window to a guy who parked his wheelbarrow in a flowerbed. The drywall is also easy, because it's been soaked and softened and covered with mold. Put a shovel up behind it and pull, and the whole panel comes down.
It's harder because this is someone's life you're putting out at the curb. In the first house we found rows of ruined books that had fallen off the shelves in solid blocks, their covers glued to each other with mud and mold. In the second house (actually a garage - the house was a total loss), we found some glass serving dishes in a laundry room, buried in the knee-deep piles of clothes and gunk and bottles of detergent. We saved them for the old woman who lived there; they were her Christmas dishes.
We spent Wednesday in the school's gym, which had been converted to a warehouse. Some of us sorted piles of donated materials, while others put up drywall and installed plumbing equipment. There were literally tons of donations: first aid kits, toiletries, bedding, clothing and Bibles. But it wasn't anywhere near enough.
Before that week, I had never really understood what it means to lose everything, to have nothing to go back to. I talked to people who had literally escaped with nothing but the clothes on their backs. I saw entire neighborhoods with no one in them. The whole area had no electricity.
And after a week in that environment, I went back to my comfortable apartment and my running water and looked around and thought, "I've got too much stuff."
I also wondered what I would do if something came through and destroyed everything I had ever known. I like to think I'd be able to survive with my identity intact, that I wouldn't draw my entire sense of self from the things I own and the place I live. But I really don't know.
I'm going back there Saturday. We're going to stay in the same building and work in the same area as last time. We're probably going to be doing the same kind of work. But I'm sure I'm going to come home with a whole new set of questions.
Write to Joanna at jllees@bsu.edu
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