Every trip I make to the Gulf Coast seems to get shorter and shorter. I plan, send emails, tend to details, write more emails, pack, hop in the vehicle and before I know it I'm on the road. Then suddenly I blink and it's Friday.
This has been another spectacular week full of progress, work, challenges, fellowship, faith and fun. When we arrived at Rampart Street, some people immediately returned to tasks from the previous day. As I was getting ready to find a prime demo location a request came for a volunteer to go under the house to assist with setting the blocks for the foundation. My response was a less than enthusiastic "I'll give it a try and see how it goes." So with knee pads and work gloves in place, under I crawled. This was not a terribly room area so there was a lot of planning necessary every time you needed to move from one place to another. Crawling is the best method, but you better remember to grab your tools as you go because crawling backwards to retrieve them is not fun. So Tom and I leveled and added mortar to the blocks and shifted them around until they were just right and then did it all some more. The next thing I knew someone was calling for lunch. Lunch? I swear we just crawled under here a little while ago, but no, it's almost noon. Even in tight quarters time flies when you are having fun.
Feeling the need to stretch my legs a bit at lunch I took a walk to the levy at the end of the road with a couple of others. The view was nice and we spotted a few homes that looked like smaller versions of the "Brad Pitt" homes not too far away. One of the homes was a model so we had a chance to peek inside. There homes are very "green" and reasonably priced. The nicest thing about them is that they offer discounts to potential buyers for things such as living in the neighborhood, volunteering in the community and working on the homes. Even better is that you are not limited to just one of the discounts. This gives the locals a great chance to have have a nice house in the community they already consider home and helps to reduce blight.
After a couple more hours of work, we had accomplished all that we could reasonably do for the week, so we packed up our tools and said goodbye to Noel, the construction manager and Chris, our site manager. It was a great week on Rampart Street. Our "double team" had a lot of fun as well as getting a lot done. The other two works groups also enjoyed their time serving God's people. Maybe next spring you'll be inspired to join the fun too, who knows?!
