Travel Tips

In February 2006 I volunteered for a week with Habitat for Humanity, removing debris from homes in Chalmette, Louisiana, that had been damaged by Hurricane Katrina. Debris removal was an important first step in the recovery process -- once a house has been cleared and stripped down to the frame (gutted), the family can return to the neighborhood and live in a trailer in the front yard.

Each team was issued a new set of tools daily -- rakes, brooms, shovels, sledgehammers, and wheelbarrows -- and it was the luck of the draw what shape the tools were in, or how many of each we had. One day one of our wheelbarrows had a flat tire; another day we didn't have enough shovels. We learned to make do with what we had, however frustrating it was.

This shows the living room of the third house we worked on. It was in bad shape, but the bedrooms were even worse, piled waist-high with broken furniture and moldy debris. From the way things landed, you could see how the current had swirled around in the middle of the room.

The hardest thing, emotionally, was seeing the ruined personal items we had to throw onto the debris heap: framed photographs reduced to a smear of color, shoes carefully stored in disintegrating cardboard boxes, a mildewed First Communion veil, a teenager's collection of Mardi Gras beads. This is a box of craft supplies buried under fiberglass insulation.

Here I am in full gear. We wore a lot of safety equipment, including goggles, hard hats, respirators, leather gloves, and steel-toed boots, for which we were grateful as we worked in and around rusty nails, stagnant water, and things we didn't even want to think about.

At the beginning of the week we were given a disposable Tyvek suit for each work day. Designed for use with hazardous materials, the suit was non-porous and didn't "breathe," so it was easily 10 degrees hotter inside it. It very easy to get dehydrated while wearing it; we chugged down a lot of bottled water. At the end of the day, you simply unzipped it and threw it on the debris heap.

Abby pulls out ceiling insulation.

Ted inspects the kitchen of House #3, preparatory to ripping out the ovens.

This photo shows what was, to us, a thing of great beauty: a house that was completely gutted. Clear floors, bare framework. You could stand in the front doorway and see all the way through the house to the back yard. Beautiful!