The last 'work day' for me in the Parish

It is Friday, and last night I drove over and met a few members of the tools team who were at one of the two businesses open in town (both bars). There were five or six voluteers at the bar, talking about their experiences throughout the week. I was amazed that the locals (behind the bar, and some of the patrons) were all treating the volunteers like they were rock stars. It was amazing how greatful they were that these people had left their lives & came to a town the did not know, and were working so hard. One guy in the bar (Gary) kept buying the group drinks, everytime there was an empty one. :-)

I have mixed feelings about leaving for home tomorrow. On one hand - I am very excited to get back to my home and family, and on the other hand - there is still SO MUCH to be done here that I would enjoy staying on as long as possible.

When I arrived, I was originally very dissapointed that I was not going to be able to help 'gut' the houses because of my broken finger. But, it turns out that each team of 10-12 people takes 1-1.5 days to gut a single house, so had I been doing the work, I would have finished 2-3 homes this week. Instead, by working on process improvement, and ensuring efficient tools deliveries, my work helped the teams to successfully finish 170 homes in this single week!!! That is 170 families that we helped get one step closer to being able to move back into their homes!!! All of the process work I did will continue to be used, and will help the camp scale (up or down), so my work will continue to help, which is an amazing feeling. I feel so lucky to have been able to be a small part of such an important, and needed project!!

We met with Colonel David Dysart, who is in charge of the entire recovery project, and one of the things he told us was that FEMA told him that this was the 'best-run volunteer project that (they) had ever seen', and they wanted copies of all of our process docs. They are going to distribute our docs to other recovery projects going on around the gulf coast, in hopes that some parts of what we were doing would help them as well.

I drove around in the neighborhoods a bit more today, and here are a few of the pictures that I took. It was interesting that a bunch of the homes (some of which had not yet been cleaned) had for sale signs on them. One of the last pictures was the spongebob that I saw on a pole, that seemed a bit out of place...