Emotional Bungee Cord
New Orleans 2006 December 18th, 2006 by adminComing into this mission, we didn’t know what to expect. Sure we knew that it was going to be a lot of hard, physical labor; but what we didn’t anticipate was how emotionally stretching it was going to be. Both of us did both construction and gutting houses, while we both learned a lot (installing insulation, putting trim around windows, ect.) it was not as emotionally draining as gutting someone’s house.
There were times when we would just have to walk outside because we couldn’t handle seeing the destruction (or the smell!) On one particular gutting expedition, we came across a lady named Dottie. Dottie lived in a mobile home for thirty years of her life, and Katrina wiped out almost all of her belongings. So whatever she thought she could salvage (including the mobile home itself) she would have us place in a different pile. At first, it was such a mess that we didn’t necessiarily want to sort through all of her things (it smelled really foul!) But when I (stacey) saw the look on her face after I had found her wedding band from her late husband; that look just pulled on our hearts.
From then on, it began to make sense as to why she wanted to keep all of this stuff. It was all she had left. Eveything that she wanted to keep had some sort of significance. Even the mobile home was precious to her. She had built that we her father and it was his home too, as well as hers. We sometimes forget that even though we are there on a “mission” part of the mission is interacting with the people and the culture.
-Lizzy Stewart & Stacey Chase