3 Day Week Rewind

Hello all, Traci here!

It is Sunday, the day of rest, but I feel as if I have been in fast forward all week and it is hard to slow down! Aside from our jobs, which I will brief ya’ll on momentarily, the 4 of us girls have been doing a lot. We have been frequenting many different grocery stores and farmer’s markets in order to try and stretch our food stipend as best possible and walk the talk of sustainability. We have been experimenting with different modes of travel in and around the city, such as the Algiers ferry, driving across the bridge, and under calculating drastically how much walking any gal can do in high heels and 98% humidity just to check out the French Quarter. Maybe I will ask the girls about the idea of swimming across the Mississippi to cool off after our adventures on foot….

Anywho, work.

We all started our jobs this past Wednesday and everyone made it successfully each day; although we all resembled zombies a bit each morning around 7am. I know Rebekah described her first few days, so I would like to do the same. Rian and I are carpool buddies, since our service sites are barely 5 minutes away from each other. The morning traffic made me miss my hours as a late night bartender, but thankfully Rian did the driving the first few days, so I took shotty and slowly acclimated to a daytime shift of work.

I work at www.lowernine.org which is a small non-profit, located in the lower ninth ward, which specializes in direct rebuild services via short and long term volunteer participation. Although I was only there 2 days out of the 3 (we will cover where I was…on day 2) I really love the energy at lowernine. It run out of a house right in the 9^th ward, so the connection to the community I am serving is very present. I instantly enjoyed all my “co-workers” since most of them are aged 18-30 and therefore we all have tons of enthusiasm and happen to be on the same page with things.

Wednesday I got a feel for how our homebase/office ran, had a few meetings with some key staffers as to get a gist of the organization, and helped prepare dinner for the volunteers. Why did I cook them dinner? Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that, most of the volunteers who stay a short amount of time stay directly at the lowernine.org house. The house holds about 15-18 volunteers at a time, and they all take meals together and alternate roles of housecleaning and such. Even though I do not live there, helping to prepare the meal was a meaningful piece of solidarity, I thought.

Thursday, my supervisor at lowernine lined up a different gig for me with Rebuilding Together-a national rebuild program. RT was under a deadline crunch for submitting a grant proposal worth millions of dollars, so I was enlisted for the day as an “intern” to help gather research to put into the grant. My task all day Thursday was to Google my brains out until I found some useful statistics surrounding rebuilding New Orleans post Katrina. This included things such as contractor fraud, the current amount and condition of the FEMA trailers still scattered about the city, and key economic demographics to support the grant.

Sounds fancy right?? Haha, yeah that is what I thought!

Although I felt like a wet noodle after sitting at that computer reading all day, I was proud that I found many tidbits of informative data that RT worked into the grant proposal. Thus, I was part of something big to help move the city forward! Not to mention, so many things started coming together for me as far as understanding my job, and how things get done in the non-profit sector.

Finally, Friday.

Boy was I happy it was a short week. I am sure your familiar with the “new job” curve aren’t ya? First it is a sense of fight or flight your first day: “What the heck did I get myself into here? How did I end up in New Orleans working for free again?” Then, if you don’t run, it turns all warm and fuzzy for the next few moments. “I LOVE my job, and everything is WONDERFUL”. Then comes informational overload and inevitably the crash. (After this the curve flat-lines for the most part…but in general the first few weeks in any job is tough and filled with ups/downs)

Friday was a half day at lowernine since our supervisor held a small “appreciation” pool party at her friends house in the late afternoon heat. Overall Friday was good. That tension of being “the new girl” broke like a fever, giving way to this interesting sense of starting to belong and be part of “the crew”. A few playful shoves around the kitchen as I helped a few of the other volunteers shell shrimp to make gumbo served as a positive affirmation. I dunno about you, but being someone with a lot of dry Irish wit, getting pushed around a kitchen and punched in the arm (lightly), is a good sign.

This week coming up, I will officially get out on the rebuild sights and start physically working. Friday I went out to a few sights to round everyone up and got a good look at where our progress was at the various homes we are rebuilding for people. I am really looking forward to wearing the new FREE clothes I got at the nearby thrift store to paint and hang sheetrock in the coming weeks. I love working in an environment where you see the tangible progress and can have a wardrobe full of paint-ridden clothes to show for it.

So aside from the nightly “crashing” that occurred for me, the new job is off to a good start! Thanks for reading!

-Traci