Mississippi, or The post in which I actually talk about the work we did

Let me do a quick recap to start this post off. I’ve already told you

How we spent most of our time waiting.

How Mardi Gras cut one of our working days.

And

How I want to take the beaches home with me.

To top all that off, we did actually do some work while we were down there. See?

We finished this house on our second day of work. The foundation had been redone and the whole inside renovated. When we arrived, there was just some finishing to do which did not take us the two days they thought it should.

M, expertly caulking.

Me, with the threshold I put it all by myself! This required a lot of frustration and a lot of encouragement and refusal to take over by MV. Oh, and, about an extra 20 minutes than if he had taken over!

The group of us in the finished house. From the left, MV, M, ML, J, and me, in the front! They were a good group to go on such a trip with: very patient with my lack of handiwork experience!

Work Day 3: Putting together cabinets. Unfortunately, there are no Ikeas in Mississippi. ML let me run the screw driver the whole time except for the tough ones I simply didn't have enough strength for.

It's surprisingly easy to run a drywall screw gun. This was a tiny bathroom with no room for more than three people at a time. And there were approximately 15 people on the site...

The final day, we gave up on our agency. There was no sign of any more working coming our way and we didn’t want to spend another day hanging around and waiting. So, we had the pastor at the church we stayed at put us to work instead.

We stripped the floor in their fellowship hall. It hadn't been waxed in three years and the pastor kept saying he never realized the floor was so white.

We scrubbed all their toys from the nursery down with a bleach solution that was too heavy on the bleach to handle without gloves. I learned this too late when my fingers spontaneously started bleeding.

See? We did do some work.

My dad reminded me yesterday that while the trip seemed like a bit of a waste in that we didn’t get to do nearly as much as we wanted to do, it was still a better choice than staying at home for reading week where we’d no doubt sit around and do absolutely nothing for seven days. He’s right. And ultimately, I’m glad we went. It might not have been the most productive trip, but it was good to spend a week with the guys, see a part of the world I’d never been to before, experience a Mardi Gras parade, and go on adventures in general.

And how do we know whose lives we touched by the small amount of work we did? God works in ways we can’t possibly understand, cliched as that may be. We were there in his name to do whatever he wanted us to do. Perhaps that’s enough.

Mississippi, or How I wish we could have brought the warm weather back with us.

The first thing we did after our (approximately) 20 hour drive to Mississippi was go to the beach.

The tide was out, so we walked right out onto the saturated ripples of sand.

We saw palm trees!

Along the shore, we also saw evidence of Katrina’s affects more clearly than anywhere else we went. Plots of land with only foundations left, marinas that have crumbled and become nothing but a late night party place, houses still boarded up, a few with visible damage, yet unrepaired.

All along the shore, the city of Biloxi hired artists to turn the dead trees into something beautiful.

The beaches were the most welcoming site after 20 hours of no sleep, crammed into a van, terrified that the driver was going to fall asleep at the wheel at 4 in the morning and crash us into the median. We had arrived.

Mississippi, or How Mardi Gras hindered our do-gooding*

Monday, February 15 was Presidents Day. Most of the US takes Monday off. But not the south. Oh, no. The south has something better. They have beads!

I don’t understand Mardi Gras at all. We were a little disappointed that our five days of work turned into four, but the parade was going to make up for it a little. We found a spot, navigating around the the cranky old ladies and the pushy women with 10 year olds and waited. It was approximately an hour before the floats finally arrived on our street. And then, instead of the typical floats on square-bale wagons with little kids dressed up in silly costumes, the floats were mostly boring and people just hucked beads at us.

The most mystifying thing about the whole thing? Everyone around us was going crazy for these beads, running out onto the street to collect them, begging the people on the floats for the really good ones, in general acting as if they were worth something!

It was fun though, and, I’ll admit, we all caught the fever just a little bit. Here’s proof!

We left the parade kind of confused though. What are we supposed to do with all these beads now? What are all the people who were grabbing them like they were diamonds going to do with them? I missed the bands playing rousing marching tunes, the baton twirlers, the clowns on unicycles. There were maybe three bands in the whole parade:

And they spent most of their time like this, with their instruments at their side, the snare drum the only thing going.

Ultimately, it was a mostly fun day, though with float after float, it did get boring. And we wanted to work!

(* I like making up words, ok? Leave me alone. :P)