First Day of Work (Britt and Amanda) January 14, 2008

Today was our first day of work at our houses. We are broken-up into six teams and are working on six houses in different areas of the city. We are both working near the lower 9th ward and are working alongside families and other organizations rebuilding on the same streets. It is nice to see other people working because many parts of the devastation area feel deserted.

The house I (Britt) am working on is just framed right now and today our team did a little bit of everything. We did some final framing projects, flooring, roof work, painting, tore down old siding, and a few other little things. We really got a lot done today, and I am very excited to see our progress at the end of the week. The house we are working on is on Kentucky Street (in case anyone is interested to find it on a map). I got to meet the homeowner today which was great. It was nice to put a face to the work we were doing. The couple was very nice and we are really looking forward to sitting down and hearing their story later in the week.

I (Amanda) am working on a house on Marais Street and we also had a great start today. Some of my team did drywall in the bathrooms, while the rest of the team worked on tiling. We had fun learning to use a wet saw to cut the tiles and some funny moments while twisting to reach the hard places. The whole team had a good time cracking jokes while still getting a lot accomplished. I’m excited to go back tomorrow and hopefully we will also meet the owner of our house this week, she is supposed to be really nice.

We both are looking forward to the rest of the week and learning as much as we can from the people in the area and our fellow TCNJ Bonners that we are working with. We hope everyone gets a chance someday to come down and experience what we are doing now. We also cooked dinner and dessert tonight with the help of some others at the camp (it was really good)!