House Party

Q: What do you do with an antsy 7-year-old who's just spilled glitter all over your desk in an attempt to glamourize your marathon training plan?

A: Take him on a field trip.

OPERATION "KEEP A 7-YR-OLD OCCUPIED":

Agents:
-Leah (aka Volunteer Coordinator)
and
-Number Five, Leah's sidekick (aka 7-year-old son of our Community Empowerment Advocate)
Mission:
Document "after" photos of Ms. Pat's house (90+ year old client with a heart of gold and some rad sunglasses)

Equipment:
-2 digital cameras (for documentation)
-Oreo crisp snack pack (for nourishment)

Mission Background:
Ms. Pat's house, when we began working on it in July, was covered in moldery old siding and graced by grimy, fungus-infested awnings. A crew of teenagers from my hometown (Chitown holla!) came in and destroyed the old siding. Folks from Michigan scoured down the awnings with pressure hoses, bleach, and scrapers, then painted them. Another group reattached the awnings and installed new flooring and cabinets, and a final group painted the whole house and trimmed out the windows and floors. Contractors installed appliances, hooked up the electricity, and connected the plumbing to the refurbished kitchen and bath.

Mission Report:
Number Five and I entered the target by means of a lock box on the front door, taking care to keep the new floors clean. We snapped several photos of the inside and outside of the house, attracting the attention of Ms. Pat (who is currently living across the street) in the process. We spoke with Ms. Pat about her new house. Analysis: homeowner is on Cloud 9 and should be moving in next week.
We exited the premises and Number Five, a budding combination lock prodigy, locked up the house and replaced the keys in the lockbox with no help from the person 3 and 2/7 times his age. Did I mention he made videos of our excursion? And figured out that people have to
As LisafMh of feministmormonhousewives.org would say, "Color me impressed."

Post-Mission Status Report:
Contractor has been called in to address remaining minor electrical inspection details; 7-year-old has new career prospects in locksmithing, or perhaps AV tech support. And we spent ample time inspecting bayou critters and playing at the park on the way home. Client gets her house back, I get my "after" photos, Number Five spins himself sick on the merry-go-round--everyone's happy.


The End.

A Little Piece of Heaven

Last Thursday was a little piece of heaven. I told a work crew, whom I was dropping off at their site in the AM, that I would pick them up around twelve to bring them back to their trailers for lunch. "Oh, hey,” they said, “Steve [a homeowner client on another site] invited us all over for gumbo, why don't you just take us over there and join us!"

“Well, okay.” Big grin.

It was a perfect fall day (the first, really, we'd had at that point--crisp in the morning and warm and sunny by noon), and the whole crew of drywall-dust-smudged volunteers, plus some hangers-on (me) sat around on plastic chairs underneath the house* eating homemade gumbo, Steve's hospitality spread out before us like an expansive picnic blanket.

Steve is what I like to think of as the best-possible-scenario client--unlike many of our clients who are elderly, disabled, working multiple jobs or unable to face the strain of 2+ years of hurricane aftermath, he is physical & emotionally able to work on his house with our volunteers as they replace siding, put in new flooring, trim out windows, etc. One night he stayed up past dark with a spotlight trained on the floor of a tiny closet as he pieced together leftover bits of laminate flooring, determined not to waste any usable material. Our volunteers, who are (understandably) disappointed when homeowners can't, or don't, come to visit their work-in-progress homes on a regular basis, are thrilled with people like Steve. When a homeowner makes an appearance, checking in once or twice a day--or, even better, works side-by-side with the volunteers--it becomes an infinitely more personal and meaningful experience. Suddenly it's not just a house they're working on, but a home. Big difference.

As his 90-something-year-old mother, Miss Sarah, made sure everyone had enough to eat (and more), and his dogs, Stinky and Belle, begged for Halloween-themed cookie crumbs, I chatted with a family friend who works at a local casino. She told me how she's living with Steve and his mother right now because she can't find affordable rent, and how the ladies who come into the spa where she works routinely marvel at the "cheap," $3,000-a-month rent for condos down here. “If I were paying that much for rent, I wouldn’t be able to eat!” she exclaimed. Good thing she has friends like Steve.

I don't know if it was the weather, the food, or the fellowship that made me the happiest--but it just felt like a taste of kingdom come. Houseless and kitchen-less, a regular guy lays out a simple feast on his front lawn for a group of strangers who have come, in the face of so much injustice, to help him recapture a little “just”-ness in his life.

Tell me this place ain't somethin' to behold.

*Steve's house is raised up on stilts in compliance with FEMA flood regulations.

Where Have You Been All My Life, Fall???

The great state of Mississippi finally got a touch of fall weather in the middle of this past week. This statement requires some qualification, of course--we're talking mid-80s as the high every day, with mornings brisk enough for a long-sleeved shirt if you're so inclined (which I'm not). People here wear t-shirts and shorts on Halloween, not long-johns under their costumes like where I grew up (this fact considerably improves the look of the midriff-baring Princess Jasmine combo).
Nevertheless, there's a breeze in the air and the humidity has taken a vacation to the tropics; later-blooming goldenrod is flowering all over the wild spots in the highway medians and ditches; the butterflies that folks up north have said goodbye to are flitting in between the wall frames going up on new houses being built on the beach, and hummingbirds are attacking my car when I pull up to a stop sign too close to their feeding ground (those buggers are territorial!). I've come to feel a surprising affection for the scruffy sycamore, the only tree that shows signs (albeit brown and yellow signs, not the festive red-orange-gold kind) of jumping on the fall bandwagon. It seems to have filled out all at once in a drunken foliate spree, then woken up the next morning to regret its profligate ways and promptly shed its leaves like half-eaten canapes that have been left out all night. Sycamore, you rascal!

The other way I know fall has arrived? The construction supers at the Habitat for Humanity house I worked on this morning had labeled all the interior walls and their future locations on the subfloor according to the Patriots and Colts football teams: "Hey, where's Randy Moss? Let's get him up here right next to Tom Brady and pound a few nails into him. Then we'll work on Peyton."

Ah, Fall.

MSNBC article

One of today's front page MSNBC.com stories is about the complete and utter lack of affordable, workforce, and/or subsidized housing on the Gulf Coast. http://risingfromruin.msnbc.com/2007/05/rentals.html

" 'Rental Katrina victims are essentially the most powerless group of all in
trying to fashion a recovery,' says Reilly Morse, an attorney with Mississippi
Center for Justice, which advocates for racial and economic justice along the
coast. 'They have to depend entirely on landowners and land developers to make
something happen.'
The loss was staggering. In a state where nearly 30 percent of the residents are renters, 72,116 renter-occupied units were damaged or destroyed by Katrina, according to Gov. Haley Barbour’s office."

The rebuilding I'm involved with is all homeowner properties, but the direct service and emergency assistance that our organization provides serves hundreds of non-homeowners who, though they may have secured a local job, are struggling to find a place to live. The massive destruction of rental properties has caused rents on the housing that is still available to shoot through the roof, and the demolition or neglect of public housing (*ahem*, HUD!!) and other low-income housing options leaves people with little choice but to live on the streets or move away to an prohibitively expensive commute or a new locale where they have no job and know no one. The icing on the cake is the epidemic of NIMBYism--Not In My Backyard attitudes--that has hit the Gulf Coast. One local city council even went so far as to pass a resolution barring all projects funded by income tax credits (shelters, affordable or public housing, prisons, etc.), because, as one city official put it, they don't want "those kind of people" moving in. Please just come right out and call it what it is--ethnic and socioeconomic cleansing.

How do you support a service-industry workforce, like the one we have here at the Coast's many casinos, without some kind of accessible, affordable housing??