Last days at Waveland

I will be heading back to Toronto, after a week of hard and dirty work. Here are some new pictures, weird and wacky.

The makers of Budweiser also provide free drinking water for us.


This house remarkably stands despite the entire first floor being skewed from the impact of the waves, which reached as high as 50 feet.


The results of a crab and crawfish dinner at a local restaurant.


" i will shoot to kill theavs"


One of our trucks, stuck in the ditch. We managed to jack it up and bring it back to solid ground.

Drywalling in Waveland

The trailer we're working on.


Unfinished walls.


The coast at low tide.


The historical society, which has some amazing photographs of Waveland's houses before Katrina.


It's been a pretty busy week so far, and I'm just squeezing in some time in to blog. We've been working only on one project- a trailer home that was salvaged from the storm. Our mission has been to drywall the interior so that the family can move in by the end of the month.

The trailer itself is owned by a Katrina survivor- single mom with three kids. When we first arrived, we found a site littered with old toys and debris. When we got inside, it was much of the same. The previous group had already done most of the drywalling. Pastor Dave, Enoch, and myself- we jumped in without any direction, and with limited drywall experience (Pastor Dave had done some before).

After two days of working from 8am to 4:30pm, I became frustrated. Working with drywall compound was messy. We had no idea what level of finish was required, or even whether or not we had to redo some of the poor drywall work. I questioned the job itself because we never met the owner, and the trailer itself was not a beautiful building. The walls were poorly constructed, the ceiling was discolored, there was hardly any space to live- especially for a family of four.

My hope is that we will meet the family that lives in this trailer before the end of the trip and that they may see that our work is a reflection of love that comes from God.

Waveland, Mississippi

Lagniappe Church has been one of churches that have been active in the reconstruction efforts in this area, which was overlooked by the media after Katrina. They started off with nothing back in January 2006, and since then, they have been grown tremendously. During the summer, they had as many as 250 volunteers helping out in one week. This is the church building, which is a converted indoor pool.


Many of the trees on the Gulf Coast were defoliated and destroyed during the hurricane, and even if they survived that, saltwater killed much of the vegetation during the subsequent flood.



A house once stood on this concrete slab, but the waters swept it away. The different ceramic tiles show where the kitchen and bathrooms used to be.

New Orleans, Louisiana

Here, in the French Quarter, things are slowly returning to normal and that life is coming back into the city.


Even the fortune tellers are coming back..