Chu chats journey

Let the rebuilding begin! From Tuesday to Friday, our group worked with Habitat for Humanity. We were assigned to help frame the houses. Although a lot of us were inexperienced, it was quite fun to work along side with over 100 students. After a days work, we would return back to the church we stayed at in Gentilly. It was at night time that we had community sessions. These sessions were basically times where we would think through, discuss and share our thoughts, feelings, emotions throughout the trip. As staff, we would lead the sessions to help students to process. We started off by talking about rebuilding the city and we used Nehemiah 1 as a way of helping us think about the attitude and mindset we should have as we start. On Tuesday we talked about lamenting for the city of New Orleans and we had students write poems. On Thursday we discussed the internal storms in our own lives and how Jesus can help us each personally through those times. On Friday we shared about th...

The amount of debris was endless. During Boston University's spring break, we took about 55 students to New Orleans to work with Habitat for Humanity. After our 27 hours bus ride, we found ourselves at Gentilly Baptist Church. We slept on cots for the week, it was great to see that the building was seemingly untouched, but I found out that the church was flooded as well with about 6 inches of water. On our first day there, all we did was pick up trash along 15 blocks of streets. We saw endless number of houses either abandoned or destroyed... The reality of the situation had finally hit me. I thought that the city was well on it's way to recovering from the storm, but locals told me that it would take another 20 years or so to get things to at least some what "normal". I had a mixed set of emotions. I was sad, yet frustrated with the seemingly lack of progression in the rebuilding. People still had raw emotions and vivid memories about the storm and as they were telli...