the photo archive

I've finally been able to create the archive for the photos of our trip. I chose about the best 250 for quick browsing, but can you believe I took 925? They're available for download too, if you choose.

archive: http://www.illinilife.org/photos/neworleans2006/

Thanks much for letting me be your photographer, blogger, and writing guide for our time in New Orleans. If you want to see more of what I like to do in that vein, I've got my own blog at chrisridgeway.blogspot.com which I hope to keep updating. But that aside, it strikes me that the images aren't as important as the people behind them.

I believe this will conclude my temporary account of God's hand here. Thanks for listening in.

grace,
Chris Ridgeway
for Illini Life Christian Fellowship
and the I-Life in New Orleans 2006 Team

my final ten images

Ten images that I had intially intended for blog posts on the road, but weren't able to sneak in within the borders of my schedule, tech problems, or simple sleepiness at the end of each day. enjoy. (ps - Internet Explorer will show captions if you hover your mouse over a picture)

we've arrived home

7:28pm – we've arrived in Champaign - all seven vehicles pulling onto John St. at the I-Life office/ministry center. Now we try to make sure everyone gets their luggage (it's perhaps a bit spread out), and finds a ride home. Dormies are crashing with someone else tonight – the dorms aren't open until tomorrow.

I don't know if we even know how grateful we are for your prayers this week.

I'll be back in the next couple days with more photos – and hope to have an entire photo collection ready for download or viewing next week.

grace,
chris

throwed rolls

Good afternoon! We actually just got done with lunch. On the way home, our way of stopping to celebrate the week was to stop at Lambert’s Café – a very sorta-Missouri-sorta-thing. Breaded okra, sweet tea, skillets for plates, chicken-fried everything sorta place. The white-beans-and-ham meal comes with choice of Big Red chewing gum or a cigar. I’m not kidding. We’re stuffed, and it was hard to get back on the road just now.

Last night we stayed over in Memphis, TN, at the main facility of a ministry called SOS (Service Over Self). We know them – in fact, about one year ago today, they hosted our spring break team for missions work in the rundown Binghampton neighborhood. Their facility includes sleeping quarters and showers for large numbers of people, so that worked out great.
For dinner last night, we had time to eat in downtown Memphis on Beale St – home of the blues. Pulled Pork BBQ and scratchy vocal live music. Nice.

Mike M. appeared with a swollen/infected eye yesterday – sorta unexpected. We watched it carefully for about 12 hours, and then Brian took him to the doc this morning, delaying our caravan for about an hour. We were happy to hear that it seem to be responding immediately to the drugs, so that’s good news. Feel free to pray for him – we are. He says he’s doin’ good.

Can you believe it – we’re almost home! We’ll see Champaign people this evening between 7 and 8pm, we think.

We’re almost done, but I’ll have a few more posts for you before I quit adding to our record here.

I'm sitting in the back seat of a van that Ty Grigg is driving. I decided to ask him about his trip experiences.

me: What’s one of the things God was showing you this week?
Ty: Well – that house that our team was finishing cleaning yesterday – I kept thinking, “this house is Jesus’ house.” He was displaced because of the hurricane, and could come back and live there again. And I’m cleaning it for him.

me: What made you think of that?
Ty: I thought of Matthew 25 last night when we were having our prayer time with I-Life people; it was so clear how it applied – Jesus talking about helping the poor like it was actually helping him. Like, he identified with suffering so much that he said it was HIS suffering.

me: wow – right.
Ty: Maybe we tend to think of Jesus as someone really important – (and obviously he was God!) But we don’t naturally think of Jesus being a poor person, or a needy person, or weak, or homeless. I think this prevents us from seeing part of what he wanted us to see – a God who came and threw in his lot with _us_ – the poor and weak and human. It really can make us uncomfortable to think of Jesus as weak. But I think that’s what makes it so powerful.

leaving camp soon

7:59am - and we're about ready to break camp. Packing quickly, because our whole team picture is going to be at 8:20am (after I get permission from the federal security officers here - a special exception to the "no cameras" rule on camp). And then we're immediately supposed to grab our stuff and wind up at the vans.

I hope to set up some better pics and post from the backseat of the van today... see you soon.

ps - we'll be staying in Memphis, TN tonight

we got hats

At our last sharing time this evening, Samaritan's Purse gave us cool hats. Dinner was salad, rolls, lasagna, italian potatoes, meatballs, and chicken marsala. Showers were luxurious. And we just spent the last 1.5 hours together as an I-Life group - praying, talking.

Photos and stories from our last day coming later this evening or tomorrow morning. It's 9:25pm, and around here that's almost midnight. I've gotta get my late night hot chocolate from the mess tent before lights-out at 10pm. And packing. ugh. My clothes are all over my cot. And under. And behind...

ps - this pic is me. if you don't know me, now you know what I look like. :)

starting our last day

In two minutes I'm supposed to bout at our morning gathering with the Samaritan's Purse volunteers. The two songs at the beginning are always a bit hard to get into cause of the early hour, but we also get some encouragement, announcements, and we're off to the busses that take us to our assignments.

It's our last day working - wow.

My team will be trying to finish the biggest house on the block today. We sorta don't think we'll make it by the end of the day, but we want to try. We've gotten the walls torn out in the front of the house and kitchen, but there's still serious rubble in two back rooms and a garage.

tyrone

Yesterday, we met “our” homeowner for the first time. But it didn’t really feel like meeting a stranger. We had already met his kitchen china, his children framed on the wall, his living room furniture, and the kids room with Looney Tunes characters hand-painted over the crib. As mud and mold and hardened film were scraped away we had slowly been discovering the life of a family.
Very few photographs hadn’t irreversibly bled into themselves and the mud, but we had seen a few shots – some of a young girl named Tyra. None of the parents.

But when Tyrone pulled up just before lunch, I could swear we recognized him.

He and his family – Tyra is now 17 years old we found out, and his small nephew lived what was the baby room – are still in the area. He’s secured an apartment, and is still able to work at the job he had before. His wife does Christian ministry – and we had seen that in the ruins too – matted books about Jesus from one of the bookshelves.
We shook his hand. We talked and heard his story. How they had left two days before. How his neighbor (and he pointed to the house) had not, and was rescued from the rooftop.
We showed him his house. It’s still necessary to wear a mask inside – the mold is still pervasive and dangerous. What were we supposed to feel about our work? Proud? A little. We worked so hard. Sad? Tyrone said that his wife would have only been able to cry if she had come.

We signed a Bible for him – a gift from us and Samaritan’s Purse – and he read each of our notes. He thanked us – and again, and again. We said it was no problem. It sounded cliché. We said that he was welcome. And then – all together – we prayed.

this enables us to do something

I think these last two days have made us realize the scope of this disaster. Our hardest efforts have cleaned almost four houses so far. It barely registers. This morning, one of our guys - Michael - stood up in front of the Samaritan's Purse volunteers, and read this prayer, written by Archbishop Oscar Romero.

It helps, now and then, to step back and take a long view.

The kingdom is not only beyond our efforts,
it is even beyond our vision.

We accomplish in our lifetime only a tiny fraction
of the magnificent enterprise that is God's work.
Nothing we do is complete, which is a way of saying
that the kingdom always lies beyond us.
No statement says all that could be said.
No prayer fully expresses our faith.
No confession brings perfection.
No pastoral visit brings wholeness.
No program accomplishes the church's mission.
No set of goals and objectives includes everything.

This is what we are about.
We plant the seeds that one day will grow.
We water seeds already planted,
knowing that they hold future promise.

We lay foundations that will need further development.
We provide yeast that produces far beyond our capabilities.

We cannot do everything, and there is a sense of liberation
in realizing that. This enables us to do something,
and to do it very well. It may be incomplete,
but it is a beginning, a step along the way,
an opportunity for the Lord's grace to enter and do the rest.

We may never see the end results, but that is the difference
between the master builder and the worker.

We are workers, not master builders; ministers, not messiahs.
We are prophets of a future not our own.
Amen.

that's when time stopped

One team found this plastered to the wall, still frozen on August 2005.

good early morning

6:57am - we all got up at 3 after 6 when about 7 cell-phone alarms went off at once. Gotta love communal tent living. I'm tying on my bandanna, finding my boots (safe in a black garbage bag - I won't put them on until we reach the site), and hoping I can get a new Tyvek suit this morning. My ripped.

hopefully we get to meet the owner of our house today!

our first real day

Morning announcements included safety briefings, equipment checkout, and house assignments. And while we smiled for the camera on the bus-ride there, we also prayed and waited and watched out the windows as broken houses slipped by.

The white suits are made of Tyvek - some space-age material that protects our clothing and skin from mold that eight feet of standing water left in these neighborhoods. The pink masks are respirator protection, and the safety glasses and hard hats make for safe but dang-this-thing-is-hot work.

With four I-Life teams, we were assigned four houses on the same block. Our job: peform a "mud-out." Dirty and tough work.

Which I want to describe, but I'm finding myself running into my sleep time... and I can't tell you how much I need it! Here are some images, and we'll describe more later.

Please pray for these families.

i'm so tired

More later on how it went, but me and my 10 person team just knocked
off our first day of intense labor, and I'm sitting here in the back
seat of our shuttle bus barely able to keep my eyes open at 4:05pm in
the afternoon. wow.

highest priority: shower. And then we've got an informal "share what
you thought" time at 5:30pm outside the Samaritan's Purse trailer.

the french quarter

Sunday is still an arrival and training day for the FEMA camp, and while hundreds of new volunteers poured into our camp, we took the opportunity to see the famous French Quarter of New Orleans - an area largely untouched by the effects of Katrina.

In smaller groups, we explored street art, tea shops, live harmonica, the Cafe Du Monde (coffee with chicory!), horse drawn carriages, and the waterfront. The music and crowds make our destroyed part of town seem all the more lifeless; the contrast makes us feel like we've stepped to a different city.
Tommorrow morning won't be like this. Wake up time is 6am or before... we must have breakfast and in full gear ready to report to Samaritan's Purse at 7am. We had a short meeting at 8:15pm in tent 4A to cover the details. We won't know much about the houses until we arrive, but we are told that we will be in contact with house owners by phone, or for some - in person. We prayed tonight for strong hands and strong hearts. Here we go.

they're worth a 1000 words

Arriving in New Orleans... yesterday in pictures.

having trouble uploading pictures this evening. pretty frustrating - it wouldn't be fair to make up for it with just words - our day was emotional and visual. Thank you for your comments, e-mail, and prayers. I'll try in the morning. goodnight.

argh

Wish you could see our sad faces on that last missed shot... ill.ini... next year.

FEMA base camp

Camp Premier is a federal installation with legal jurisdiction of the Federal Protective Services and/or its contractors. That's about 15 signs around here. I'm writing you from tent 5A, second cot on the left. In the last two hours we've arrived, been fed in the mess tent, received security briefing and photo ID's, and taken showers in the portable shower systems. They're nice - even a little place to hold the soap.

One sad thing: Pictures are prohibited here. Just within the installation, but I won't be able to show you the tents or our food, etc. No worries, we can take pictures any time we leave the compound - like through the neighborhoods and the work we'll be doing.

We're about to chill and try to catch some of the Illini game. I'll give you some end-of-day pictures a little bit later.

they made us breakfast!

Good morning. We just finished eggs and grits, and we're gettin' the road. Next time: we'll be in LA.

we've arrived for the night

Well, we've been rolling all day: our white vans, pillows in the back seat, fast food, and talkabout radios. I convinced a medium-size group to join me at Church's Fried Chicken for dinner, and split an 8-piece dark-meat spicy chicken dinner with mashed potatoes and four grease-dipped biscuits. That's the south I remember (I'm from South Carolina originally!). But good thing there are familiar things like Walgreens - several of us had to stop to pick up forgotten toothbrushes, etc.

We're about to do "lights out" at our temporary lodging for the night - the Meadowbrook Church of Christ in Jackson, Mississippi (go elementary school spelling bee) has graciously housed all 50 of us. We wake at 7:30am tomorrow. God's been gracious.

Goodnight.

on the road today

good morning tyler

Hi. My name is Chris, and I’m the nerd with the digital camera, laptop, and the possibly non-FCC approved radio device that’ll be bringing us live updates this week. Feel free to leave comments as we go – whether funny our encouraging, I’ll try to pass them on to our team as we work in Chalmette, LA.

And let’s begin…

Waking up at 4:50am on a college campus is as easy as getting Wayne to buy the Walmart brand. Let’s illustrate. I’m sitting here in the absolute back seat of our 12 passenger van with Mr. Tyler Brauhn.

Good Morning Tyler
Me: what time did you get up this morning?
Tyler: five.
Me: what was your first thought when you woke up?
Tyler: A Christian Irish Rock band. I had set Flatfoot 56 to wake me up cause, you know, it’s St. Patrick’s Day. Plus it had to be loud.
Me: Were you all packed when you got up?
Tyler: Yes. Except for my toothbrush. Wait. Did I bring my glasses?
[Tyler abruptly ends interview]

We’re on I-57 S somewhere near mile marker 14. We’ll see you soon.

early morning coffee

your team is headin' out

Hello friends,
For several months you've been hearing about this Spring Break trip to New Orleans. Well, it's here. Around 8 in the AM tomorrow morning we'll be shoving out of the Mobile station on Monticello road to join in the recovery effort in Chalmette Louisiana.

It will be dirty, grueling, dangerous work; but, there will be sun and highs in the mid-80s, so there will still be an element of the stereotypical Spring Break.

We'll be gutting homes, breathing through respirators, and handling big steel tools like wrecking bars and sledge hammers.

We need your partnership in many areas...

Prayer for our team would be a help.
a list of things to be praying for:

1. Safety- driving, working, our Sunday when we'll have the opportunity to connect with people in the neighborhoods
2. Wisdom- making snap decisions, looking out for others' safety, deciding how to do supplemental assistance for people in the neighborhood
3. Team/Unity- we are encouraging one another, looking out for one another, keeping short accounts of offenses, submitting to one another in reverence to Christ, we are all able to serve and build one another up out of our giftings
4. Adaptability- FEMA & Samaritan's Purse have never done anything this big before- there is no manual. We need to be people who can maneuver quickly: emotionally, mentally, and physically in order to adapt to any changes or issues with expectations
5. Centered on Christ- this involves a ton of stuff, among which includes loving one another, taking the initiative to love another person, LOOKING for open doors to share the Gospel, taking the initiative to serve others, seeking intimacy with Christ throughout the entire trip, and going with a desire to see God glorified in our eyes and the eyes of all who are watching.
6. Money- fundraising has been going well! We would like to see more come in, so a sizeable donation can be made to Samaritan's Purse to continue helping with the work down there, and to assure us that all the expenses will be paid for.

Thank you for struggling in prayer for us.
Love,
Dan Herron & Brian Smith

one day away

About 36 hours until we're on the road. This is a test, we'll hope to have real posts coming soon.