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Blog Entry 4 of 5 A CU Student's Perspective

I'm Lisa Doan, a student at the University of Colorado - Boulder. For spring break, I traveled to New Orleans with the Alternative Breaks volunteer group, and I'll initially be blogging about the experiences I had down there.

Blog Url: http://denver.yourhub.com/~LDoan

Gutting a Home

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Contributed by: Lisa Doan on 7/12/2006

Gutting a house is physically demanding. With 13 energetic volunteers, we completely gutted a house in 8 hours. This entails moving out all the moldy furniture, tearing out the carpet, knocking down the walls and clearing out all of the rubble. What's left is the skeleton of a home and a life.

But the hardest part about gutting a house isn't the manual labor. The most difficult thing I faced was trying to remain emotionally detached from the wreckage.

Gutting the houses was difficult because we were hesitant to throw out many of the keepsakes and items that the owner had once treasured. Crystal and glass were salvageable and could be cleaned off, but pictures and most other things were destroyed by the water and mold.

Ruined as they were, we still struggled to toss the belongings into the pile of "trash." I remember when somone found a drawerful of silverware and wanted to save it. When told to toss it, she replied, "But this is someone's life!" Another volunteer responded with, "This whole pile right here? This was someone's life."

I'm a very stoic person, but I had to hide my tears when I heard that.

We never met the homeowners and knew very little about them, but it was still difficult to throw destroyed, sometimes unrecognizable, items onto the curb. Even as strangers with no connection to the objects, we recognized the pieces that once decorated a person's life.

As we were clearing out the homes, the debris told us about the people who had lived there. In one house, we removed the tools of a hairdresser. In the other home, we had to throw away all of the nursing books accumulated by one of the family members.

While we were gutting one of the homes, a son of the homeowner stopped by. His mother was in her 60s, and her husband had died shortly after the storm. She hadn't been able to return from Texas to see her home since she fled. She had lived in that house for 25 years.

As we carried out the ruins of the home, I felt awkward every time I passed the man. How must it have felt to see us throwing out the remnants of his mother's life?

I can't begin to fathom what I would do if I was in the same situation as these victims. If I ever managed to bring myself to at least visit the house, I wouldn't be able to gut it. I wouldn't be able to rummage through all my destroyed belongings and throw them out.

Possessions aren't everything, but it's the little things, the little keepsakes and the memories they represent, that are precious. I'd either try to save everything or just collapse and cry.

It's no wonder why so many people haven't been back to their homes since the hurricane hit. And if they have been back, they haven't found the strength to tear down their own homes.

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CONTRIBUTOR INFORMATION

Lisa Doan

Longmont , CO

Lisa Doan has posted 5 blog entries and 0 comments since joining on 4/5/2006. Lisa Doan 's average blog rating is 5.

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