Las Vegas and Habitat for Humanity

What happens in Vegas does not stay in Vegas for us.  We will share our first visit to Sin City with you.  They enthusiastically sell sex here figuratively, and I guess in reality too.

We spent a whole week here, working with Habitat for Humanity during the week.  We enjoyed the privilege of working with Mary and Gary Welch—dedicated Habitat volunteers who are here for months building houses and coordinating the Care-a-vanners who come in their RV’s to work.

Darryl is the construction supervisor coordinating all the various locations that Habitat Las Vegas has going on.

 It is always nice to work with the future homeowners, and we had the chance to do that here.  Tomika and I planted shrubs that were donated to the affiliate for the houses.

The Circus Circus KOA lets Habitat volunteers stay at a reduced rate—a great contribution to Habitat’s work here.  It gave us the opportunity to live on The Strip and walk to see the amazing, over-the-top casinos.

We went to the old Vegas downtown one evening for the Fremont Experience—a pedestrian street covered with a curved roof—the largest screen light show in the world, four blocks long, with the show arranged to music.   

 

The Legends show is a long-running musical tribute show to some of the greats who played Vegas in the past.  The acts change—we saw Liberace, Rod Stewart, Michael Jackson, Marilyn Monroe, and of course, the King:  Elvis.  While they performed excellent renditions of various numbers, footage of the original stars was shown on the screens.  Very nice.  A great show.

Liberace smoozed the audience a bit and when he asked a woman in front where she was from, she said Wisconsin.  He said, “Good for you to get out of that mess.”  Later he made a joke about getting away:  “Maybe we should all go to Wisconsin and help with the recall.”    That has been the attitude everywhere.  When we say we are from Wisconsin, it used to be, “How about those Packers.”  Now it is all outrage about our governor and the terrible things happening to unions.  People are afraid their state might follow suit. 

The famed fountain show at Bellagio was cancelled due to high winds, but their spring flower show in the lobby was phenomenal. 

I guess everyone at some point does the time-share presentation to get some freebies.  We sat through one for free Cirque du Soliel tickets and $50 at Pampas Brazilian restaurant.  Little did we know that entrees are $45 there.  We settled for the salad bar at $23.95 each!!!  It was scrumptious, and we had plenty to eat.    Cirque du Soliel is just amazing.  The strength of those acrobats is beyond belief.  How do they do that?!!!

We did a lot of walking on the Strip.  Those casino resorts are huge, and you walk miles to wander through a few of them.  I asked Don for his overall impression of Vegas.  He said self-indulgence.  Everything is very expensive, but money pours out everywhere.  People drink and gamble constantly.  Vegas is an unreal world.

Now it is out of the big, bad city and back to our kind of place—the wilderness.  We are finally heading to the Utah canyons.  Oh, if you are thinking you can use our Las Vegas time-share—no, we did not buy one.

Mesilla Valley Habitat for Humanity, Week Two

Las Cruces (the crosses in Spanish) has been an interesting place to live for a couple weeks.  We have enjoyed seeing the desert, Southwestern style homes, and especially the Organ Mountains looming over the east side of the city. 

Mesilla Valley Habitat is building six houses right now, and one family of new home-owners-to-be worked with us all last week.  She explained how her family emigrated from Mexico to make a better life here since everything is so poor where they lived.  They tried a number of times to buy a house, but with no down payment and an only moderate income, they did not qualify for a mortgage.  She said she prayed and prayed, and God answered their prayers through Habitat for Humanity.  She even brought her own homemade red enchiladas one day for all of us for lunch.  What a treat!

This week Don and I installed windows, did some interior bracing, cleaned up a bit, and kind of helped install a door. The leaders trained as we went along and made us feel valued and productive.   As we always have, we signed the house asking for blessings for all who live there. 

 Ron and Jean Gratz were the team leaders for this build.

Everyone on this build really connected.  We feel like we have a whole group of new friends.  They came from all over the country from a wide variety of professions, and all worked together beautifully.  I was also impressed with the strong women on this build and how women were valued as builders just as the men are.  No wimpy, girly behavior is allowed.  The women all identified with Mary Jo’s T-shirt that said, “I fought like a girl and won.”   One grandmother was a bit unsure of her construction skills and her strength with the hammer.  By the last day of the build she helped install sheetrock and was declared the “supreme screwer” of the build to everyone’s delight.

Being God's servants with a hammer is evident from everyone.  It feels good to do physical work as service.  No job is too lowly for a servant of God.  It always feels like a blessing to us to be able to help put a family into a house of their own. 

Saturday we attended the Mesilla Valley Balloon Rally and the wonderful downtown market.

Habitat for Humanity, Las Cruces, New Mexico, January 2011

     We have arrived in Las Cruces to a very different place for us to build houses.  Most of our Habitat work has been on the Gulf Coast doing hurricane relief builds.  This is the desert—dry and cold, with cactus and gravel in the front yards instead of grass, stucco instead of the vinyl siding we like to do, and jagged mountains ringing the city.  Don raised an eyebrow or two when he backed the trailer into our camping spot and then went into the opening potluck dinner with his blind cane.  That’s how retinitis pigmentosa works.

We have 13 rigs on this build, many of them full-time RVers in big motorhomes who have worked many Habitat builds.  Nearly every place we have built, someone here has also worked there.  What fun to talk about places like Galliano and Slidell, Louisiana and Gautier, Mississippi and about wonderful people from former builds like Harry Fritts and Diane and George Gravlee.  Happy hour in the RV lot after work every day is a lovely way to relax after pounding nails all day.

With a week in and another to go, we have found the Mesilla Valley Habitat affiliate a great one to work with.  Don and I have worked together at a number of tasks involving most of the big power tools, which Don said he wouldn’t use, but he does.  Everyone is friendly and supportive.  Like with most Habitat builds, there is an emphasis on learning to build a house properly, not just keep busy.  Don has not dropped a 2 x 4 on me, so no black eyes like in Slidell on our first build.

 Here is lunch at the Riviera Las Cruces at the back of the worksite.

On Saturday we drove up to White Sands National Monument.  The dunes look like snow drifts, and people were even trying to slide down on snow disks (rather unsuccessfully), but it is really white gypsum sand from eroded deposits in the surrounding mountains.  With no river outlet, water simply evaporates in this desert leaving dry lakes of gypsum which then blows into dunes.

The soaptree yucca grows stretches upward to keep its leaves above the encroaching dunes.

An aquifer below the area provides enough moisture for a few cottonwoods, but they get buried by dunes as this one did.  Those are the top branches of a big tree.

Some plants have such extensive root systems that when the dune moves on, a hillock remains under the bush.   

We walked all the trails but took a shortcut on the longest one, circling back.  I told Don the truck was just over that dune over there.  It wasn’t.  He was beginning to worry, but we did get back.   This is a surreal, beautiful place.

 

Sunday we enjoyed a small, very friendly church with a dynamic service.  Lunch was at old town Mesilla, the first settlement here on El Camino Real before Las Cruces was founded. Billy the Kid was tried on the square, just one of many colorful events when Mesilla was a wild frontier town.  La Posta was a fabulous Mexican restaurant that we want to visit again before we leave.

Habitat for Humanity in Galliano, Louisiana

March 2010

We have settled in a Habitat for Humanity construction site driveway in Galliano an hour southwest of New Orleans, deep in the bayous amid the canals and shrimp boats. We are building porches, stairs and railings. Never know when you might need that skill.

Grand Isle is the town and Louisiana state park at the end of Bayou Lafourche, the river/bayou/canal that is main street for the towns along the 50 miles from Thibodaux to near the Gulf.  It was fascinating to drive along the bayou.  There are no cross roads across southern Louisiana.  Roads follow the biggest bayous and are crossed by roads that go out a couple miles only.  Then it becomes too marshy, more water than land.  The bayou is lined with shrimp boats, fishing boats, and tugboats.  This does not appear to be a prosperous area; houses are not big and not always kept up well.  Near the Gulf it is apparent that this is a big port.  Oil platforms are visible out in the Gulf. 

We walked the beach at the state park and saw LSU students planting shore plants to stabilize the shore—expenses paid by Shell Oil.  The brown pelicans congregate near the beach as they fish.  All the houses near the Gulf are built on pilings 12 to 15 feet off the ground.  Threat of hurricanes is part of life.

The people here in the bayou towns are down-to-earth and friendly.  On our walk last night, we met Ernie on the street behind the Habitat development.  After ten minutes of small talk, he gave us a package of local redfish he had caught and advice on how to cook it.  It was delicious.  He and others think the modest Habitat homes we are building are “so nice.  Those are great houses, really nice.”  We have met several of the new homeowners, eager to move in to these houses.

The porch, steps and railings we have been working on have been difficult—mistakes, twisted wood, ripping out, redoing.  Don says it needs an exorcism.  We finally finished it and started on the second one.  Michael, an Americorps worker, is directing us.

On most of the builds we have worked, the supervisors drive trucks donated by Nissan.  Today a neighbor living in a completed Habitat house told us that Shell Oil had contributed funds and volunteer hours to his house.  It is so nice to see companies donated to help people obtain decent, affordable housing.

Four new RV’s came in over the weekend—Care-a-vanner neighbors.  Hooray.  They are all interesting people, very friendly and fun—three couples on their first Habitat build, and one guy, Hank, who also is on his 5^th build.  Two of the guys, Eric and Larry retired from careers in construction, so they are really good.  They finished their porch and steps on the next house before we finished ours. 

Here we relax after work after hitting the drive-through daiquiri stand.  It is legal as long as the driver’s straw still has its paper cover on it.  Life in the Bayous has been an experience—Cajun food, shrimp, plantation tours, bayou boat ride, warm friendly people.

PS added later:  The BP oil rig explosion in spring after we left tore our hearts.  The people in the bayous are shrimpers, fishermen, oil rig workers, dock workers.  All this is imperiled for people who haven’t much money to start with. May God be with them.

Musicians’ Village, New Orleans

January 2008
We drove to New Orleans for two weeks to work with Habitat for Humanity in the Ninth Ward doing our third year of hurricane rebuilding.  New Orleans and the Gulf Coast are finally getting somewhere, but it will still take years to rebuild.  While there we found ourselves filmed for an episode of This Old House.  Interesting how many takes are needed for a spontaneous appearing show.  In a landscaping scene, Don shoveled dirt off a pick-up truck so many times that he had to shovel it back on in order to shovel it off again.
The Musicians’ Village was started by Branford Marsalis and Harry Connick Jr to help bring the music back to N’Awlins. Too many of those who played in establishments around the city left when Katrina blew in. Until now, many had no hope of a decent home to live in if they came back. 

Located in the upper ninth ward, Musicians’ Village will have about 70 houses, 90% of them owned by musicians, clustered around a central green-space and the Ellis Marsalis Center for Music, a building with practice space, opportunities for music lessons, a recording studio, and a performance area. The houses are typical Habitat for Humanity homes—modest three bedroom, one bath homes, with a full front porch, tool shed out back, and no garage. They are lined up for several blocks with varying front roof lines; some are L-shaped instead of the usual straight back rectangle. The striking differences come with the colors—striking contrasts or subdued and coordinating, but all different colors. The Hardi-plank siding and wood trim are paintable, and paint them they do.  Brick red with pink trim, shades of blue or green, salmon with white trim, bright purple with lavender or gray trim. Musicians are sometimes said to hear in colors; their artistic souls certainly show expression here.
        
It is heart-breaking to see how many homes are still a wreck with the owners having no money to restore them. In the blocks surrounding the new houses in Musicians Village, many houses are still boarded up. Some have campers or FEMA trailers parked in front while the owners try little by little to fix up their ruined homes. Businesses in the poor areas are not all reopened either. People have to drive to the wealthier parts of town to buy groceries, because the local supermarkets are still closed. But everywhere people are working—cleaning out, tearing down, rebuilding.  It will still take years. Habitat for Humanity NOLA plans to build hundreds of houses in the next few years —this from an affiliate that built only a few homes a year before Katrina. 

Habitat for Humanity in Mississippi

             The South is not recovering very much yet from Hurricane Katrina.  Don and I spent our two weeks this year with Habitat for Humanity in Gautier, Mississippi.  We drove along the coast just to see what kind of progress had been made since last year when we worked with Habitat in Slidell, Louisiana.  The answer is very little.  I could have taken the same pictures I took last year.  The most noticeable change is all the “For Sale” signs.  The Gulf coast is mile after mile after mile of houses blown apart or washed away, toppled trees, ands signs marking where restaurants or other businesses used to be.  This is one of the poorest parts of the country, and thousands of people lost what little they had.  It will take years to rebuild, partly because it truly was the worst natural disaster this country has ever known, partly because the South does not have the infra-structure and resources that many other parts of the country have.  People have been living for over a year in FEMA trailers.  Many people who had homes do not have money to repair them because their jobs have also been blown away.
          
This was in Biloxi at the volunteer center in an old stadium.  The red line on the sign way above our heads was the Katrina high water mark in the middle of the city of Biloxi. 
         Our campsite was behind a storefront church called the Refuge.  There was just wilderness behind us and concrete around us, but the church put in full hook-ups for volunteers.  We met Monty and Susan who quit their jobs in Indiana when they felt a call from God to work with Convoy of Hope doing hurricane relief work.  They muck out and repair homes of hurricane victims.  They have lived in a borrowed 24 foot travel trailer since February.  What dedication!  It was just them and us back there—kind of disappointing not to have more neighbors. 

            Monty arranged for us to go to a New Year’s party at noon at Billy Joe’s houseboat on the Pascagoula River.  There is a Teen Challenge group home in Pascagoula down the coast for girls and women in drug/alcohol rehab.  Billy Joe puts on parties for them and whoever else who wants to come every holiday except Christmas when the women go home.  The New Year’s dinner had fresh catfish, barbecued chicken, wild boar that he recently shot, hush puppies, black-eyed peas, fabulous cornbread, and about eight desserts that people brought.  The wild boar (which they announced as pork) was darker and a bit tougher than pork, but otherwise similar, not too strong-flavored.  It was served with barbecue sauce, so the flavor was not clear to me.  Billy Joe is a genuine old Mississippi bayou man.  He lives on the houseboat about half the time and spends his days hunting and fishing the bayous for catfish.  When he has a freezer full, he puts on a fish fry as a fund raiser for Teen Challenge.  The houseboat is about 70 feet long and homemade.  It has a big covered porch with beat-up furniture and loads of trophy horns and heads and mounted fish and alligators and goofy signs.  There are pictures and clippings on the walls and clutter everywhere, but it is the kind of people and place that welcome everyone.
   
            Don and I worked on one of seven houses Habitat is building in Gautier.  We did vinyl siding most of the time, as we did last year.  For two teachers with no professional construction training, we are getting pretty good at vinyl.  At least we didn’t have to take pieces down and redo them like we did last year.  Now instead of detailed instructions for each new application, the supervisor would say, “Don and Jean, go put J channel and soffit material under the porch ceiling,” and we actually knew what to do.  We also insulated the walls (nasty stuff—insulation) and roofed the tool shed.  Habitat does not build garages, just a basic house and small, wooden tool shed anchored into the ground in case of another hurricane.  Don’s New Year’s resolution was to not drop a two-by-four on my head like last year, and I am happy to report that he kept it.  No black eyes this time.
  
            We met some great people again.  Our site supervisor, a woman named Kim, and our construction boss, a young guy Bryce, both are in AmeriCorps—like the Peace Corps but in America.  Both gave up their former lives for at least a year to work on Katrina rebuilding for very little pay and rooms in the volunteer dormitories in Biloxi.  Retirees have parked their RV’s there for months to work.  It makes a person humble to volunteer only two weeks.
            We are back now in the frozen north and back to the stress of a new semester starting at Concordia.  After I retire in May, we hope to do more Habitat builds.  It just makes so much sense to us—help poor people one at a time to improve their lives with (as our construction supervisor last year said every day after the morning devotions) “a hand up, not a handout.”