What I was doing in New Orleans

Got my laptop fixed and couldn't wait to use it

I know this one’s been a little overdue, but now that I have my laptop back, I can start catching up on a few things. First I have to pause to tell everyone how impressed I was by HP’s service. Since the unit was in warranty, they shipped a box to my front door complete with packing materials, a pre-paid shipping label, and even a little roll of packing tape. I packed and shipped it, they fixed it and shipped it back in Less than ten days and at no cost to me.

To recap a bit: when last you heard from me, I was living and working with a volunteer organization called United Saints rebuilding the First Street area of central city, which is lakeside of St. Charles Avenue. Riverside of St. Charles around First Street is the Garden District but, in typical New Orleans fashion, one block in the other direction is fringe ghetto.

According to Lyle Saxon, Uptown used to be nothing but “the river road”; a dirt track leading out to the plantations while the entire city was contained within what we now call The French Quarter (despite the fact that it is actually a Spanish Colonial city rebuilt on top of the charred remains of a French town). When Louisiana became the property of the United States, all sorts of American frontiersmen started mucking about the place and, after being thoroughly snubbed by the Creole elite that occupied the city, they moved outside the confines of the old city and created the Garden District. This is about the time that a nearby town named Lafayette was thriving enough to compete with New Orleans. Lafayette isn’t there anymore, it got swallowed whole. If you happen to take St. Charles uptown and compare the relative angles of Polymnia and Felicity Streets, you will see where the two different city grids collided. This is why the streets on one side of Felicity meet it at a right angle and the streets on the other side meet it at an acute angle. Saxon didn’t have Google Earth, so he had to put it in words.

For those of you who are not interested in the forensics of urban planning (and I know very few people that are) let me touch briefly on what I was doing in New Orleans in the first place before I get to Mardi Gras. After a couple of weeks doing general painting and so forth, it turned out that the organization needed a full-time cook from the beginning of Mardi Gras to the first two weeks in April. This is because lots of people volunteer during this time so that they can stay in New Orleans. Hundreds of college students spend their spring breaks laying flooring and scraping paint as reconstruction volunteers in New Orleans. Imagine that? Now, I wasn‘t really qualified for this position, but I was the closest thing just because I worked for a while in college as a line cook in a Cajun restaurant. So I gave it a shot. Good thing I got a lot of help. I’ll get more into detail of that experience another time since most of the pictures I want to share are on a CD that I accidentally left back at the church. As soon as I can get somebody to mail that to me, you’ll see the rest. I don’t know if I can explain what a wonderful experience it was, but I’ll try.

My next entry will focus more on Mardi Gras.

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Part of trip: United Saints First Street Revovery Project, New Orleans, LA

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