Holy Trinity at the Gathering

Today was our tour-around-New-Orleans day.  My friend Brian Perry  joined us for the morning, and gave us the insider’s perspective.  We started by driving through the French Quarter and over to the 9th Ward, which has gotten a lot of press.  It’s incredible how close these are — the Quarter which wasn’t under water, and then what stretches for hours of driving that was.  Brian said that over 80% of the city was flooded after Katrina.

Down in the 9th Ward, we saw houses that had been gutted — after the water, if an owner planned to keep the house, they had to strip it down to its studs and let them dry, and then clean and sand off the residue from the water even from there.  It was striking how many empty lots there were, where before Katrina were proud houses, children playing, a park.

One house we saw had a hole punched in the roof, which Brian said was where a homeowner had to chop through his/her own roof to get up on top, to get away from the water.  It was a very striking day.

Then tonight’s Mass Gathering featured two speakers, a young man whose legs had to be amputated at age 2, and another young man who was a child soldier in the Republic of Congo at age 5.  Imagine — at age 5, he was abducted by rebel soldiers, blindfolded, told to pull the trigger of the AK-47 they handed him, only to pull off his blindfold and discover that he’d just killed his best friend, Kevin.  And then the soldiers told him, “You’re a killer now.  Your family won’t want you back.  We’re your only family now.”

All in all, a powerful day.

More pictures at Gathering – Friday

Well today was one of the sad days we had we went out and saw were Katrina had done the most damage. We would see a X on a house and on the top it said who the house was searched by and at the bottom it would say how many bodies they had found in that house we saw only about one or two houses with a number at the bottom but we saw a lot of houses with a zero on the bottom witch makes it better. It was very interesting to see were the water was and how high the water had gotten. In this one spot the water was 13ft high it was CRAZY! We went in to a house and saw how they just had nothing in there and i mean nothing the walls were gone, all that was there was the wood that held the house up. But then we go to see were all the history in New Orleans was. That was really fun. We also ate a Snowball. Nope it is nothing like a Snow Cone at all. I would much rather have a Snowball any day. Well im getting to bed! Goodnight!

ok so after all the tour stuff we went to eat. we went to slim goodies. we all ordered and i ordered a waffle and cheese fries. the cheese fires were great but as i was eating my waffle i came across a piece of metal. let me tell u eating metal doesnt taste the best. so we told the manager and i got a free t shirt. but im ok. i didnt need to go to the hospital or anything. the metal just came from the scrubber used to clean the waffle maker.

well today we got to go on a tour of the city where katrina hit the worst. it was like a completely different world there. you hardly every saw someone outside. really the only people we saw were the kids on their service day. the houses that were still standing some of them looked horrible. they didnt even have any walls. it was so surreal. and then on the houses they would have an X which meant they had been searched. in the top part it had the date and on the bottom it had how many people they had found. also were the animals found in the house. just to see all of what the hurricane had really done first hand was hard to grasp at first. it took awhile to say wow this is really what happened. i think that we learned a lot today though. our great tour guide brian was the best!

Tonight we saw Skillet play. That was really fun. Can’t wait to get home so I can catch up on sleep. Forgot to tell everyone that yesterday we all ate alligator. It is shockingly really good. My calf muscles are going to be huge when I get because of all the walking I’ve done. Goodnight everyone.