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

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