It's week two and we have already done so much! We are split into two crews for most work days and my crew has been working in Pearlington, Louisiana which is about 30 miles away from Bay St. Louis. Pearlington is where the eye of the hurricane hit and the community was totally devastated. We are building a house for Ms. Johnnie (many of the older women in the community go by Ms. ______). She is a super amazing woman who cooks lunch every single workday for all the volunteers in Pearlington. They have been serving this lunch every workday for like a year and a half, it is pretty inspiring their commitment to rebuilding. We have been mudding and taping drywall for the past week and we are getting close to finishing the whole house. Mudding and taping is semi-skilled labor and we have had a little learning hump but we are on our way to becoming solid drywallers. We get to eat lunch everyday with Ms. Johnnie and all the other volunteers in Pearlington and there is a pretty awesome rope swing hanging on a tree outside of Ms. Johnnie's house so we have had plenty of fun with all the work we have been doing. This last weekend we got a chance to meet some of the community at Second Saturday, a community gathering in coffee shops and art galleries near the retreat center where we are staying. Some of us also ran a 5K race in a nearby city on Saturday morning. There are nightly jogs on the beach and basketball games to keep people busy and I don't imagine that we will run out of things to do in our freetime before we leave.

Current Mood: excited

hi