Well, I’m heading back to New Orleans this weekend. This time, with three dozen other folks from Our Lady of Lourdes parish. We’re going to work with Catholic Charities to help rebuild homes destroyed by Hurricane Katrina. On this trip last year, we gutted out houses, but now we’re in a rebuilding phase. I’m told [...]

Dear President Bush, I just watched you deliver your sixth State of the Union address, and I’m a bit disappointed. You made no mention of the problems we are experiencing recovering from the worst natural disaster in American history.
Hurricane Katrina made landfall on the Gulf Coast on August 29, 2005. After 17 months, that entire [...]

So, I’m back here now, in my cozy home in De Pere, Wisconsin. I didn’t bring a laptop with me on the trip, so I wrote in my journal while in New Orleans, and I’m just now putting the final touches on the blog entries here on my web site. Please also check out Pat [...]

Saturday. Our overnight drive went very well. We made no wrong turns, and we made excellent time. I had driven a short shift around 3:00am, and then Dawn drove the final stretch. Hwy 41 near Oshkosh was a sight for sore eyes.
We pulled into my driveway at 8:00am. So it took us 19 1/2 hours [...]

Friday. This was a very interesting day. Neil had a special project for us. There is an old woman who is in the hospital dying of cancer. Her husband is blind, and she just wanted to see if anyone could get some valuables out of her house. The house itself was going to be bulldozed, [...]

Thursday. I was up this morning at 5:30am as usual. Meals this week have been a crap shoot. Catholic Charities provides breakfast items in the morning like fruit, cereal, milk, bread, bagels. But some mornings there just isn’t much there, even though I’m one of the first ones to the kitchen. They also provide food [...]

Wednesday. Today started out unique, because there’s a priest here with a different group, and he says Mass at 6:30 each morning. So I went to Mass today. It was pretty nice. It was just in the back room behind the stage; the altar was one of those desk chairs with a table cloth over [...]

Tuesday. We continued with the house on Elder St today. This house had those plaster walls on top of wood slats. I was on the stairway going upstairs, and as I pulled off some wood slats, underneath was a large nest of cockroaches. These are the biggest cockroaches I’ve ever seen! It didn’t take long [...]

Monday. I woke up at 5:30am after sleeping quite well. We headed over to St. Raymond’s School (map), the central location from which Catholic Charities sends out its work crews. Since we had 32 people, we split into groups of 15 & 17. Neil was the site supervisor for my group. He’s the guy that [...]

It’s quite hard to have 5 cars stay together, so we just planned to meet at the first rest stop south of the Louisiana border. We arrived around 4:00am just behind a couple of cars and before another (not bad for having gone the long way through Chicago). We all rested there for a bit, [...]

Today was fun. We’ve got 32 people making this trip to Louisiana. So we’re taking 7 cars. Two cars left early this morning and are going to spend the night in Memphis, finishing the trip tomorrow morning. The rest of us left the Our Lady of Lourdes parking lot at 10:00am and are driving straight [...]

Very cool evening. Fr. Tim said Mass for our New Orleans-bound group tonight at 7:30 at Our Lady of Lourdes. This Mass was planned at the last minute, and due to some other family happenings, my wife and two of my daughters couldn’t join me. But I was glad that my youngest daughter and my [...]