Final Thoughts

Well it took me a while to post a blog about this but now that I have some time (I can’t sleep) I figured I would... One day after Hog's (our men’s bible study) the boys and I were just kind of sitting around discussing why God lets horrible things happen, such as Hurricane Katrina. Then we started talking about what we could do to help.  We were brainstorming of different ideas. We thought of donating a large amount and thought man that’s not very big people donate thousands of dollars I can only give about 200... So we thought we could donate food money and clothes. That sounds like a lot... But deep down I knew it wasn’t enough.  One of my best friends Curt says, "Hey my church group is trying to gather people to go over there and actually help if you call him tonight I think you might be able to go over there... now making a decision if I want to go to Mississippi to help is a pretty big deal I mean at first he said 3 days and now were talking 10 so I would miss some school.. But I thought to myself ....when else would I have a chance to do something like this.....so I said yes. We volunteered for a company called Alaska Structures. Anyway my flight left on September 13th and we were scheduled to be back on the 23rd in 2005 the only person I knew that went up there was my good buddy Curt (who happens to be number 3 on my top 8).. So we first arrived in Pensacola Florida. There was a HUGE nice beach. Our house looked like a freakin’ road rules house it was like a 2 million dollar house. We had beachside view with a huge flat screen plasma TV, and 4 stories. We were living the high life. We went out to the beach and chilled and man it was great. We got news that night that we had to be ready to go around 5. (3am Pac time) which is about the time I usually go to sleep. Well I figured eh ill just sleep on the ride over which was a 4 hour drive there and a 4 hour drive back. When we first started driving to Mississippi I remember we were in Alabama and we saw some signs that got blown over and we were all like oh man look at that. That’s crazy! And some burger king sings blew over and what not. Well the closer we got to Mississippi. The more reality kicked in. it was seriously a DISASTER. I mean there were houses that were on the freeway. Boats were everywhere it smelt like sewage. There were NO houses standing on the beach. People’s belongings were scattered everywhere. I was seriously in shock. The whole time I was there i didn’t see ONE animal. It seriously looked like a huge bomb went off but there was no fire and just blasted everything 500 yards from its original location. I wish words or even pictures for that matter could describe what I saw but it doesn’t even give it justice.   Well we get to our worksite in Waveland Mississippi. And it’s hot as heck already and its only 9:30 I was thinking man I’m going to die. But the first day we worked they showed us how we were going to be putting up the structures. There pretty basic 20-60 wooden flat slabs with arches. They have electrical and AC there about 40k a piece... they’re really nice. But we put up a structure for a school and one for the Priest the first day. Alaska Structures wanted to put up a total of 275 total Structures I was thinking great. I don’t know what I got myself into... well for the first 3 days we worked from morning tell we couldn’t see anymore putting up as many structures as we could.  We weren’t putting them up as fast as we should have been it was like 3 a day or so. So we had to think of a new strategy. I think we had about 13 people from Curt’s church led by the one and only Pastor Rob. Also there were people from Las Crusis, New Mexico who worked for Alaska structures. We decided that we needed to move closer because we were wasting so much time just driving! So we ended up moving to Mississippi. Which was about 1 hour away from the worksite (14 miles from New Orleans). Still the new house we stayed at was a HUGE ranch and had the biggest horse in Mississippi and a mad hooottt daughter with a sweet southern accent ha ha... Any ways we moved in over there and well it was pretty nice. Although work was getting harder and harder on our bodies. I was on the lifting team (cause I guess I’m a pretty big guy) so all i did all day was lift big pieces of metal and moved them around with some other big guys ha ha.... I didn’t mind at all. But eventually this got to me. Curt and I were tired of working on the blacktop it was 107 degrees with 98% humidity and I just couldn’t take it in the sun anymore so we both decided we were going to unload the AC units... not a good idea.......these things weighed about 600lbs a piece there was 60 of them and they were all stacked on top of each other.. Not to mention the blowers weighed about 300lbs a piece and we had to move those as well. We finished that and then they wanted us to move some more metal. Seriously that’s the day I will never forget how sore my whole body was I went through a BRAND new gloves in 1 day. By the end of the day the gloves were shot. We ended up working about 13 hour days. This eventually started getting to us; I mean the heat and the pressure that we need to be making so many structures and it got really rough. Well we ended up making 32 structures: schools, medical clinics, church, homes, police department. We slammed out 9 the last day we were there. I’ve never worked that hard in my entire life. There’s people such as Rob, Curt, TC, Lisa, Holly and Jerry I seriously couldn’t have done it without the power team.  They’re such an inspiring group of people... I will NEVER forget the time that I spent over there. I want to eventually volunteer for many more relief teams because I felt that it was life changing for me. Here is the video that they ended up making. Man like I said I’ve lost like 40lbs so I look rather large in the movie ha ha.. If you have anymore questions about the trip please feel free to ask me... Craig