Thursday - October 8

Today’s Team Bloggers are John Harter, Claudia and Bill Fulton . . .

It was 80 degrees before the sun rose with a forecast for 91 actual – with a heat index feeling like 105 – we were all grateful for God’s beautiful shielding cumulus clouds and the gentle breeze which mitigated this challenging environment.  Could this really be the middle of October?  And while it would clearly be too hot to work around our own house, we gladly sweated together to continue our mission together here.  We are a remarkable community working together – asking one another for help as we go about our various tasks – freely helping each other – caring for one another as heat appears to be getting the better of one or other – and bandaging the small injuries of fingers banged with hammers.  We truly have seemed to have found our work rhythm accomplishing a good deal.

Claudia was today’s specialist cutter at Claudia’s Chop Shop.  Everybody on site measured their individual cutting needs, wrote the specs on a scrap piece of wood and took the order to Claudia who delivered accurate service with tools she didn’t even know she was skilled with yesterday.

Mid morning we were blessed by an Angelic member of St Charles Ave Presbyterian Women, Laura St Clair, bearing gallons of iced coffee to the parched.   

Presbyterian jewelry was also available for sale from the trunk of the car, with all proceeds benefiting RHINO’s work here on Ferry Place. 

Jeremy – our Habitat for Humanity site manager – 

should be known as St. Jeremy as he directs this Stamford crew of well-meaning but relatively unskilled construction workers.  He patiently teaches us new skills we need and encourages ALL to try new tasks.  In fact, today he shuffled the assignments so that we didn’t get to use the skills we learned yesterday.  He is remarkably skilled as a general contractor, but even more blessed as a caring leader with more patience than we can comprehend.  Thank you, God, for our Jeremy.

We continued to wrap our entire house with custom cut pieces of 4 x 8 foot pressed boards with just about everybody up on ladders for long periods pounding nails.  The second floor walls were all completed yesterday and everything was top-tied together today.  Construction standards are particularly rigorous as this little house needs to be able to withstand the next hurricane with potential 150 mph winds.

Upon returning to the hotel after a full days work, there was an incident involving one of our male congregants getting ice at the ice machine and one of our female congregants changing into her bathing suit with the room door open across from the ice machine.  There was considerable shrieking – but our male member was without his glasses and had to be told what he missed later that evening.

Tonight, the church’s hospitality continued with a very nice dinner at the home of one of their fine young couples, Mike and Mary Dawn Pugh.  We were joined by the Associate Minister, Kelly Hofstetter and her husband Matt.  

As is not unusual here, we traveled East to get to a part of New Orleans called the “West Bank” of the Mississippi River.  Doug Abel had complained that he had never seen the Mississippi after several trips to New Orleans.  So, tonight we went across one of the bridges to give him a view of the “Big Muddy” at last.  Now that the day has ended, we are looking forward to another hot time of productive work on “our” house tomorrow.  We ask that you keep your prayers and comments coming.

Yes, it was hot in New Orleans today.