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Wednesday, Dec 06, 2006
Different Kinds of Overwhelmed
D and I spent the day in Gentilly working on some Habitat for Humanity houses. They have a half dozen or more houses going up on a couple of blocks. It's smaller than the Musician's Village project in the Upper Ninth, but was impressive none-the-less.
One the site I worked, we put up all the roof trusses on a house today, including a hip on one end. It was nice to see a big chunk of work get done. By the end of the day tomorrow we should be able to get the roof decked.
This evening we saw a film, Left Behind, about the New Orleans Public schools as seen through the eyes of some of the kids on Dumaine. I don't believe M appear on film, but the house did.
The point of the film, hammered in over and over again is that the school system is a multilayered clusterfuck. The root causes are numerous and intractable.
The housing and reconstruction issue is vast and overwhelming, but I can visualize the solution -- with enough lumber and cinder block and nails, etc., something can be done. Fixing the school system? I just don't know. But M has been plugging away for years, not with the vast problems, but with individual kids and their daily struggles.
While the magnitude of the problems in the film is depressing, the survival and success of the three boys at the heart of the film is a hopeful story.