s of standing water on the floor of our bathroom. But don't worry, I turned into lady Macgyver and immediately requested a plunger, draino, a coffee maker, and a trash can. Yes. we survived. We switched camps, so we didn't have to stay another night at that hotel. We went off to a FEMA camp located in Algiers, south and west of the city. We stayed in a tent with about 700 others. We had hot showers and luxurious portajohns. We ate hot meals, twice a day and we were provided with a lunch to take 
with us on the job site. They took good care of us.The homes we worked in were molded and we wore N95 work masks and goggles. I became accustomed to the wonder bar tool. I even brought one home with me for around the house things. They really are a wonder.
Anyway, the hard part about describing the experience of this spring break trip is that I know before I went I had no idea what it was like down there. For the past 6 months I have been going about my life, it's been quite peachy. More than anything, this trip taught me a lot about what I believe about God. Do I believe in Him because life is good? Do I trust Him because of what He does for me? Do I praise Him for who He is? Will I love Him the same if a hurricane takes away everything I own? Will I praise Him? Where are you in your spiritual journey? Cause you're on one right now, whether you know it or not. If you get a chance, check out everystudent.com. Some of these big questions find themselves on the pages of this site. It's worth exploring.
I've posted my pictures on shutterfly for now. Check them out here.
here is an article:
E&P in New Orleans: 'The Press Has Moved on Too Fast'
By Mark Fitzgerald
Published: December 19, 2005 12:15 PM ET
CHICAGO New Orleans is a devastated city. I know,that's not exactly breaking news. But I just got back from there, and all I can say to everyone I've talked to since is: New Orleans is a devastated city, almost beyond belief.
You've got to see it, I told people again and again this weekend, back home in Chicago. Everyone in America should see it.
Because you're not seeing it in your newspaper. Not really.
The press, of course, is famous for rushing to disasters, and then moving on. But it's moved on too fast in New Orleans, with the result that Americans either figure the city has descended into anarchy, or is doing just fine.
Instead, block after block, mile after mile, New Orleans is a landscape of houses bumped off their foundations, spray-painted by National Guardsmen with big X's, inscrutable markings except for the bottom number that signifies whether a body, or two or three were found inside.
New Orleans is a pile of TVs on every other street. It is a highway underpass converted into a graveyard of flooded cars. It's a New Yorker magazine poking up from the silt a few hundred yards from the breach in the London Avenue levee, the really bad breach that nobody outside of New Orleans has heard about. It's a city of refrigerators duct-taped and dumped on the sidewalk, some of them converted into advertisements for itinerant demolition crews: "Gutting," the spray paint legend will say, followed by a phone number.
True enough, New Orleans can still make the front pages in America, more than 100 days since Hurricane Katrina stormed ashore.
Everyone headlined President Bush's commitment to rebuild the city's levees with $3.1 billion, and The New York Times reported over the weekend that just about every person who stayed in New Orleans during Katrina did so by choice--news, perhaps, to the rest of America, but a fact long-ago documented by The Times-Picayune.
A few out-of-town papers have made a commitment to ongoing coverage of the struggle to clean up and rebuild New Orleans. But making my first visit since Katrina to New Orleans--a city I've visited nearly a dozen times for the past two decades, thanks mostly to newspaper industry conventions--I was struck at how little prepared I was for what I saw.
The same national media that riveted us by showing the horror of the conditions endured by hurricane survivors at the Superdome and the Convention Center now tells the New Orleans story without much passion. It's all about numbers, like the levee appropriation, or bloodless debates about how--or even whether--to rebuild that great city.
Even when newspapers go down there to write about, say, the struggle to reopen such storied restaurants as Galatoire's or Commander's Palace, the context of daily New Orleans living gets lost.
For instance, until I went to New Orleans myself, I had no idea that virtually no McDonald's fast-food sites have reopened inside New Orleans. I had no idea that traffic lights are non-existent outside of downtown.
I glimpsed one reason for this lack of context just as I was leaving Friday. New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin was holding one of his frequent town meetings at the downtown Sheraton hotel, and I figured I had just enough time to catch it before getting the last flight back to Chicago.
Before the meeting, he held a press conference, with the ground rules being that every reporter could ask two questions. As Nagin's harried press spokeswoman went down the line, it became apparent that the reporters were either New Orleans locals, or foreigners. There were two crews from Japanese television, and at least three correspondents from Europe. So far as I could see there were no newspaper or broadcast reporters from outside Louisiana.
So there are few from outside the city to tell the hard story of how New Orleans is an odd mix of civilization carrying on under almost survivalist conditions.
At night, the French Quarter can seem almost normal, its bars packed and the music spilling onto the streets as in days of old. But then you can hear two words I never expected to hear in New Orleans: "Last call." There's a 2 a.m. curfew, and long before that you notice that the streets are filled almost entirely by males, demolition and construction workers who have replaced tourists.
Friday, empty streetcars adorned with swags of Christmas green rode the tracks downtown in dry runs for the scheduled resumption of service this past Sunday.
Outside of downtown, the devastation is numbing and redefines normal. The tenth, or hundredth, time you see "2 cats found" or "house off foundation" spray-painted in orange on the wall of what used to be someone's family home, the fact is remarkable only in its familiarity.
During the day, whole neighborhoods of New Orleans are utterly deserted, and at night they are dark and silent. It would be a cruel fate indeed if this great American city were to similarly fade into darkness while the press remains silent.
Driving in the Lower 9th Ward early Friday afternoon, I saw orange graffiti on a wrecked home that thankfully wasn't an "X" with a body count. "Psalm 55:18" was all it said.
The King James version renders the verse this way:
"He hath delivered my soul in peace
from the battle that was against me:
for there were many with me."
Restless and unpeacable though we often are, we in the press must stay among the many who abide with that anonymous and hopeful soul in New Orleans.
---------------------------------
Mark Fitzgerald (mfitzgerald@editorandpublisher.com) is E&P's editor-at-large
