Gustav 3

What a tricky thing. We were sure that we'd know our Gustav fate today, but after it slowed down and moved southwest and hit Jamaica last night, we are still unsure of whats going on. It is still predicted to hit the Gulf coast next week, but chances are just as likely for it to hit anywhere along the coast as they are to hit any other place. Hopefully we will know better tomorrow as it moves into the Gulf. Regardless we are acting as if we will be leaving on Saturday morning. At this point my short term volunteer Heather has agreed to come to Shreveport with me.

Everything has been rather strange and way different than what I would have ever expected a year ago (especially to think that all my friends are at the first UConn football game tonight). But yeah, I figured that today we may end up just sitting around feeling that it could be very pointless that we are doing work, but I forgot how community oriented lowernine.org is. They spent $500 to buy plywood and screws for local residents to help them board up their houses and will be doing so probably until Saturday afternoon. Then we spent the rest of the afternoon walking through the heat telling everyone we could that there was buses available to take them out of the storm if they didn't have evacuation plans. I only had one person in the 20 or so blocks (granted about half the houses were abandoned from Katrina) I covered say that they were not sure if they were leaving (ironically he lived next door to a family that was packing up to leave tonight).

What puts a very weird spin on the whole situation is that tomorrow is the 3 year anniversary of Katrina so there was and still are events planned in the city over the weekend to commemorate this. Tomorrow I am going to see a Jazz Funeral for Hurricane Katrina (if you don't know what it is wikipedia it, although I will probably post photos/videos) and am VERY excited. The place that is hosting it is also hosting some speeches later that day including one by our Mr. President. They asked my buddies Eric, Ryan, and I to help set up for it but we declined to walk through the heat to warn residents of the storm since we felt that saving human lives (which is essentially what we did) was more important than helping the president look good for a press shoot. After the Jazz Funeral the volunteers that are staying with me will come back to our house and help me get all our ducks in a row in case push comes to shove. This includes boarding the windows (since we have shutters we just need some 2x4s and not a lot of plywood), packing our own stuff, and getting gas/packing the car up. One of the strange/wasteful things we will need to do is to empty our fridge of all persihables. It is terrible to think about how much food/money I am going to be literally throwing away, but with no clue about traffic, power, and how long we will be away you need to be safe rather than sorry. My guess is that I may leave some where around 5 or 6 am on Saturday.

As I said before for more information on the current status of the storm please check out www.nola.com. Also check out my video that I posted on Sunday or Monday. Hope to hear from you all soon.