Saad Riaz

I haven’t been awake at 8am in a long time. Getting up from the bed at 8 and heading straight to work is something that I came down here to do, and it makes me happy. And it is fun! Lower 9th Village is one of the towns affected by the Hurricane Katrina six years back. But it’s the area in New Orleans that has not been given much attention. When I came here I was expecting some development in this area since it’s been six years since the catastrophe. But it hasn’t changed much within the last three four years. Houses here are still damaged and places that haven’t had any improvement. The towns nearby, that were affected worse are way better off than the lower ninth village, since they were being helped, had sponsors but for no reason the lower ninth ward was left without help.

It was my dream to come here and help out the people. We came at the Lower Ninth Ward to a warehouse and have stayed here since then. It is supposed to be a Community Center and was our job to make it look like one and make it worthy for people to actually come and get help they wanted. The day we came, it was a dangerous place for children, due to all the tools and equipment lying around. Banners of Universities whose students have been here were all scattered around on the roof and hanging badly, library was just dumped with books and two of the rooms were filled with chairs and other wood stuff. In two days we changed a lot of that. Removing all the dangerous tools, shifting the chairs, tables, broken doors, pieces of wood, all the scrap metal, books and weeding the garden outside was hard work. Right now the library looks awesome, Andy and I did most of the poster arranging all day today- getting up on the ladder 15 feet high and hanging the posters, taking some off was fun. I also helped in putting on the wall on one side of the shed and also painting it. It is tiring but a lot of fun and that is what keeps everyone going. We also went to a ranch. It was far from the warehouse but we had a lot of fun there. We got to ride horses, give them baths and had an amazing dinner. We also cleaned the stables, helped with cleaning the land and came back around 6pm.

We took tour of the city and saw all the damaged houses; some had holes in their roofs. These holes held a significance because what Mack, our guide, told us was that during the hurricane at the moment the water was rushing in the streets and into the houses they had just a few seconds to make a hole in their houses and escape, and that way their houses too could have been saved. But many died in the attics and a few made it out. Also something what I came to know were the crosses on every house in the town. The crossed had numbers on two sides and writing on the other two. One showed how many people had died in that house; one that how many animals died and the writing was letters that showed what company helped them.

This trip so far has been really good. Though we didn’t get to build much but there has been a lot of other stuff that is also something that is helping the villagers here. I came to know about some great stuff, about New Orleans and how it was affected.

A Village to Rebuild 

A hand to lend 

A Great Experience