Habitats for Humanity

This Saturday I participated in Habitats for Humanity. We woke up at 7 am, drove more than half an hour to Musicians’ Village off N. Claiborne and stood outside freezing in the crisp early morning air.

And all for what?

Musicians’ Village is a place where Habitats has built a large group of homes so New Orleans musicians can come back and live together. If you ask me, its the best idea for the space, as it propagates the human imagination and spirit in terms of music. We were honored to be contributing to the project . . .and contribute we certainly did try to do!

We were put in charge of making sawhorses. At first, we were so excited that 5 seemed too small of a number, but then we started hammering and nailing. I sawed the wood with a circular saw while someone held the 2 by 4s for me, another team nailed, and another team measured out the wood. We thought we had a very efficient system going until we stood up our first sawhorse and discovered that it wasn’t quite aligned. See, the concept of simply cutting pieces and putting them together had led to us actually nailing them on in different places . . . and also created very unsturdy projects.

<<(At work on the sawhorses- me and my sister Jennifer)

And so we had to correct all of them . . . and you could tell which ones were ours. In our defense, everything turned out fine, and people ended up using our sawhorses that day. We also participated in painting and cleaning up and organizing when the frustration of the sawhorses got to us. We wanted so badly to get in the mix of building things but we quickly discovered that things don’t fit together in reality like they do in theory!!!

<<(My sister Amy working with one of the future homeowners)

But we had a great time, us Delta Xi Nu girls and the Sig Ep boys. Our very own admissions counselor Jeff was there too, working (or at least pretending to!)

I’m proud to say I got this amazing opportunity. I think it’s one truly unique to Tulane and New Orleans, and I hope that my little bit was just another piece in the giant puzzle that is rebuilding this city.