Guess whose back? Back again. Drewbie’s back. Tell a friend.

It’s been far too long. In fact, a whole round has passed since the last blog. Sorry, life gets in the way. I was told recently that the readers just want the info, they don’t care about the presentation and how much thought I put into the wittiness and presentation of it all. Well, that’s not how I roll, so you will just have to be patient with the updates. This post will be a recap and will be followed shortly by an outlaying of the current proceedings. The team spent the half of October, all of November, and a large portion of December along the Mississippi Gulf Coast working with Habitat for Humanity. We worked in the cities of Ocean Springs (where we lived), Pascagoula, Pass Christian, Gulfport, and Biloxi. The beginning of our time was painful boring if we are being completely honest. We spent a lot of time doing what is known as punch list work. This type of work includes caulking, touch up paint, cleaning, and fixing minor problems. In short, it is all the things that you probably would not notice upon initially walking into a house to purchase it, but might annoy you upon further inspection. Our team became experts at taking a house that was completed but lacking in a few areas and turning it into a home ready to be showcased for a homeowner. While the transformations could be quite impressive, the satisfaction was not near as strong as we had seen at SBP for one simple reason: no one was moving into these houses. This fact gave the greatest contribution to the frustrations of the team during the first portion of the round. Habitat for Humanity homeowners must 1) have a job, 2) make under a certain amount of money, and 3) put in a large number of volunteer hours with Habitat. The current state of the Mississippi Coast, which has rebounded much quicker than New Orleans from Hurricane Katrina, is such that very few families qualify for both of the first two categories. The families who are in need of homes rarely have the necessary steady source of income required to get a home. As a result, many of the homes that are being completed have no owners to move into them. The result is a lack of new builds and lots of homes sitting empty for longer than expected. HFHMGC is working to remedy this by raising the maximum amount that people can make, but until the job market picks back up, it will make for an interesting situation for the organization and those for whom the need for housing is greatest.

Our work began to pick up during the second half of the round, as we began to work on a huge deck which connected 17 MEMA cottages. This was a project that really intrigued me because of what it meant for the community. Most importantly, it meant community. The goal for the project was to bring artists and artisans together in an artists’ village to begin to bring culture back to the city of Pascagoula. The idea of these people living together and sharing their skills, talents, and lives with one another and with the community was and continues to be very intriguing to me. Our work with this project was largely in putting the different railing systems up around the deck. We learned how to build wooden hand rails, run pipe and wire rails, and meet the building codes associated with each. In addition, we stained the deck and did some cleanup and landscaping around the exterior. This project was a great way to learn while on the job, thanks in large part to our supervisor Mark, who made sure that we not only learned how to do the things we were doing, but why we were doing them.

Finally, during the last week of our time on the coast, we got to do work on a new build, putting up the framing for a house, which is considerably more difficult on the coast, where all the new homes are built on stilts. It was cool to be able to see the detail that went into making sure everything was properly aligned at these beginning stages and to have the process of creating a home come full circle. Our time on the coast concluded on December 15^th with a bowling party with the whole Habitat staff, before we headed back to campus for a week and then home for winter break.