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May 3, 2006
Today we spent the day in Slidell, La., where Habitat built its first Gulf Coast house after Katrina. It was an early morning, leaving our New Orleans hotel at 7 a.m. to be at the morning devotions and construction meeting in Slidell by 8.
We arrived to find a crowd of more than 30 volunteers and staff members, ready for a day of hard work. The NBC Today show house, and the neighbor's house, are done, moved into. Two across the street are being finished up.
A few blocks away, on Washington Avenue, several houses have been repaired after the storm, and four more foundations are under way.
There, a Thrivent Builds team was working. Thrivent Financial for Lutherans had already pledged $100 million to Habitat for Humanity International before Katrina. After Katrina, Thrivent gave $5 million more to support Habitat's hurricane response, and they have been sending work teams composed of their members to the Gulf Coast to help rebuild.
After a full day visiting build sites in Slidell, Steffan and I returned to New Orleans, where we checked into a different hotel, in the business district. It hadn't fared as well during the storm as our hotel in the French Quarter; the lobby was still "under renovation" for some of the water damage it had sustained.
After we got settled, I went out to dinner with a friend from college who lives in New Orleans now. Ashley picked me up and we went to eat Indian food at a restaurant called Nirvana. "They were one of the first places to reopen after the storm," Ashley explained, "so I like to patronize them." We enjoyed naan bread and spicy eggplant curry and each other's company and gossip about college classmates - and things in New Orleans, for a little while, seemed almost normal.