The creative side of me never wants to repeat anything. Traveling sometimes means pushing yourself out of your comfort zone. So it was with some reluctance that I went back to Camp Hope and New Orleans. Two things made the trip a total joy. The first was being able to share Camp Hope and New Orleans with Appalachian Trail friend John Calhoun. John lives outside Birmingham Alabama and when I visited with him in January I invited him to come down to New Orleans. Despite it only being a six-hour drive, New Orleans is a far cry from Leeds Alabama. But not only did he throw himself into it with gusto he really made the effort to understand the city and what the people of New Orleans had been through.
The second thing that I enjoyed about New Orleans this time around was getting involved in the St Bernard Community Center. It's run by a man named Ezra from New Hampshire who came down, found out what people needed and made it happen. Two or three times a week they serve lunch to whoever needs it and run a huge foodbank. For people whose jobs disappeared after Katrina this can make all the difference in whether or not they make it. I put my retail, shelf-filling, logistics hat on and got to it making sure the shelves were filled, the right people knew what we had and that folks got what they needed. By the time I left I was splitting my time between them and the Habitat Re-Store.