INSIGHT
Mission: Demolition (with Love)
Twenty-four OWU students waited anxiously at the Mueller Sports Center, bleary eyed and tired. We were getting ready to take off for Kenner, Louisiana, a suburb of New Orleans, to help with relief aid for the Katrina and Rita hurricanes.
Several weeks earlier Tori Babin, a freshman at OWU, informed us that there was opportunity to travel to New Orleans to help with relief work. Her mother, a coordinator for World Hope International, needed thirty students who were willing to come and willing to pay thirty dollars for their trip. Within days all but a few spots were filled.
As the day approached we prepared ourselves. Nurse Deb offered a First Aid class. We met Sunday evenings, planning details and praying intensely. Senior Casey Culver, the appointed trip leader, informed us that we would be tearing down sheetrock. Aside from that, the details were pretty foggy. Uncertainty lay before us.
During our 15-hour drive, I wondered what exactly our work would entail. Was World Hope going to throw us out there and expect us to work for twelve hours straight? What would our living conditions be like? Could I handle the strenuous work and the intense humidity? What exactly is sheetrock? How could we tear it down if it is rock? I’m sure I wasn’t the only one wondering about our situation and how the people might receive us.
The first day we unloaded a truck full of donated sheetrock and other construction materials. Then a group of us went to a house ravaged with mold; we threw everything out except for a few treasured items. The daughter-in-law of the man who owned the house struggled to hold back her tears. She finally broke down when Nurse Deb started talking to her. Brenda Gunter, a freshman at OWU, summed up how the woman was feeling: “It was so hard to throw away all that stuff. This is these peoples’ memories, their lives. We are throwing their lives away.”
The next day all of us returned to gut the house. Greg and his wife Jan, a couple from California who came to New Orleans to help, assigned us to a specific area of the house. We were a tight and motivated group. We left nothing undone. Carpets, doors, cabinets and drywall were all removed. We left nothing of the house but the wood frame and ceiling, and we did it all in five-and-a-half hours.
Our last day, a small group went to gut the last house. What took months to build was torn down -- stripped to its core -- in only a few hours.
I think this trip exceeded all our expectations. It wasn’t just the fact that we had showers, that we did not have to work for twelve hours a day, or that the food was so much better than the cafeteria’s. Instead, there was something oddly satisfying about the sore muscles and tired limbs. We boasted about them. They were signs of our productivity, of our accomplishments.
We built camaraderie around serving.
“We did so little in comparison to all that needs to be done, but it meant so much because we did what we could,” said sophomore Lindsay Hettich.
“It reminded me to appreciate what I have because I have more than others. Material things don’t matter,” said junior, Aaron Bunker. 
“It was humbling because we worked behind the scenes, tearing down the sheetrock and not getting to see the houses rebuilt. We don’t get thanked by humans but by God,” said sophomore Andy Holm.
But the residents did thank us for coming -- over and over again. And if they did not say it in so many words, they expressed it.
Our last night in New Orleans we had a worship service. There we saw the Gonzales’s, the couple who owned the second house we gutted. Nothing expressed more appreciation than the tears in Mrs. Gonzales’ eyes.