WHere are we?

For those of you we forgot to tell, we have been in the Florida Keys working with Habitat for Humanity in Hurricane recovery. Hurricane Wilma hit here in October, it was a catagory 2 but the storm surge caught everyone by surprise. It didnt make as many headlines as Katrina (Possibly because the Mayor and the Governor aren't Idiots), but it affected peoples lives just as much as Katrina. Its been said it's the first time the Gulf and the Atlantic met on land in the Keys...Aparrently the low pressure on the Atlantic side sucked the gulf waters across teh Keys....some people reported seing the shallow gulf side looking like mud flats, before it all came back across the Keys back to where it belonged. How did we end up here? We were looking for a way to help, but didnt want to just show up somewhere and be in the Way. The habitat for Humanity web page showed an ongoing opportunity here in the Keys, and when we contacted them they said 'Come on Down! Turns out this HfH office has been doing disaster recovery since Hurricane George in 1998. Their resale store is actually in a county building, and they hosted FEMA, the SBA, and other disaster recovery agencies, which provided a kind of "One Stop Shopping" for the local folks. THere are 25 or so RV's, ranging from a 15 ft A-Frame pop-up to a 45 ft custom motor home with a 30ft trailer equipped with a portable workshop on site at the Habitat building. Not the most fancy accomodations we have enjoyed in 2 years, but all our neighbors are great people and fun to be around.

Things are going OK here, we are getting a lot of stuff done for folks who cant do it for themselves. A typical job is to pull out the drywall to above the floodline, (usually about 4 ft), remove anything in the walls, let it dry out, spray for mould, then re-drywall and finish. Oh, yeah, any electrical device that was underwater ususally has to be replaced. this often means redoing at least part of the system, since to repair it requires bringing it to current code standards. Some of the stuff we are looking at probably(!) wasn't done by an electrician in the first place, so there are some interesting challenges!

Most of the folks we are helping would be good candidates for the home makeover show. One has terminal cancer and cant get to the upstairs living area that was undamaged; one is a widowed lady barely able to hang on to her property, with the taxes getting so high, one is a disabled gentleman who keeps trying to get us down the street to help his friends who "need it worse than I do!" Of course, there are some who made it into the system who could probably do it without our help, but we have adapted a quote from the Crusades..."God will recognize his own". We just do our best to make it nicer than when we got there...

The weather here has been warm and humid, ranging from highs of mid 70's with 80% and better humidity to low 60's. Its funny when it gets down to the 60's, you can tell right away who the locals are! They dont all wear Parkas, but there is an amusing assortment of coats/jackets/sweaters that come out when it cools off! all the snowbirds continue with shorts and windbreakers!

Looks like we will be leaving here the first of the month We'll be working our way to the north, to be in Leyland, MS, early March for a Habitat build. Folks who are here who have done both keep telling us it's totally different at a build than in Disaster recovery, so we are looking forward to seeing how that goes.

Not sure where we will be spending the summer, but long term thinking (not firm enough to be called Plans at this point!) have us following the Mississippi River to the headwaters this spring, then working our way back to the west. We have thought about Alaska this summer, but are watching gas prices before we make a decision. We still plan on getting to Yellowstone one day!

Jim and Cathy
jimandcathygreen@earthlink.net
http://home.earthlink.net/~thegeekandhippie/
BLOG: http://thegeekandhippie.blogspot.com/