Today, we got up around 7:30. Some of us headed off for a grocery adventure, while the rest posted yesterday’s blog and set up the work area at the church. (We will be posting in the mornings, as the church is locked in the evenings.) For work, we began with emptying 2 large closets/small rooms and the peeling paint got vigorously scraped off in preparation for painting. While that was going on, we put donation stickers in the front of bibles, prayer books (in 2 languages), and song books. We speculate that there were about 500 books in total! Then tile got ripped off the floors in the rooms we scraped. 15 wicked heavy army cots were retrieved from a nearby church and unloaded into our house in anticipation of houseguests to arrive Saturday. These projects were expected to take us all day, and it was only 11:30! About this time, bellies grumbled, and we headed to St. Bernard Parish to meet our new friends at Project HOPE. As it turns out, Segie is from Cornish NH and she recognized Sophie from 5 years ago where they met at a music festival (Cornstalk). Niko gave us a warm welcome, Jeff prepared a nice lunch for us, and Fong got us going working at one of the volunteer residences. After picking up LOTS of shingles from a recently completed roofing project, we headed to a neighborhood house and completed the gutting process, where we pulled approximately one huge bunch of nails to clear the studs for sheet rocking. Drake, a local 9 year old, spoke often of milkshakes, and helped out pulling nails (sometimes while perched on Owen’s shoulders!). During this process, it was about 97 degrees, and we got to wear our first respirators which felt like mouth saunas. We wrapped it up around 4:30, and headed to HOPE for decontamination. Finally, we had a wonderful dinner at Emergency Communities with Jeff and Segie. A dang good day.