April+22+Work+Experience

This is my fifth year being part of Operation Katrina. The good news is I see a lot of progress being made - especially this year. More businesses have returned to the area. The sad news is that 17,000 homes still have damage from Operation Katrina and progress has been slow to help these people. This is our fourth work day in the Biloxi area. Sometimes we waited to do work so we expanded our services to help others. Our jobs have been very interesting - some involve working on homes for people who were directly impacted by Hurricane Katrina. Other jobs have been for some of Mercy Housing and Human Development's clients. The students are meeting many different people. I do hope they realize the difference they are making whether working on a Katrina project or one of MHHD's clients - these people are very grateful for our student' skills and help.

-Hello everyone. I am Nicholas Stewart and I just want to tell you about my work day. Today i woke up early, as usual, and departed to my work site. Mr. Aument was our chaperon today. I worked with Bob, Matt, Peter, Tory, and Marcello and we are building a deck. Today we finished setting posts in holes that we dug yesterday and filled the holes with concrete. We had to remove the steps from the back door so we could remove the vinal siding and nail the hedder board into the side of the house. I know that it does not sound like much but it was a lot of hard work! -

media type="custom" key="9178486" Hello, my name is R.J. Shackles and its been quite an experience so far for me here at Biloxi Mississippi. I have done a lot of work like grading, and some electrical work. Today, I was working with Sean, Bob, Ms. Steph, and Mr. Smiley. Today was day three working on a ceiling fan at Mrs. Lindsey's house. We had to abort it because there were so many problems with it and didn't want to make it worse. I felt horrible that there was nothing that we can do but she was still grateful that we tried. Later after that we shook it off and went to Mary Holm's house. She needed a new garbage disposal and we went to replace the old one with a new one. That became successful but then she also needed a new receptacle mounted in, but the one that we bought was in the other van because we keep switching up vans. So we went and bought a new one and later we mounted it. At the same time I had to go up on her roof and clean out the lint from the vent. I'm not afraid of heights so it wasn't a problem for me. Ms. Steph had the van and went to pick up the people from the other job sight to take them back home while we were invited to stay at Mary's house and made ourselves at home. We got to know Mary very well and we all laughed a lot because she is pretty funny as we got to know her. She offered to drive us up to Mercy housing since it took a while before they left to come get us. As she was driving us we had a great time and many laughs because it was one of those moments where you had to be there to laugh. It is now the weekend so we won't be doing as much work until Monday. Tomorrow we will be going to New Orleans so I'm pretty excited about that and I just know this trip is going to get better and better as the days go on.

We also have fun after work:

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