Na'Leans!

Nothing like it. Going to New Orleans that summer was by far one of the best decisions I’ve ever made (next to coming to Virginia Tech). My church attends these Lutheran ‘Youth Gatherings’ that take place every three years, for Lutheran high school students across the country. It’s a time to meet people, to give back to the community, and to serve the Lord. The event is hosted by any city large enough to comfortably withhold a very rapid population increase of about 35 to 40 thousand kids, plus adult leaders. That being said, the city needs to have enough hotel rooms, a big enough arena/stadium, and a big enough convention center to fit this crowd in- not to mention plenty of restaurants to accommodate these hungry people’s appetites whenever needed. You can’t really understand the feeling of being close to and among 40,000 kids, every day of the week if you’re not there; it’s like high-def, you’re just not getting it. It’s not just like college; you’re not just walking by these people, completely ignoring them shutting yourself off from everyone with ‘The Carter III’ blaring through your ears until class starts. No, at the Youth Gathering it’s different, it’s much more different. At the Youth Gathering you notice people, you interact with people, and you go to the Superdome and interaction center twice or more a day with these people. You remember faces and names of every person you meet. You exchange hugs, phone numbers, and facebook information with kids you met just for a minute in your hotel lobby, maybe see them once or twice more for lunch and then never see them again because they live 2,000 miles west of where you live. And yet you’ll still stay in contact with them until the day you die. That’s just the way it was- crazy right? The atmosphere of this place was absolutly unbelievable. I’ll never in a million years find this many people who are just as, or even close to being so nice, so giving, so happy and so loving- I loved it and didn’t want to leave.
The whole ordeal started years in advance, three years in fact. Right after the last one had ended in San Antonio, Texas. We started planning, coming up with fundraising schemes, traveling methods of getting there and back, listing the names of people most likely to go and not go this time around, and so on (they were spur of the moment ideas but legitimate planning nonetheless). The ELCA (Evangelical Lutheran Church in America) already has arranged where the next Gathering’s going to be about 5 years in advance. So two years before San Antonio, we already knew where our next plot of adventure would be. Then a little girl named Katrina came along and kind of put that image on hold. So where would it be? No one, knew how long it would take New Orleans to completely recover, I mean, it was under 9 or so feet of still water. And Time magazines photos of “Katrina plus 1 year” weren’t very promising pictures that NOLA would have us as their guests in two years. Cars were still in trees, roads and sidewalks were still pulverized, houses and buildings still lay shambles all over the streets, and a lot of NOLA’s citizens were still homeless. Despite all of these appalling facts, New Orleans carried out her promise of hosting the 2009 Gathering.
18,000 dollars- that’s how much money it cost for all 17 of us from Hagerstown to go. That’s a lot of fundraising- and a lot of fundraising is what took place from the months of July 2008 to June 2009. We’d have bake sales almost every Sunday. Chocolate chip, sugar, oatmeal raisin, you name it we’d have it, 1 dollar four a bag of four. We’d have lunches composed of hundreds of cheap Sam’s Club hot dogs and ruffle’s potato chips after the 10 o’clock service. There was even a day when all of us gathered in the church’s kitchen one Saturday morning to dip cherries and pretzels into chocolate for 8 hours straight. We went through hell to raise that 18 thousand dollars. “It’ll be totally worth it,” we kept telling ourselves.
The day finally came, we were headed to Nalins! All packed up, backwards hat on, and cargo-short pockets stuffed packed with my phone, sunglasses, sunscreen, iPod, and wallet. We got to the airport, boarded the plane and by 4pm we were swimming in the Deep South heat and humidity. The first night was just a break-in night. After we unpacked everything in our luxurious hotel rooms at the Monteleon, we decided to go out on the town. The town was beautiful! So artsy and colorful and not caved in like so many other skyscraper cities- no building was painted white either, all dull yellow, red, green, purple, or blue with iron pillars and decks- the sidewalks were made of brick, there were exquisite pictures painted on the side of almost every building, there were a few street corner trio bands playing their jazz and blues medleys on their rustic, beat up guitars and trumpets, and the energy was alive. The food was of course phenomenal. There’s no other place that I’ll have shrimp for breakfast lunch and dinner and be totally fine with it. Every day seemed like the best day of the week. We would get up, shower, grab a quick bite to eat at the KFC down the road and then head to the convention center. The convention center was like 3 super-sized Walmarts stacked on top of each other then multiplied by 20 across. We played soccer, kickball volleyball and moon-bounce basketball inside of this place, we rappelled off three story walls, we rock-climbed and we of course made bracelets. It was impossible to do everything in that room in just one week. After wearing ourselves out on the moon bounce we’d get some lunch then chill at the hotel (which by the way had a pool and bar on the roof) for a few hours, get a nap or two and then head on over to the Superdome to rock out to some sick bands and listen to all the speakers from around the world give their spiel. Then after this, there would be dance parties and more crazy activities at 4 of the major hotels every night. The excitement didn’t stop until 1 in the morning.
On one of the 7 days we were there we had to take part in a service project, which could be anywhere from reading books to underprivileged children all day or picking up trash in a nearby park. Our church group got the environmental task of clearing out a lagoon at a community park. So, early Thursday morning (5am) we got up had some donuts and OJ to go and headed to the Superdome where one of the thirty charter buses was waiting to take our group to Joe Brown Park. After a thirty minute drive out of the city and into the suburbs, we arrived at Joe Brown Park. We thought the place was gonna look like hell when we got there; trash everywhere, trees down, but to our amazement it was the total opposite. Then we found out that that wasn’t the part of the park we were working on. The project leader led us to this lagoon/swamp that looked like it hadn’t been touched or walked on in years, you couldn’t see through any of it. “Grab a hoe, shovel, weed whacker and clippers and get started.” That’s all he said, and for about 6 hours, TLC (our church) and about 7 other charter buses full of kids in matching orange shirts, whacked away at vines, tall grass, dead trees, and weeds in 103 degree heat and humidity. I didn’t know I could sweat so much until that day.
The aftermath had everybody in awe; it looked like we had made a whole new park next to the old one. It’s amazing what that many people can do in one day, and the feeling you get when all is said and done is above gratifying. Then came our tour of the ninth-ward; the part of New Orleans that was hit the hardest during Katrina. We crossed the steel bridge and there it was. The bus fell silent for the next 20 minutes. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing, the houses were wrecked, bent, crooked and boarded up; the streets were pounded just like I had seen in the pictures. Torn down houses were left only with their concrete steps, driveways and foundations that had 8 ft. weeds and grass growing out of them. Yet still people lived back in here in this foul wretched place, in their warped, cracked and dead smelling houses that wouldn’t stand a chance of being fixed, and all of this 20 minutes away from the nearest church, food market and hospital. Why? Because it was their home and they wouldn’t live anywhere else. The levee’s were rebuilt but are still only strong enough to hold a category 2 or 3 hurricane. This got me going, I wanted so bad to help this place out, to rebuild everything, to fix these peoples lives, but I couldn’t. I would have to come back sometime, a couple years from now with another church or mission’s group- I promised myself I would. But for now it was time to leave the beautiful city of New Orleans. “So long,” we all said as the plane lifted off the ground and above clouds.
“To be honest… that was the best trip of my life,” Were the words that sailed out of my mouth after my uncle asked how the week went.” It was late; I’d say 12 or 1 am on a Tuesday night two months ago, when our plane finally landed back in BWI. “It was awesome, riveting, eye opening, electrifying, inspirational…,” adjectives kept popping in to my head; how was I going to describe everything that happened to the folk back home the next day, and in a timely manner. I decided to let go of the thought for the night, seeing that I had been up since six and had to go to work in about 7 hours. I switched on my iTouch, corked in my head phones and nestled down in to a bulky Chevy Suburban front seat. I still couldn’t wrap my mind around the fact that it was over, that a week’s time flew by in a matter of what seemed like 3 hours. All of that preparing, all of that fundraising, all of that waiting! It took so long just to get here and BAM, it was gone just like that. I was sad to say the least; I felt like a ten year old on December 26th. And it wasn’t just me; it was everybody who had traveled this long and brutal path to get to the Gathering; all 5 sleepy and drained kids behind me in that suburban, all 9 bushed and whacked kids in the commuter van behind us, and all three dog-tired and exhausted adult leaders who took on the burden of looking after 14 high schoolers for an entire week during their 2 and a half month break they had from teaching us. One day I’ll go back to that city, of course it won’t be the same without 40’000 other kids my age there, but still… best time of my life.