Email: Andy Greenhow

Greetings from New Orleans!

September is over, which means I must have been here for a month. I have to look at the calendar to tell me that because it doesn’t really feel that way. In one way, it feels like I only just arrived, but in another, I feel like I’ve been here forever. I don’t know that I’ve ever learned so much in a one month period ever before. But at the same time, I’m pretty sure I’ve never lived a month devoted entirely to orientation either. Almost every waking moment for the entire month was spent learning something: CPR, framing a house, living in community, or figuring out what to do with one’s life.

I arrived here the day after Labor Day with my roommate Caitlin from Baltimore. She was on the drive down from Philly so I figured we could save some money and keep each other awake on the long drive down to New Orleans. Virginia took forever, Tennessee was the land of Cracker Barrels (Thank you, Jesus, for that Sawmill Gravy), Georgia went by in a flash, and we crashed for the night in Alabama, which was...Alabama. The next day, we rolled through Mississippi, crossed the Twin Span Bridge over Lake Ponchartrain, and saw the towers of our new city in the distance. We got here and discovered that eight Young Adult Volunteers would be living in a shotgun house together. You can look up shotgun house on Wikipedia, but for our purposes, it’s important to note that shotguns are not built for privacy and ours has only one bathroom. I spent most of the month sleeping in the dining room with Stephen, a YAV from Louisville serving across the lake in Slidell. We had separate beds but I suspect this was only so there would be more places to sit for meals.

Our living-in-community orientation was a little redundant, but it reinforced that component of the program—that we were a community of people serving on the coast even though we are spread out over 130 miles, from Gulfport, Mississippi, to Houma, Louisiana. We did everything together and really came to know, love, and respect each other. We all got certified in CPR (cardio-pulmonary resuscitation) together and learned how to build houses together.

CPR training was an interesting day, mainly spent joking about one another’s resuscitation skills. We equally enjoyed our two weeks of construction training, which ranged from how to hammer a nail into the wall to how to hang drywall or how to use high-powered pneumatic nail guns (in a word, spectacular). I was surprised how much the training equipped me for dealing with volunteers. It was a flood of information, every day more than the previous, and my brain actually retained a lot of it. It also went a long way to giving me confidence that even if I didn’t know what I was doing, I could certainly look like I did.

Then, we flew to New Mexico for the last week of September before returning to the coast and our jobs in earnest. The Presbyterian Church has this beautiful property in northern New Mexico called Ghost Ranch, that was once one of Georgia O’Keeffe’s haunts (har har). All the Young Adult Volunteers serving in the United States converged on this retreat center nestled in the desert. One focus of the retreat was vocational discernment, which is churchspeak for “What are you doing with your life?”  We read a lot of Jeremiah and were asked to meditate on the questions, “What are you doing here?” and “Where are you going?”  We did this all while hiking and enjoying God’s creation, which is easy to do at Ghost Ranch. It was an inspiring week, and I came back to the coast ready to take on the world.

Thanks for reading and for your support. I’ll leave you with a few requests. Pray for my relationships at home and with my colleagues on the coast. Pray for me as I learn the hard way how to live simply (i.e. without any money). Pray for me as I live in this city that needs so much work. Hurricane Katrina left its mark everywhere, and my reactions fluctuate. Most of the time, I have this heart of stone and refuse to be affected. But I sometimes find that a tiny little remnant of the storm will send me into a moment of total despair. I need to find that response grounded in moderation; I’ll call it being functionally affected.

I miss you all and look forward to seeing you all again.

With love,

Andy Greenhow