Email: Jessie Jennette

Friends,

What’s new? My new news is that I’m the newest addition to the PDA (Presbyterian Disaster Assistance) Village in New Orleans. (It’s the same set up as in Houma, just a little more crowded, and there are barracks instead of individual pods for volunteer housing.)

Yes, due to several of the PDA staff nearing the end of their terms and more volunteers coming in to fill their spots, I was officially transferred to Olive Tree Village on January 5 to become the work site manager here. Just for the record, the job descriptions for this position and the one I left in Houma, Louisiana, are very different from each other. As a village manager in Houma, my job was to maintain the village, receive, orient, and debrief volunteer groups, and provide what resources they required in order to live on the village while volunteering in the surrounding community during the week. Really, the job was just challenging enough to secure a position without any prior experience whatsoever. Very nice—I was just beginning to feel comfortable in my role in Houma. True, there was still room for improvement, nowhere near to being a proficient, but I wasn’t a complete fish out of water either.

Now? Now, I am experiencing true feelings of fish-out-of-water-ness. A work site manager is supposed to coordinate each group of volunteers with a job that they can contribute to, based on their skill levels. This involves driving to the work sites prior to the volunteers arriving, finding out what needs to be done on the worksite and in what order, not to mention being able to troubleshoot if a problem arises. It may not be the same for all of you, but when a wire of unknown origin is sticking out of the ceiling and needs to be tested before you can hang sheetrock around it, I am at sea. Nothing in my experience has prepared me to deal with generators that won’t start or what consistency floor leveler should be before you apply it to kitchen floors or how to set up the wet saw when laying tile.

My default response to all volunteers this past week has been, “Hold on, let me call and find out.” Mark Sell, the work site coordinator for PSL (the Presbytery of South Louisiana) in the New Orleans area, has probably assigned my number a different ring tone, I call him so many times trying to be “Mr. Fix-it” for the volunteers. Wait! It gets better. When one group of volunteers is too large to work efficiently at one home, then the group is split and put at two different work sites, and should there be more than one large group staying at Olive Tree, then the week involves me being middle man and phone receptionist to four or five different sites.

I know it’s unrealistic to expect to be great at your job from the beginning, and there is some progress being made: the generator needs to be level, the switch turned to “on,” and the choke opened all the way before pull­­-starting the engine; floor leveler lays more smoothly when it’s the consistency of a malted milkshake (in contrast to tile cement which needs to be somewhere between peanut butter and oatmeal). Wet saws are still a mystery, but maybe we’ll get there next week. Apparently being out of your element is not an indication that God meant for you to be elsewhere. Quite the contrary, being challenged, even to the point where your learning curve is steeper than a black diamond run in the Rockies, may be an indication that God wants you nowhere else—to learn, to grow, or just to make the decision to be happy in your circumstances despite the life-taking parts of it.

The village manager, Charles McDonald, a thin, distinguished Canadian gent with a black beard and a quick smile, has been a fantastic mentor and assures me that I will grow into my job. Indeed, village founder would be a more accurate description of him because he’s been here for about 16 months, and the PDA village in New Orleans exists primarily due to his efforts. There are no better conditions under which to be brand new to an area.

On a (more) personal note. It was such a blessing to have the mission crew from Westminster Presbyterian in Blackhawk Presbytery down here with me for a week! Aside from making great progress on the work sites and a big impression on the homeowners and staff, they were there when I was preparing to move on to Olive Tree and helped make the transition much easier for me. Thank you Karen, Terry, Mo, Jill, Sean, Katie, Thomas, Derek, and Ray! Miss Rita wants to know if you’ve finished off that gumbo. I think she’d be willing to make another five-gallon pot for you and overnight it to Illinois. (I told her if you wanted any more of her good cookin,’ you’d just have to come down to visit us again.)

With love,
Your salmon on the sidewalks of New Orleans,

Jessie