The best thing. . .

One of the best things about having been down here for such an extended period is having had the opportunity to see the changes. When a volunteer comes down for a week, he or she experiences what is, essentially, a snapshot -- often a very powerful, very compelling snapshot, but a snapshot nonetheless. But people who are around for months get to see something special: renaissance. The rebirth of an area.

I wasn't among the first responders on the Gulf Coast after the storms. I didn't get down here until February '06, nearly six months after the storms. When I arrived, there was no electricity, no running water where I was working. Something else was missing, too: life. A team'd be out gutting a house, and there would be no one else in the neighborhood. But people came back. A homeowner would see us gutting a house in his neighborhood, decide that maybe the neighborhood would come back after all, and come in to start gutting his own house. FEMA trailers started popping up in yards. After a couple months, you'd go to gut a house, and a neighbor whose house had already been gutted and de-molded would be in the process of putting up drywall, his house almost ready to be reinhabited. Streetlights came back. Water lines were repaired. People started driving by.

People who come down here now, a year and a half after the storms, are often stunned by the devastation, but they don't see how much has come back in a year alone. In a particularly misanthropic moment, it's easy to focus not on how much has been done but on how much is left to do. There is still a staggering amount of work to be done along the Gulf Coast, in some areas more than others, but to be able to see how far things have come, how much has been done -- it's very rewarding. Very rewarding indeed.