Friday Night everything's all right

I've been real busy in this adminstrative stuff. In the past two days:

• We got a pallet puller! If you have ever shipped freight, you know about pallet jacks, forklifts, wrapping flats. Pallet pullers look like the old ice carrying hooks with teeth! You can hook the chain onto the forklift, the other end to the puller, and the scissor-action forces the teeth to bite into the middle skid as you pull it to the lip of the truck.
• We got rollers in the storage trailers! We have an old Fed Ex side loading trailer with built in rollers in the floor. We had been using pallet jacks, turning the pallets by hand inside the truck. Today with the help of the trucker James and a plumber brother from Florida, Dana, we got the air into the system enough to push the rollers up! Now we can work more than hard, we can work smart, too, letting the rollers do the work for us.
• Dana also helped us get a drainage connection from the clothes washer to the clean out into the sewer instead of running out into the drive.
• Some electrician brothers were able to get some camper hookups (electric) installed at the building enabling about 10 campers to park and get juiced at the building. It's not working yet, though: The breaker needed to finish the project is almost $1000.
• Speaking of electricians, Jim was able to troubleshoot and fix a lot of the electical problems we were having at the building. The service needed beefing up.

A RIDE THROUGH THE BAYOUS

cattails, sugarcane, winding roads, mud, images of wader boots, floppy hats, and saggy khakis

After dropping off Tim at the airport in Baton Rouge, I took a ride down to Houma (pronounced HOME-a). I was meeting Don Neyland, the preacher at Montagut (pronouned Mont-a-gew) to give him a generator and some supplies for the church "way down in the bayou." The church was a plant from the Hollywood St. Church in Houma about 12 years ago, starting with the call to Brother Neyland and his family and two newly birthed Christian ladies. Now their membership is about 60 and about half of the people are flooded out of their homes. To put this into perspective, they are going through with Rita what New Orleans went through with Katrina. Also-- people in Slidell (a badly hit area) have gone through the same process that is brand new for these souls.

Don grew up in the Texas coast and has been in LA for 12 years. He's seen lots of storms. He described what many people don't know: IT HASN'T HAPPENED LIKE THIS IN OUR LIFETIME. This clean-up/renewal/healing era is a different thing that we've ever experienced before.

There are some people here this weekend from the Trauma Response Assistance for Children , they are from New York and they're here to help. Many of them were involved in the recovery effort after the tragic event of 9-11.

Remind me to tell you about the Robinsons. I'll send you a picture next time. Goodby