Here are a few more pics from Mississippi. This is a schoolteachers house. Diana and I ripped out all the windows. Woohoo!

And this is how, apparently, you remove vents from the rafters. Of course, you have to be part monkey to want to do that on cathedral ceilings….

And here is the garage at that house:

Here is the house across the street. I don’t think it is salvageable.

Here is another schoolteachers house where a bunch of our team was working.

Working on a wall in that same house:

This is a vacation cottage that we are working on. It is being given to a family whose house was completely destroyed. The owner has been in MS helping with rebuilding and is allowing use to a family they met here. Wow.

Overall here, it is overwhelming. There is so much damage and destruction that it seems more like a war zone than a community. It doesn’t seem like we are doing much, but when the owner comes to the house and sees the progress that we’ve made, it is truly powerful. One person said it so well when they said that we are turning their homes from hopeless disaster areas to hopeful construction sites.

One thing we learned is that FEMA charges the communities for the trailers (Tin Castles to the locals) and the cleanup. One good thing is that the city can claim from between $7-10 per hour for the volunteers who come down and do work as part of their repayment. So we are making an impact there too.

What an experience we all are having.