Brokenness

Thursday, March 27, 2008

Our first trip into the 9th ward was indescribable. We rode around different neighborhoods because we were early for our church service on Sunday (I’ll blog about that later!).

All 15 of us in our van were completely silent. I mean dead silence. We didn’t have anything to say. We were overwhelmed with what we were seeing.

Every house was empty; we could literally see through all the houses because they were all gutted and empty inside. However, the yards and porches were filled with left over belongings like teddy bears, lawn furniture, clothing etc.

It literally just looked like it happened two weeks ago. That’s unacceptable. I felt as if the hurricane just came through, tossed everything around, and the families weren’t back yet. I was hoping everyone was going to come back next week and clean up their homes, but then I remembered this happened almost three years ago and that probably wasn’t going to happen, ever.

There were large X’s on all the houses (pictured below) with numbers all around it. We later learned what they all meant. The date was on the top and the bottom number was the number of dead bodes found inside the home. It was very eerie when we passed one home that had a six on the bottom.

I didn’t cry while passing through the neighborhood because I think I was still processing everything (however, I did later in the week, which I’ll write about later).

We thought the area was deserted until we pulled up to Carver Desire Street Baptist, which believe me was full of life. I titled this entry brokenness because that’s exactly what I saw and that’s what the speaker of our nightly worship services spoke on…more on that later too. This isn't even the worst part, we did visit that area and that will come later.

Here are some pictures that we experienced: