Some positive sights, and then more positive sights.

Monday, I stopped by the “old” Camp Hope. They are bulldozing it (they being the Parish officials), saying it’ll be more cost efficient to rebuild it from scratch than to rehab what was a gutted structure. Like every other building in the Parish, this former elementary school was under water for days following Hurricane Katrina.

I watched for a few minutes as the bulldozers did their thing, snapped a few pictures. Today, I went back and watched again. I definitely experienced a mix of emotions. It’s not all sentimental stuff, in the true sense. Rather, I’ve just always looked at that place as a symbol of something bigger here. It’s funny, I sat there looking at piles or ruin, but I had nothing but positive thoughts about it. Not to yank on the name, but it truly was a place of hope. Volunteers from all over the country came to St. Bernard Parish to help (and many who stayed there helped out all over the New Orleans area), and so many of them congregated here. How great is that. It’s been a time of need down here, two years plus now to be exact, and it’s places like Camp Hope that sort of came to symbolize what strong will and hope and positive energy can provide.

Not long before going by “old” Camp Hope today, a resident I met with this morning took me by her house in Chalmette. She’d lived here since the late 1960s and has lived in this particular neighborhood her entire life. She talked about the neighborhood more than anything else. She loves it there, and doesn’t want to leave. We walked around inside her home, and she’ll be the first to admit, it’s pretty messy. She’s in a small home just outside, and her brother is in a FEMA Trailer in the front yard. She doesn’t have the money to fix up the main house yet, still waiting on Road Home (like thousands of others). So in the meantime, “stuff” is just scattered everywhere. Maxine is a bit older (over 65, put it that way), and I know this heat down here, and it’s not really safe or healthy for anyone at that age to be pushing themselves too much in a house that could push 110 degrees and has no air circulation. She needs help.

She let me take some pictures. It wasn’t pretty in there, but I still looked at this as a positive sight as well. It’s something for Maxine to have hope for, to look forward to. She knows she’ll be back in the house someday, hopefully sooner rather than later. More importantly, it’s her home of 40-something years, and she hasn't thought about leaving it behind. Should she? That's not for anyone other than Maxine to answer, and she's already made that decision.

You see a lot of things around here that could be perceived as bad, as negative, as sad, as frightening. A lot of it was in my first few weeks here. Not anymore. It's pretty neat to see the good, in bad, if that makes any sense. Lord knows I wasn't very good at that before coming here.