We got a fair amount done today. Actually, after all these years, we are pretty good at this. It helps to have a bunch of engineers on the team as well.
Today we started putting windows in House 49 and siding on House 48.
Shooting pictures of installing windows is always tricky because you go from complete darkness on the inside to bright sunlight on the outside. So here Kristin saws away while Lorenzo clears the sheeting from the outside, until Kristin emerges like a cicada.
Meanwhile next door, Nicole and Jon cut the siding that is going to go into the soffets.
Bird boxes, those corners under the roof are always tricky. Jon and Dino measure them out with care.
Next door, the crew works installing the windows.
Emma came out to watch us work and make sure we are doing a good job on what will soon be her granddaughter’s house. Another daughter lives across the street and another around the corner. Lots of family connections in this neighborhood. Habitat homeowners have to put in a certain amount of work on their houses or another, so Pierre and Ariel came down to help. It is always good to meet the people who are going to move in.
Tomorrow we are going to start mudding and sanding the walls in one of the houses Stay tuned!
The West Tallahatchie Habitat for Humanity Chapter got started some time after Sr. Anne Brooks came down to run the Tutwiler Clinic. After recovering from a longterm physical condition that left her unable to walk, Sr. Anne was encouraged by her doctor to go to medical school. To pay back the government funding for her tuition, she had to work for several years in an underserved community. She wound up in Tutwiler, where she remained for the next thirty-five years or so.
Shortly thereafter, Sr. Maureen Delaney joined her and started the Tutwiler Community Education Center.
And from there the West Tallahatchie Habitat Chapter was born. We are currently working on House #49. Sister Anne has since retired and Sister Maureen became the head of her order, but the work they started goes on. Among the things the community center does is provide space for the Tutwiler Quilters.
We are back for our 20th year here back in Tutwiler. After all this time, our routine is pretty well developed, though in recent years we have come down on Sunday rather than Saturday.
We always meet at Niemerg’s restaurant in Effingham, IL (named after the British nobleman who refused to take up arms against American revolutionariers.) Niemerg’s has pretty good food and a great salad bar. And it is about halfway down.
Last year I purchased one of these beautiful t-shirts on the way down.
We then wind up at the Mexican restaurant in Clarksdale, MS, about fifteen miles outside of Tutwiler. I am told they make great margaritas. This is the crew for this year, including an impressive THREE rookies!
My sister Kathleen died the week after Easter this year. She never made the trip down here, but paid for a few of mine. In my early years as part of the team, I was dropping in to assist with her first-grade class at St. Paul of the Cross in Park Ridge.
Later, some of those classes were about my trip to Tutwiler and the students were given an assignment to write letters to Dr. Anne Brooks at the Tutwiler Clinic.
Dr. Brooks was a sister who attended medical school later in life and had to serve in an underseved community to pay for her government loans. She stayed for thirty years providing medical care to the very underserved residents of Tallahatchie County. The clinic staff told me they always looked forward to those letters. They would take them to the conference room and spread them around so that everyone could look at them. Sr. Anne graciously replied to each one.
The first-graders were always excited to hear about our trip and never failed to remember us in their moring prayers. Last Friday, I had the pleasure of teaching first grade at St. Sylvester School in Logan Square, and asked them to take up that responsibility. So we look forward to their prayerful support this week.
This is our twentieth year making the trip down, and my twelfth. We have seen lots of houses built, lots of progress made, and some of it lost right back. Things tend to move in a positive direction, but slowly and sporadically, and not often in that direction. But as Father Kevin Feeney pointed out a few years back, we have become part of the Tutwiler community and they in turn have become part of ours.
JD Smith has been the contractor for the West Tallahatchie Habitat program from the beginning. (Now if we can just get him to do something about the leaking roof in the volunteer dorm…)
Lorenzo is one of his relatives who has been showing up to help out whenever we come down for years, at least since I joined the team. When I first met Lorenzo, he was a skinny little kid. He is not any more. Lorenzo helps out on some of the Habitat jobs throughout the year but always shows up when we are here. At the end of the week, we put up a plaque with all our names on it, (more about that later) and Lorenzo’s name is on every one since I started. I gave him grief because he started texting other members of our team on our way down and forgot me.
Customarily the Sheil community has given us its blessing before he headed down each year. One year I was not present at the Mass where that happened and I asked Fr. Kevin when I went to one of the later masses. He was happy to oblige and said to the visiting priest who had just said Mass, “This is one of our missionaries.” I had not thought of it in those terms, but that is what we are. On another occasion, Fr. Kevin observed that we had been heading down for years and had become part of the Tutwiler community, and that they in turn had become part of the Sheil community. Or as J.D. put it as we were about to head home, “Y’all are family.”
We look forward to coming down every year, we keep in touch with the people who live here, and we share their joys and sorrows. This is Shannon. We worked on his house a few years back and got to meet him and his family at the potluck that year. He was excited to be moving into his home and to be able to provide a home for his grandmother and daughter as well. About two months after the family moved in, Shannon’s grandmother was killed when someone shot into the home, right through the recently installed windows. No one has been apprehended.
We (mostly me) have sent thousands of books and DVDs to the library. The Tallahatchie County Library had two branches, and one of them was in Tutwiler since it had a sturdy building. Along with my cousin, we discussed trying to set up some programs for the library to encourage parents and young people to read to kids. But the library closed. It has closed in the past, so perhaps it will reopen again.
After three years, Dana should be able to move into her house some time this summer. Construction started before the Covid outbreak, then stopped for a year. We were the first group to head down after the pandemic, and one of only a few that year. We put up siding but had to stop just around the windows because several of them had been damaged and new ones had not arrived yet. About a week after we left, the whole area flooded.
All of these are houses we have worked on at one time or another. Dana’s house is the one in the background with siding halfway up the wall. Fortunately, the water did not reach that far. The water came right up to the front step of Sarah’s house, but no further. Other homeowners were not so fortunate.
But there are good things happening as well.
High Cotton ART Studio
This is High Cotton ART Gallery and Café run by Jay and Stephanie Kasem.
But there are good things happening as well. This is High Cotton ART Gallery and Café run by Jay and Stephanie Kassem. They recently opened the High Cotton ART Studio and Cafe.
Before they purchased the building in a tax sale, it was the scary bar on the corner across the street from the community center that none of us ever had the courage to enter. Despite the dangerous wiring and the fact that it was prone to flooding, the place was rocking at night. But they still couldn’t pay their taxes.
Today it serves lunch and Stephanie teaches art classes to kids from the area, some of whom travel some distance to get there. And they all get fed lunch. All of this is free, paid for by the proceeds of the café and donations. Here is a video of the studio in action.
Recently they have started a community garden to teach kids and adults gardening skills and provide fresh produce for the café.
So feel free to purchase stuff or send a donation if you are so inclined.
Lorenzo and Dino
I first met Lorenzo the first year I came down. He is a relative of J.D.’s and had worked on one of the earlier and got to know some of the team. Since then, he has worked on every house we have and sometimes brought his friends. His name is on many of those plaques we put up on the wall. Lorenzo looks forward to our arrival and when we leave on Saturday morning, he tells us to call when we get home so he doesn’t worry.
Lorenzo gets to know all of us, but he has always had a special relationship with Dino. When Dino does not make the trip, Lorenzo finds someone else to focus his attention on. When Casey first started this blog years ago, she interviewed Lorenzo. He was thrilled. But Dino is his special friend.
Sarah’s House
We worked on Sarah’s house a few years back. As a matter of fact, we worked on it two years in a row. The first year, things were pretty bare. Homeowners have to put in a certain number of hours on either their house or someone else’s, so Sarah dropped by to work on her house. We were putting up drywall, so she could not afford to get plaster in her hair before going to work.
The following year, we returned with a big crew. We spent most of our time early in the week framing one house, but owing to the fact that we had such a big crew (and the fact that Bob the Builder would not let anyone else play,) some of us started drifting to the houses still being finished, including Sarah’s.
The group that preceded us did a less than admirable job. In fact, they were terrible. They left a pile of unwashed paint brushes behind, which made them useless by the time we arrived. But worse, they had done a terrible job on Sarah’s house. The front door was a mass of drip marks. Some of us (primarily Natalie) spent hours sanding down the front door (and convincing me to never come down again without a sander or two.)
Meanwhile, the kitchen cabinets were terrible. I took them all down, sanded them down, and refinished them.
The following year, Sarah met me in front of the next house an gave me a hug, saying, “You’re the one who fixed my door!” I did not bother to clarify that is was Natalie who did the door. I did the cabinets. But they both looked pretty good.
Sarah gave us a tour of her house today. It is immaculate, and tastefully decorated. (And the kitchen cabinets look great. Sarah loves them.
When we first met Sarah, she was quiet and shy around us. I can safely say that Sarah is not quiet and shy. Having a home is a great confidence booster. At the end of the dinner, she was networking with Charlotte. I do not know what that was about, but it was important to Charlotte. Perhaps she will provide us with the details.
Sherri
Sherri took over as the program manger when her daughter left to take another job. She took over “temporarily.” She is still here years later and does not seem to be in a hurry to leave. When we first met Sherri, she had just had a leg amputated as a result of diabetes. She was getting around on a walker. Now she gets around just fine. She says that the Habitat program and people like us is what keeps her going.
The Marquette Connection
As it happens, three of us are proud alumni of Marquette University. This includes Mike, who with his wife Nicole started this trip, Kristin who has made every one, and me, the relative newcomer who has been on the last eleven. Of course, many of us have reason to be proud of our alma mater, but it is no coincidence that those of us trained in the Jesuit tradition of cura personalis are dedicated to our careers, families, and service of others. AMDG.
There is a lovely prayer on the subject.
In any moment, may I choose to care as I have been cared for. What I have received abundantly, I can only honor by sharing. With You as my God who holds me dearly, who forms me affectionately, who loves me fully, I myself can take part in the healing and strengthening of others. Amen.
Earlier in the week, Mike in his morning devotion spoke about building the Kingdom of God. Things go up and down n Tutwiler, but we keep coming back and making what changes we can, and in the meantime have built so many meaningful relationships. Of such things are the kingdom made.
We worked half the day and pretty much finished up the cabinets and trim.
Here are the cabinets that we have finished, mostly in the last couple days.,
There are few pictures of me in this blog, both because I was behind the camera and because I spent a fair amount of time back at the dorm working on this blog. But that’s OK. I like it on my side of the camera. But Dino shot this one, which I have to admit is appropriate. Here I am setting up our week-ending group shot.
Charlotte made the point that we did most of our work on the interior of the house this year, so we ought to shoot the end-of-the-week group picture there. So here it is.
Here we are gathered on the newly installed floor in front of the newly framed windows.
The plaque
The volunteer groups often put something on the wall comemorating their visit. This can range from t-shirts to exhibits that are far more elaborate. The first year I came down, the plaques for the Sheil team took up about half of one wall, in no particular order. When we come down on Saturday we have Sunday off and most of us go off to visit some cultural attraction or another. That year a few people stayed behind and organized all those plaques in chronicalogical order. Since then we filled that wall and started on another one. That required relocating a few of the existing momentos, but we were nice about it and tried to keep them with others from their group (like relocating one from the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine to the ceiling.)
In recent years, Andy has contributed his considerable artistic talents to designing them. This is this year’s offering.
It always gives me a feeling of satisfaction to sign my name. This year several of us spent time looking over the ones from years past and recalling the people who came along, some of whom have either moved or passed away. Andy designed one for 2020 when Covid shut things down for the year, and by the time we made it down here for 2021, four of our regulars had passed away. Andy added their names to the sign, which is appropriate since they left a legacy in some of the houses that stand here and the people who live in them.
This is what the second wall looks like now. I think we have room for another six to eight years before we have to relocate someone else’s stuff again.
Here we all are before signing the plaque. Yeah, I know I already posted a group picture, but I like this one, so I posted it anyway.
On Fridays, we gather for a potluck dinner with some of the homeowners and people on the WTHFH board. This year the community center was closed on Friday night, so we held it at the dorm instead. Program director Sherri provided a tent for us to dine outside.
Dinner Friday. Lots and lots of food. The woman in the green t-shirt, sitting across the table from J.D. is Dana, who will be moving into the house as soon as it is completed.
Wonderful breakfast this morning! Guacamole on Dino’s homemade bread, topped with tomatoes and balsamic vinegar and fresh fruit. Usually, breakfast for me consists of a nourishing Coke. We eat great down here. Dino is great with breakfast – the afore-mentioned homemade bread, sausage and peppers, coffee cake. Andy of course is an accomplished chef, so last night we had seafood Thai curry. Despite the hard work we put in, this is not a good place to lose weight.
I have a bunch of great pictures from Thursday, but I cannot seem to get them off of the SD card in my camera, so you may not see them for a while. But we went to Ground Zero and had fun Thursday night. You might well see some later if I my collegues have some to contribute.
Until such time as I am able to recover those photos, I shall have to settle for this great picture of Ed cutting boards to by used for trim and baseboards. Alas, I am not able to show you pictures of Kristin and Lorenzo working tirelessly to stain and apply polyurethane to it all.
So I can tell you all about how much fun trying to finish louvered doors (It’s not.)
Then we went to Ground Zero Blues Club in Clarksdale to hear music. I got some great pictures, but my phone ate them. I am still working on it, and the rest of the team might have some. I have some videos that I hope to post, so stay tuned.
Ground Zero Blues Club
We usually spend one night in Clarksdale checking out the local blues clubs, the most prominent and famous of which is Ground Zero. The club takes its name from the idea that Clarksdale is ground zero for the blues. The club tends to feature and encourage local talent, and there is no question, there is plenty of it down here. On our earlier visits, we sometimes arrived on the night when all the folks who attended harmonica camp for the week get to appear on stage one at a time and show what they have learned. This leads to a train of musicians, followed by the instructors all getting together and jamming.
Ground Zero is legendary. People come to see it from all over the world, and if my pictures had not all disappeared, I would post some of some of the many flags hanging from the ceiling, usually autographed by whoever donated them. Very early in the club’s history, some waitress wrote her name on the bar in black Sharpie, and since then, there has been a custom of covering nearly every square inch of the place in graffiti. I personally choose to distinguish myself by NOT writing anywhere in Ground Zero, but others feel more of a need to express themselves.
Since my pictures are gone, at least for the present, I will include some provided by Ed that pretty much give the vibe for the place.
The barThe graffitiEdgar Allen Poe. I have no idea what he is doing here, but perhaps he was a blues fan.
But we did not see the harmonica train tonight. Instead, we saw local musician Stan Street who runs Hambone Art Gallery across town. Hambone Art Gallery also has a Facebook page where you can frequently watch live performances, something that made the pandemic a little more tolerable for me.
I would love to add the videos right here, but WordPress charges extra to for the ability to add videos, so I shall have to post links instead.
We have gotten most of the flooring done. Here is the livingroom when we started. It was where most of the loose stuff wound up.
This is how the livingroom looks now.
Work continues on the floors, but now we are now working on staining and finishing wood trim and cabinets and framing windows. This is an area that I am pretty picky about because I actually know something about staining and finishing wood. Some years back we worked on a house that was near completion. The crew that came in before us were not as careful as we were, and the kitchen cabinets were terrible! I took them all down, sanded them down and refinished them. They still did not quite meet my standards, but they were much better. So today I delayed lunch a little while I put one more coat on a louvered door. I hate louvered doors!
Here are Charlotte and Ed cutting wood to be used for trim and baseboards. We will be doing a lot of staining and finishing in the next couple days.
We frequently take an afternoon off and find something fun and interesting to do. Today we went into nearby Tunica to visit the Tunica River Walk Museum. It is a lovely place, and we were pretty much the only people there.
Here is the Mississippi River. It is big. It is muddy. Andy really likes it.
The museum was pretty much empty, which is a shame, as it is a lovely museum.
This is on the wall just by the entrance. There are a lot of these throughout the museum. This was one of my favorite exhibits. Since the river often changes course, trees and roots frequently find their way to the middle of the river. These obviously present a significant navigational obstacle, so boats like this would go out and haul them out of the river. The wood was then used to fire the boilers and keep the boat going. This is a pretty cool map. The lighting in the museum was not ideal for shooting pictures and you cannot use a flash for things behind glass, but I took this one anyway. The different colors show how the river changed course over the centuries. Some of those different colors represent periods of decades, others of centuries. And here are some seriously ugly fish! Andy can tell you what kind they are. I just know that they are ugly.
It is really a very nice museum, and I would recommend it for whoever comes down this way. Unfortunately, not all that many do. For a while, Tunica enjoyed a bit of a boom when casinos opened. There were a whole string of them right down the road from the museum. Then just about every state legalized gambling and the casinos mostly went away. Such is life in the Mississippi Delta.
We are starting to get the hang of this tile thing. We have covered pretty much the entire house. John and Dino finished the front bedroom.
Here Dino and John R. celebrate the completion of the flooring on the front bedroom. They insisted that I pose for a picture as well, since I did the closet, which is kind of tricky because you have to cut the flooring into pieces the right size and from the right edges. It takes some practice.
By the end of the day we had gotten the hang of it. We had covered that bedroom, the other two bedrooms, and the main hallway. A fair accomplishment for the day.
This is our nineteenth year down here as a group, and most iof us are veterans. This is my eleventh year, and I am somewhere in the middle in terms of seniority. We have one rookie this year. Andy brought his brother-in-law John R.
J.D. has been the project manager/contractor for all of the years we have been down here. It is always great to see him, and he looks forward to seeing us as well. We get more done than most groups, and do not require adult supervision, which is a good thing, because that sort of thing can be hard to find, especially by the end of the week.
Sherri has been the program manager for about five years now. She stepped in temporarily when her daughter left to go to school, proving once again that there is nothing more permanant than a temporary solution.
So here’s what we got done today!
Progress on houses is always inconsistent. Some houses get built relatively fast. Some take a long time. This year we find ourselves working on the same house we worked on two years ago. The pandemic slowed things down of course, and fewer groups have made it down since. We were the first group to come down after the pandemic. The pandemic slowed things up of course, and when we came down as the first post-Covid group, building supplies were not so easy to get. Dry wall was not available. Siding was. We put up the siding on three sides of the house.
This is how the house looked when we left in 2021.
Last year we returned and got most of the drywall up.
This year we are back to the same place. It is getting much closer to completion and we are putting flooring down.
This is the way the house looks as we get started in 2023.
We covered pretty much the whole house, and some of our number got very adept at putting up ceilings. So now we are back at the house above, and it is nearing completion.
This year we are putting in flooring. That required us to scrape the whole floor before we began.
Teamwork helps.
Unlike previous years, this year that flooring comes in strips and locks together, finally being held down by the base boards. This requires a bit of care, as you have to tap it into place to get it to lock, and if you hit it too hard, it chips easily.
There is a technique to started along the wall.
But we managed to get a fair amount done on our first day.
Here is what the front bedroom looked like before we got started.
This is how it looked by lunch.
And here is how far we got by the end of Monday. Not such a bad start.
Welcome back friends! Here we are back in Tutwiler, MS for another Habitat for Humanity trip. This is year nineteen for our group from Sheil Catholic Center and year eleven for me. Many things have changed over the years, some have not. The past two years we have headed down on Sunday rather than Saturday and made the customary stops at Neimerg’s Steak House in Effingham, Il for lunch and Atzimba Mexican Restaurant in Clarksdale, MS for dinner. Since I have shot and posted the same pictures multiple times, I thought I would change it up a bit this year.
Instead of showing the outside of the restaurant, here is the cool t-shirt I bought. And instead of a picture of the outside of the restaurant, here are the charming people who welcome and serve us.
Hammerin' In the Delta 