A few pictures from New Orleans

We have been in New Orleans since Wednesday. That is the reason there has not been much action on this blog lately. We have had a wonderful time. Yesterday (Friday the 24th) we started the day with a three-course breakfast at Brennan's. (Yes, the Brennan's who invented Bananas Foster, and Eggs Benedict!) The meal was fantastic, the service excellent and the stories told by the head waiter very moving. We spent the afternoon in the Interaction Center where the kids could do high ropes, karaoke, shop at Old Lutheran, inflatable games, guitar hero, talk to college reps and camp directors, read stories by teens from the area, play volleyball, elimination, and other games. This week at evening gatherings we have heard from

• people who have started volunteer organizations to raise money and raise buildings in depressed areas
• a young man from the Congo who was forced to kill his best friend at age 5
• a man with both legs amputated just below the pelvis who challenged us to "stand up" with him to fight discrimination against those who are different
  
• a woman who started in Senegal by homeschooling her 2 grandchildren and ended up helping over 3000 young girls succeed in school and in life.
  

The evening activities have been great. The kids have met some others from other places (I think Monica and Katie have a crush on one young man) and had a great time with all the music and action. Sophie will compete in "Gathering Idol" tonight (our knockoff of American Idol).

Today we left at 9 am for our service project: helping to run a big free health fair at a huge city park. Our specific job was to man the inflatable games for the little kids to play on . The only trouble was that very few people knew about the health fair and we saw just a handful of kids who were not helping out at the fair. Afterwards we had two choices of tours of the places hardest hit by Katrina...one set up by Denny with a professor from Tulane and the other an impromptu drive through with Mo, our bus driver. Yeah Mo!

I will be trying to post more pictures as we close out this wonderful week.