We do.

Each day here begins somewhat the same. We roll out of bed, stretch aching muscles, slap deoderant on to whatever body parts we know will need it. We pile out of our gorgeous hotel into the street and hike to the bus stop. We marvel at all the wonderful old buildings and history contained within each city block. We wait on corners with our coffee cups and backpacks, and then we board the bus for a day of work.
Somewhere between our sore backs and thighs hitting the bus seat and our departure onto General Meyer Avenue in Algiers, New Orleans changes. Buildings are less statuesque, in need of paint and TLC. Grass grows knee high. Garbage cans overflow. But here, in the less "beautiful" areas, is where true magic is happening.
We all clamber up the steps to Harriet Ross Tubman Charter school, recieve our smiley-adorned visitors pass, and with our minds set to a day of work, we begin. Since our arrival here on Monday, we have teetered on ladders to paint classrooms, cramped our backs and knees into little chairs to sort dusty, forgotten books, and made mad dashes down the street in the sweltering heat on our lunch breaks to Brothers for some cold pop or sinfully greasy fried something-or-others. We have had kind, generous people point us in the direction of the right bus, or the better route, or the best overhang to stand and sing under while the sky pours down on us. We have sweat a whole lot, and had that sweat mix with dust and paint and rain to form a special slurry that coats our arms and knees and eyebrows. But we have worked hard, and accomplished much. We sauntered into our home base in the basement and stood over our kingdom of neatly stacked books and felt fulfilled. That feeling sustains us, the sensation of having "done good" for the world, for an area of our country that has so much to offer both in its physical beauty and the beauty of its people.

Every morning starts the same, but every day when we leave, we move this school a little closer to something amazing. We do a little more to help the future of NOLA lift itself up, to set an example to the world that you can survive the absolute worst and become stronger and better for having done so. Our work here is beautifucation and is emancipation and is absoultely essential. So we roll up our sleeves, and we do. We do what we can, what we must, what is asked of us, what we should.

I am proud of our group, from all walks-- teachers, students, lovers of beautiful buildings and people. We have done so much for a city with a heart that almost stopped beating once, but lived. This city has its scrapes and bruises, its painted mascara coated eye and a bandage on its cheek, but it lives, and breathes, and our work breathes back into it.

And because no more words of mine can do justice, I will let poet Peter Cooley say them for me:

Because the spirit, too, knows loneliness,
disasters happens in the universe
and someone like myself, the smallest of men,
Finds grace, a nimbus on the wall at noon.

(From "Third Heaven", a poem by NOLA resident Peter Cooley)

Back to work, we have much to do.
-Marjorie