Sunday Best

About six of us went to church on Sunday at Mt. Rock Baptist Ministry, which is one of the 13 churches in the Hollygrove neighborhood. It was a tiny church with about 30 people, including us, in attendance. The pastor of the church has been really involved in what AARP is doing, so we’ve been connecting with him quite a bit. The whole experience was really amazing, people were all dressed up in their Sunday best – hats, suite, gloves. Nitiya - you'd fit right in. The whole thing was kind of like a musical, where the worshippers would just break into song in the middle of the sermon. They had a children’s choir sing a couple of songs which was adorable. The pastor pointed us out to the congregation and explained what we were doing the neighborhood. After service everyone came up and was talking to us and asking us about our project. I really like how we’re approaching this experience by immersing ourselves into the neighborhood as much as possible. Last week, we went to a walking club, which is apparently quite popular here, that AARP hosted with some of the senior citizens from the neighborhood and we’ve just been trying to spend as much time as possible their. We’ve played basketball a couple times in their neighborhood park and we did door to door surveys with some AmeriCorps volunteers who are stationed at a community center there. That was quite the experience, all the community members were really inviting. We talked to the residents about how they think their neighborhood could be improved and collected a lot of data on if they lived here before Katrina and how long it took them to come back. One woman said that she had lived in Hollygrove for forty years and had just moved back five months ago. She said that when the storm came in the water didn’t hit until the middle of the night. She had gotten up in the middle of the night and there was water everywhere. So they were ok through all of the high winds and storming but when the levees broke and pumps stopped their house completely flooded. Her and her husband had to be picked up by a helicopter from the top of his truck. It was really enlightening how she had gone through that and was still so inviting about our whole process. I know I keep saying this but I can’t stress enough how inviting people have been.