On the Road to Oakdale

We have a new Senior Couple arriving in the mission (in Oakdale, specifically)--maybe Thursday. When I spoke with Sister Hastings today they were in Nebraska. Elder L and Elder F had secured a little apartment a few weeks ago, and it needed to be furnished today. The office elders drove the van and trailer with most of the goods, and we met them there some time before noon. Marc didn't want to go by himself, since it's a 2 1/2 hour drive each way, so I agreed to accompany him.

What a beautiful, scenic drive it was to an area I haven't seen before. We started off in another driving rainstorm and were so in hopes that it would taper off before all the furniture had to be unloaded. Whew! It did.

The elders worked so hard getting things unloaded, arranged, assembled and installed--everything from pots and pans to washer and dryer. Marc and I ran to Walmart to pick up the extras that yesterday's Walmart excursion didn't supply or that we didn't even know we needed. (Do we have Walmart stock? If not, we should!) There were no window treatments, the lamp needed a shade, lots of burnt out light bulbs, and the toilet seat and shower head desperately needed to be replaced. Actually, the whole bathroom could've used a makeover, but that's another problem we couldn't deal with.

Here's just a couple of other pictures from the drive. The pond is actually a crawfish farm. The red things are markers for the traps. Every day during the harvesting season the workers go out in their little boats to pick up the traps and replace them with a freshly baited trap. Bait can be cut up fish, or grain based pellets. The traps lure the crawfish in and contain them till they're "harvested."

The last picture is, unfortunately, a common sight here in Louisiana. We've seen this several times. It's rows and rows and rows of mobile home, hurriedly produced after Hurricane Katrina.

These are just some of the temporary homes the victims of Katrina were living in, then had to be displace again because of the unsafe levels of formaldehyde they were being exposed to. One news report estimated that 114,000 people were living in these homes, which now live in mobile home graveyards throughout LA. (The homes are in the graveyards, not the people!)