To all those still playing along at home, thank you.

I made it to Baton Rouge, LA on Friday and I just finished my first day of work. I don't know if I can call it work because it was filling out forms and then I was given a tour of the Habitat builds by Lynn Clark, our Development Director. I will try to get some photos of the builds up soon, but in the meantime I'll provide the details of what I've learned...

Habitat for Humanity of Greater Baton Rouge is a mid-size affiliate. This means that they typically build about fifteen homes per year. Because of Katrina and the population expansion of approximately 100,000 new residents, this Habitat affiliate anticipates ramping up 2006 construction to about thirty homes per year.

There are three ongoing builds:

• Port Allen
• Denham Springs
• Faith Court

Of these, the Faith Court is the largest current build where they (ok, we) are currently constructing five houses to accompany the eight they've already built. Faith Court is also unique, because they were able to join two dead-end roads and were allowed to name the new road, hence "Faith Court". Faith Court is also home to two survivors of Hurricane Katrina, houses that begun August 20 and were worked on August 27 - one day before Katrina began wreaking havoc with this town's infrastructure. It should be noted that these two homes are part of a woman's build, and they did indeed survive the hurricane.

What's most surprising (to me) is that every weekend they work on all of these builds. Because HFH relies on volunteers, they average over one hundred volunteers per weekend, usually split up into groups of 20-25 at each house.

There is a one week blitz build that will begin Sunday, November 27 where four new homes specifically allocated to displaced residents from Katrina, will be built! This means that volunteers wanting to help are desperately needed that week.

Ok, the last little tidbit is that on Monday, November 21, the Today Show will be here to highlight the activity of HFH of Greater Baton Rouge! We don't know yet if it's Katie, Matt, Ann or Al, but it will be somebody, and I'll try hard to get my photo taken.

Tomorrow I hope to know more about my responsibilities, but at least here's a bit of background. Again, I hope to have links to the photos up soon.

Finally, I have a email address with Habitat! That's so cool...