Never mind about the last blogg being for 3/3. My blogg is getting all mixed up and confusing, I guess thats what one gets for trying to do it ahead of time. Well, to make sure I'm on top of the number of blogs I need here is another. GROUP MEMBERS: skip the following parenthesis its a question for Julia. (Julia, if Iwrote 2 blogs one week because I didn't think I'd have time following week would you count the 2nd blog as the blog for the week with out? I hope so because that is what I have done. I have also written mulitple blogs for a week, but they do not amount to 500 words at one time, but overall there is way more than 500 words, is that ok?)
Anyways, over spring break I was down at Mississippi, and the area was so much different to what I was use to . We'd be driving along the rural highway through fields of flat farmland and see a random abandon home. Actually, we thought it was abandoned because no one could possibly live in such a structure that was on the brink of collapsing! Seriously, most of the home had caved in roofs or slanted porches. Then, someone would walk out of this home, a home we thought had been abandoned!! This totally shocked me, especially being an engineer I have a pretty good idea of what is structually sound and what isn't. The people of this are would live in homes that didn't just look bad in appearance, but the stabilty of the sturcture was bad. Even in the best kept home there'd be chipped paint or an over grown yard, but down there that was normal. In the town where we worked at, Mound Bayou, was even more worse than the rest of the area. 85% of the town lived off welfare, and most of the citizens were unempolyed because they could not afford a car or gas to get to work in the next town over. Because everyone in the town was so poor, all of the home were run down. Closed buisness would remain there, the skeleton of the buildings are shadows of the once thriving town. This town was the first town to be established by free slaves in Mississippi after the civil war. It was and still is mainly an African American community, that back in its hay day served as refuge from the Ku Klux Klan. After a couple of bad farming years and depressions and recession the town turned into the very poor area that it currently is. If something happens to a building, abandoned, burned down, storm damages, its just left there. There were more than a handful of lots of where a fire had taken place. Nothing had been done, the building burned down entirely and was left there to look like the fire had just happened only yesterday. This blew my mind away, that these people could just let the remains sit. A hotel had burned down many, many years ago, and the pipes were still in the air, twisted up! Some buildings were boarded up and some weren't. The ones that werent boarded up are now frames with half the walls down and the roof caved in. I had done a service project in New Orleans summer after my sophmore year, and some of these lots looked as though they too had been attacked by hurricane Katrina. (they had not; although Mississippi did received a lot of damages Mound Bayou is located closer to Arkansa than the Gulf of Mexico so the destruction of the buildings was not caused by the hurricane)
As we drove through this town, I wanted nothing more than to just get out of the van and start fixing up the lots. It bothered me so much to just see burned down lots sit there. The whole town was like an archeological site of ruins. But, actually the whole town is an archeological site in the sense that there is a lot of history (the town shouldn't be in ruins though equivalent to that of settlements form the 1600s and 1700s though). I want to go back next year, and hopefully be able to work on those lots. Unfortunately though, not to many people repeat trips, so I do not know if that is because they want to try somehting new or because you have to. By other trips I mean that my trip was one of several Alternative Spring Break Trips. There were also trips to Chicago, Memphis, Flint, and Mexico. There was one to Hadi as well, but it was canceled/postponed due to the earthquake. I want to go to Mexico one year, but I think that will be for junior or senior year. If I can't go to Mexico I think my second choice would be Chicago, but I leave that decision to next year.
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