A Sad Day At Howard

This past week, a group of us have been working on building a house for a lady named Ms. Nguyen. She has been living in a FEMA trailer for the past 4 years, but recently she has been sleeping on a cot in her unfinished house. She is afraid that the government will take away her trailer any day now because she was notified that trailers would be removed starting June 1st. Today, we arrived at Howard House to find two tow trucks preparing to take away her trailer. She wasn't home at the time, but it didn't even matter to them. One dad parked his car in front of the trailer to protest and they went down the street to call in the Federal Marshall. They came back and told us that they had to take the trailer away so we moved all of her belongings out of it. They said that if she wasn't home and we weren't there, then they would have taken the whole trailer with everything she owned inside. Everyone at our site was devastated, furious, and heartbroken. Instead of taking into consideration that this trailer had been her home, the two workers violently demolished her staircase and barged into her house. Everyone filmed and took pictures of the scene. One worker said that she didn't like to take people's homes away, but this was the only job she could find. When we asked one worker what they did with the trailers that they took back, we found out that they take them to sit in a field and possibly use them for scrap metal. No one could understand how taking away people's homes to sit and rot in a field could benefit anyone. We were all very worried about how Ms. Nguyen would react. If we were not in Biloxi, she would be homeless. When Ms. Nguyen came home, she at first could not understand what had happened, and kept asking where her trailer had gone and was even laughing about it. Later, we saw the look of distress in her eyes and saw that she was silently crying, but didn't want anyone to know she was upset. We chatted with her a lot today and tried to make her feel at home again. We even started taking pictures with her and feeding her chickens. As we left, we saw Ms. Nguyen lean on the new railing of her porch and look out with a feeling that she finally had a house of her own.

Kelsey "Stinky"
Katie "Tic Maber"
Jen "Quick Draw McGraw"