Tuesday, March 12, 2013

The Ecosystem is important

New Orleans was an amazing experience. I feel really blessed to have worked with such great group of people and to have made friendships that would have never been if it were not for this trip. It still surprises me how well our group got along. Not only did I have a great experience in New Orleans and working with Habitat, I also have people I can now call friends who have shared the same experience. Working with Habitat for Humanity was better than I expected. Though I had no construction experience, I was putting up the siding on the house in no time. I worked on a house that someone will live in one day. Not many people can say that, and I’m glad that I can. One thing I will never forget in New Orleans is when our group visited Bayou Bienvenue. Andrea, our tour guide, gave us a tour of the Lower ninth Ward and we stopped at the Bayou, but it didn’t look like a Bayou. A Bayou is supposed to be full of thick vegetation and aquatic animals, but it was the complete opposite. It was a barren body of water full of skinny dead trees. She handed out an article with a picture of what the Bayou used to look like fifty years ago and the difference was shocking. It used to be beautiful, but now it looks dead. It’s sad that such a beautiful part of nature was destroyed so easily by canals that introduced salt water into the freshwater swamp, destroying all the plant and animal life. It’s interesting how people have realized after Katrina how important it is to protect the environment since the swamp protected the Lower ninth ward from flooding. Sadly, it took a disaster for people to realize the harmful effects of disrupting the balance of the ecosystem. One thing I learned is that it’s important to maintain the balance of the ecosystem, because the environment protects us in many ways that we fail to acknowledge until it is too late. Natalie

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