Bigger Picture

Last week we were mapping fast. So fast that we'd sometime get a call from a resident and we had already done their neighborhood. The bigger picture is that we're now preparing to help residents map themselves without us being stationed here.

The Dartmouth graduate student team running the project with me the past week, the one led by Sarah Fisher (MALS '07) and Abbey Allen (MALS '08), is creating what they are calling a "precinct in a box" as their signature project for this service trip. This box would be a set of materials and instructions that enable neighborhood groups to refresh the mapping of local recovery. Observations that we've made in the past couple weeks will need to be reviewed in the coming weeks/months to keep up with the most local rebuilding changes.

Also, a conversation that I had with Harsha from the team leads me to seriously consider returning to New Orleans after Christmas to finish mapping the rest of Gentilly. With several dozen people volunteering for a few days, we could finish before New Years.