Festival International de Louisiane

One thing I have learned while living down here is that Louisiana has a festival for everything. There are crawfish festivals, frog festivals, shrimp festivals, music festivals, etc. Last weekend Lafayette had their annual Festival International, which is a huge music festival. Myself, along with 5 others on my team volunteered all weekend in the artist hospitality tent. Incase i havn't explained before, we have to do atleast 80 additional ISP (independent service project) hours during our 10 months. We have to find these projects and coordinate what we are doing with the organizations, but they usually are not too difficult to find or plan. At the festival we served food to the musicians and other VIP people who helped put the festival together. I think we did over 500 meals on each of the 3 days. We got a whopping 31 hours towards our ISP's as well, which was nice.
The festival is a huge deal down here, people drive from all over to come see the musicians and artist vendors. There were musicians from Argentina, Finland, Mali, Mexico, Benin, France, Quebec, the Balkans, Jamaica, Ireland, Guinia, and of course a few locals from Louisiana. Unfortunatly we were not able to see many of the performances because we were working in the tent. We were told we were going to be able to escape more than we actually did, so that part was a bummer. From what we could hear and the little bit we did see it was a unique, really cool festival. I would definitly come back and visit it sometime, to enjoy the music. Plus, it's the same weekend as Jazz Fest in New Orleans! (Incase anyone wants to come back down sometime with me in the next few years, haha). We did have fun joking around and talking to a lot of the artists that would come eat with us every day. We also got to meet some people who live here who were also volunteering.

We have been doing odd and end projects that the organization we are working with has been working on for a while now. We were at one house this past week where the couple is living in a house that is still definitly not completed. Their home was flooded by Hurricane Rita, and they lived in a FEMA trailer for over a year. They bought this house that also had some damage last November, and have been working on it when they can. The other day we tore down the front wall because the studs had a lot of termite damage and the bottom parts were weak because of the flood waters. It was cool to rebuild the wall and see it all come together. We've been painting the inside and outside of homes, laying subflooring, and doing all kinds of other things. We will wrap up this week and then move to Slidell Louisiana for one week. Of course I have no clue what we will be doing (this is Americorps, what else should i expect?) haha. Another team is living at the volunteer camp there, so it will be nice to be around other people.

I hope the links work to the pictures that I put up in the previous posting. Have a wonderful weekend/week!