Undergraduate Blog / Defining Your Babson

“Shiva Shiva what what?” New Orleans Day Three!

Allons-y (Let’s Go) New Orleans!

Last night was an adventure, as always. We started the night by eating local cuisine, complete with alligator. We have learned that every single thing in Louisiana is fried. So at our table included: fried pickles, fried alligator bites (which somehow Melissa liked), fried cornbread (hush puppies), fried catfish, turtle…we started coming up with our own menu items, including fried people, and fried mayonnaise. Marissa thinks she’ll be 100 pounds heavier if she stays here another minute.

We came back and had a bonfire, complete with our nightly reflection session. Kye joined our bonfire and spoke during reflection, which we thought was pretty fantastic. He used to be a manager and employee at Habitat but now helps whenever he can. The group had met him two years ago, and he showed up to dinner and bonfire wearing a Babson Tshirt that we had given him :). He explained that Habitat as an organization does more than just build a family a house and a community—they also give the family something to use to take out mortgages and loans, start businesses, and give a lot of them the permanent address they need. They sign a 14 year agreement with Habitat, and we still have a lot of questions (because we’re business students) about the profitability and how this huge discrepancy in prices is dealt with when a family moves out.

We continued during the day in our painting/under the house crews, and Marissa got to spend more time with a woman named Stormy, who will be moving into one of the houses we’re working on in the middle of May. She is almost done with her 350 hours of “sweat-equity” required to move into her home and became part of the painting crew. She works 3 different jobs and has a three year old daughter, and we were amazed at how she managed to keep all of her different priorities going. She had a great attitude, and you’ll hopefully hear more about her when other people from our group find the time to blog.

We finally got to go on our SWAMP TOUR today. We ended up on a boat with the girls who live next door (from SUNY Plattsburg) and we got to see alligators and feed them marshmallows. (Fun fact of the day: Alligators are attracted to things that are white, so they love marshmallows and will come out of nowhere to eat them. so the strawberry ones ended up being a poor choice.) We had a really cool guide who explained that you can tell how big an alligator is because for every inch from its nose to eyes, there’s a foot added to its body length. Gross.

Tonight, as the highlight of our day, Marissa taught the paper game to the group. Here’s the paper game, in case you’re bored and have some spare friends to play with:

Everyone gets a piece of paper and a pen and sits in a circle. Each person writes a sentence (any sentence) at the top of the page. They pass it to the person next to them, who draws a picture underneath of EXACTLY what they see. You fold the paper over so you can only see the drawing, and pass it on. The next person will write a sentence about the picture and fold it over, and so on and so on. Kind of like a drawing-and-writing version of telephone. Regardless it was fantastic, with highlights like making fun of Josh and Kevin and talking about how we always lose Shin Shin wherever we go. Seriously, we lose her everywhere.

We’re in the middle of another bonfire and we’re hearing that more people are finally ready to blog after us. It’s about time! We’ll see you tomorrow for the Melissa and Marissa show.

Smell you later,

Marissa Ferber and Melissa Diranian