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Dear Tikvat Israel,

My week in Louisiana was certainly very interesting.

Our first day of work (Monday, 20 March) was started off with a briefing of what we were going to do - disassembling houses. The National Relief Network does not like to use words like "demolish" or "destroy" because these are people's homes that have been created over a lifetime and it would be wrong to treat them with such insensitivity. The actual work the first day was marred a bit by being sent to the wrong house to work on due to a clerical error, but that was corrected soon enough and were sent to 81 Thornton Lane, Chalmette, La.

Our instructions were to disassemble the house almost completely and leave only the wooden 2-by-4 frame, toilets and bathtubs, hot water heaters, floors and roof. We were to make four piles out on the lawn in front of the house: one for hazardous materials like cleaning fluids, one for large electrical appliances, one for personal objects with sentimental value like pictures and bundles of money that may be stored inside the walls from the time of the Great Depression, and one for everything else.

I must confess, I did not have any idea how much stuff went into a house until I started to help take it all out. It was very sobering to see the mess that was created by the hurricane. However, I was very impressed to see that even after all the destruction and flooding that came with Katrina, the building itself was still standing strong. All of the carpets (wall-to-wall in every room, including the kitchen) were ruined and it was difficult trying to take them all out, even after everything else was cleared.

My team and I had a feeling by the time we finished on Thursday that we knew the people who lived there very well, just by going through what they collected over a lifetime in just a few days. For example, we found Tom O'Hare's navy ID card (he served during the second World War); we found his High School diploma; and we found his certificate for coming in second in a Mister New Orleans contest.

All in all, it was a very amazing learning experience as well as a volunteer experience. I now know that when I live on my own in a permanent house, I will not have so much wall-to-wall carpeting or more than one refrigerator, because it will be ridiculously difficult for relief volunteers to get them out.

I encourage you all to consider taking similar steps. You don't want volunteers to feel they got the shorter end of the stick when they duct-tape five refrigerator doors shut and carry them each out.

Ronen Lautman