Noah's House

It's amazing how you go from a high, to a low.

Yesterday, I was hiking the Badlands. Some of the most stunning natural beauty in my opinion that exists anywhere in the world. With a ten minute walk from the gravel road, you can be surrounded in a natural bowl of earth, carved out into amazing geological formations that tower skyward. The Badlands can be incredibly quiet, and stunningly serene as there are enormous tracts of land that remain untouched by man and machine.

And so we sit, when we visit the Badlands, in silence. Asking our volunteers to decompress, disconnect and "plug-in" to the world around them.

It's a special place.

Today, the reality of the Rez.

I worked on a house in the town of Pine Ridge, the service-center of the entire reservation. In Pine Ridge, you find the comparative amenities of the civilized world: a grocery store, community services, and so on.

The house that we worked on today, threw any expectation that things in Pine Ridge are better than some of the outlying communities right back in my face.

We arrived to find a typical Rez house with overgrown grass, a few cars in rough shape in the driveway and a fair amount of debris scattered across the yard. Our first task, as outlined by our project sheet was fairly straightforward: clean and cut back yard.

Our project sheet went on to list other tasks to be accomplished: replace two doors, patch floor collapse on porch, evaluate and repair ceiling, build steps.

As we commenced our yard work, it became apparent that there was another house in the back of the lot, smaller, and in worse shape than the one out front.

It took all morning to clear the yard. Two trailer loads of debris were brought to the dump prior to lunch, all under the watchful eyes of Noah, a young boy wearing an NFL jersey about three sizes too big for him.

Noah opened up to us more as the day went on. At lunch, we invited him, and his family to share in our lunch break by breaking bread with us.

Following lunch, Noah took my hand, and asked that I come with him.

He brought me back to the smaller house in the rear of the lot. It was not until then that I realized which house was targeted for our repairs.

"Can I show you some things that are broken?" Noah asked.

He brought me onto the porch: "careful," he said, "you might fall through."

As we stepped carefully across the rotting floorboards, stacked on both sides with a mixture of trash and treasure, a crack of rotting lumber erupted. I fell through the floorboards into a mixture of trash, home debris, and what we would later find to be human waste.

Noah giggled, "I told you to be careful!"

He pushed open the inside door, one without a handle, and with a heavy sheet wrapped around it's corners to keep out bugs in the summer, and cold air in the winter.

Inside, an incredible stench of expired food, and human waste hung thick in the air, competing for space with flies and other bugs crawling on the piles of household goods lining the hallway.

To the left, an open door. "This is my bathroom," Noah said, pointing to the back of the room where a toilet sat, visibly overflowing with waste. Before I had a chance to ask that he not open the cover, he did so, exposing a bowl that was full.

"Do you use this?" I asked, hoping that there wouldn't be an answer to follow.

"Yeah, it's the toilet!" Noah said.

He then brought me back into the hallway, and pulled back two sheets, bringing me into his bedroom.

To the left: a table, with a few empty beer cans and other food, left out in the summer heat to spoil. A fridge, not running, dripping from the bottom into a pool of coagulated stench on the floor.

To the right, a ceiling, collapsing above a small television, where stacks of children's movies sat.

Straight ahead, a small bed, and a futon, where Noah sleeps with his brother and sister.

The floors throughout the house were covered with a layer of trash, the ceilings were beyond repair. Certainly, the bathroom is beyond reclamation. Where we originally had planned to repair the floor on the porch, it was quickly determined the easiest, safest, and essentially the only option would be to tear the whole thing down and start anew.

Noah was excited that we put down a piece of plywood today so that he could walk from the outside, across his porch, and into his house without worrying about falling through any holes.

"I'm excited your coming back tomorrow, we're going to fix all the problems!" He told me as we were packing up.

"I think you should just build a new house though, I don't like this one," he said.

Photos from yesterday, and today, soon.