The Made With Love Café.com

Plaquemines Parish : We Do It For Love

Chris Sheard

It’s a beautiful feeling, especially next to someone like your brother, to fulfill a task that means something, even something we take for granted like breakfast. It’s something we all search for and definitely something we volunteers in Buras looked for there. A person needs to fulfill a purpose: saving a life, serving a community, connecting with and impacting others, even if it’s just cooking eggs.

As we drove up route 23 in the quiet of a beautiful damp morning a lot went through my mind but I kept coming back to one question:

-Why?

I asked myself that same question, over and over: why? What brought me here, what kept us here? What the hell were we thinking? Why did we do it? You know? None of us had to be there. None of the residents were kin to us. We didn’t owe them anything. We didn’t have to spend our summer days preparing meals, building showers, installing washers and dryers and trying to deal with the million fucking things that went wrong every day for the sake of complete strangers.

And they didn’t owe us. They didn’t have to open their hearts and homes to us the way they did. They didn’t have to bring us alligator and shrimp, or teach us how to fish or tie knots, or share their stories and memories. They didn’t have to eat and drink, and I mean drink with us. They didn’t have to invite us into their trailers, or take us gator-watching, or fishing.

But we did. And they did. We did and we were happy doing it. But why?

Then, rolling down the highway a voice came out of the bright Louisiana morning and in a pleasant southern way it said to me, real simply as if just mentioning it in passing:

We do it for love, baby. We do it for love.

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