If you're making a post-apocalyptic science fiction epic and are having trouble budgeting for the outdoor shots, I have a suggestion.

So, as I mentioned, EchoDitto just got back from our annual retreat. This year we did something different and scheduled a service project for our first day together. The idea was to start things on a positive note, get everyone working as a team, and hopefully do some good. Being a company forged from the remains of a liberal presidential campaign, we naturally decided to accomplish this by destroying a church.

Of course, it was pretty well destroyed to begin with. The church in question was located in New Orleans' lower ninth ward, close enough to the water that you could see the levees from the front door. I don't know how high the water got there, exactly — twenty feet? twenty-five? — but it was high enough to engulf two floors of a church sanctuary. Three years later, much of the mud was still wet.

This was all set up for us by ACORN, an organization that not only lined up the opportunity but also provided the equipment necessary to keep us from dying (or getting sick, anyway). So we donned our allegedly-Tyvek suits, gloves, goggles and respirators and set to work.

First up: destroying pews. Ben came up with a pretty good system for demolition, and soon we had dragged them all out to the curb. That left us faced with the mud. Oh, the mud.

Although there was plenty of wet, shoe-grabbing muck conveniently located near the doors, most of it was like this: thick, caked, dry. The clumps were easily an inch thick, and hard to break. It was like enormous pieces of pottery had been shattered and precisely arranged into a plane. Shovels and wheelbarrows arrived just in time.

Under the mud there was a layer of carpet stubbornly clinging to life. The less said about the ensuing struggle the better. In the end we got it done — the place was stripped, ready for ACORN's lead and mold remediation measures and then, hopefully, for a congregation that's ready to rebuild.

Throughout the experience it was hard to know what I should be thinking and feeling. Would anyone come back to this building? To this neighborhood? There were no residents watching us work; no church members on hand to choose what to save. We might as well have been excavating an archaeological site. It was easy enough to imagine the despair the deacons felt upon first entering their ruined church, but whatever sorrow might have remained in the place had turned stale and seeped out of the hole in the wall. It was empty.

Plus, reality was being a bit over the top. I mean, c'mon: ladies' shoes? A destroyed organ? A waterlogged Bible? Mud encrusted children's toys?! It was all very maudlin and, frankly, unbelievable. That sort of lack of subtlety would never fly on HBO.

But once we had finished the ACORN folks gave us a tour of the lower ninth ward, and the enormity of the situation became apparent and more immediately striking.

These markings mean that the house was searched on 9/12 by a crew identified as "TFW". They found zero bodies, but the "NE" stands for "no entry" so that number's actually meaningless. Looks like they found a dog, too. Three years later, these spray paint markings are still on nearly every house.

This is the new levee. It's three years later, but this structure, allegedly temporary, is all that has been rebuilt. It's built to the same flawed design as the one it replaced, and built badly at that.

This used to be someone's front stoop. Three years later, the missing house is one of the few visible signs of deliberate progress, if you want to call it that. Whether the owner paid to have it torn down or whether the city did it for them because they were deemed not to be maintaining the property — who knows?

I don't mean to imply that the situation is hopeless. We met a gentleman named Mac who says that God told him to build a community center, so he did. It's an amazing thing. The ACORN volunteers were awfully inspiring, too. But there's still so much to do, so few people, so little attention paid. It's taken years just to accomplish what anyone could reasonably expect the world's richest country to accomplish in weeks. We should all be ashamed.

All photos belong to Jason or Michael