Rebirth

It has taken me over a week to even attempt to articulate the very thoughts and feelings that have consumed me in the wake of our trip. As I reflect on what was probably one of the most moving and influential weeks of my life, I'm left with so much to say I can hardly speak.

At the outset of this trip, I think we all experienced a flurry of emotions....excitement at the prospect of exploring a new city....eagerness to get to work, speak with residents, hear their stories....hope that we would actually make a difference....and, fear that we would fail to change much of anything or be ill-received by residents.

The week, of course, offered no respite from the emotional turbulence. From gazing across the wreckage of the Lower Ninth Ward to hearing heart-wrenching tales of loss and tragedy, I was often overcome by feelings of sorrow, guilt, and helplessness. And yet somehow, as I look back on last week, I am filled with so much gratitude, inspiration, and hope.

Many of us have probably asked ourselves at some point: Was it all worth it? Did we even make a difference? Even aside from the SHN project, I think we accomplished something major last week. At a very basic level, we did this by simply being there and lending an attentive ear. So many people just wanted to vent and be heard. We can all recall those residents who sat with us for over an hour, recounting their stories and talking our ears off. When virtually marginalized by their governments, it’s understandable why they so desperately needed to hear that others have not forgotten and still care. Numerous times, we received heartfelt expressions of gratitude for just being there and doing whatever we could to help. I was almost loath to receive such thanks since I felt relatively helpless up against the grand bureaucratic scheme holding the keys to their recovery. Yet their deep appreciation likely stems from a sense of neglect and desertion, which renders the presence of volunteers in the area so vital. I cling to the hope that our presence, in some measure, helped to fill that void.

Another thing that inspires me is the passion of these extraordinary people. Although bruised and tattered, their spirits are certainly not broken. The city is still brimming with personality and heart – people continue to wave and smile at random passersby; the sweet sounds of local brass bands reverberate through the evening air; even mardi gras beads can be seen adorning tombstones and the entrance to abandoned homes, left as signs of life at otherwise inert sites. Amid the devastation and immeasurable sadness lies unrestrained faith and pride. The residents are anxious to rebuild and restore New Orleans to the city it once was. Several homes display bright flags bearing the word “Rebirth” and the majestic fleur-de-lis that has long symbolized the city. And in front of other homes stand signs that proudly proclaim “We are rebuilding!” and “We’re home!” It’s comforting to see so many determined to rebuild their homes and return to their neighborhoods. These resilient people have nothing, just the memories of what was. The closing remarks of one woman I had interviewed included a request for me to come back to New Orleans when it rises again to its former glory: “Come back and see us when we get back on our feet.” I assured her I intend to come back……even before that happens.

Their strength and gratitude instill me with hope that our work was and continues to be, at least, some small step towards the rebirth of this great, beloved city.

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** To the people of New Orleans: You have welcomed us into your homes and shared intimate details of your experiences with this horrific disaster. We thank you for your hospitality, candor and, most of all, personality. We will never forget you.

"Cause, baby, this place ain't nothing without it's people"

We travelled all day to get back to San Francisco yesterday and it was exhausting. But I couldn't help think of what it would be like to travel for weeks or months and return home to nothing. No one to greet you at the door, carry your bag, and ask how your trip was. No door to be opened for that matter. The road home is surely long for the people of New Orleans, and gets longer by the day as the state and federal governments dispute whether and how to distribute the recovery money needed to rebuild.
I've often wondered during this week if it wouldn't be easier to just pick up and rebuild elsewhere, start fresh. But after speaking with the residents of New Orleans, I quickly discovered that the sense of community here is strong, and the sense of history remains firmly rooted. Leaving it is unthinkable. One woman told us that the neighborhood in which her trailer stood was where she had played with her friends as a kid, and now her children were playing in that same neighborhood with her friends' children. "You think I'm gonna pick up and take my children away?" she said incredulously.
Another man told us that, in New Orleans, people will offer you a hot meal and want to get to know you. But if you refuse, "aw man, that's it for you, man, we don't trust people who aren't neighborly." And another man told us that the way he was getting through the aftermath of the storm was by working on his friends' houses in exchange for hot dinners. "This lady over here? Man she lost everything. So I say to her I'll work on her house, you know, cause I did some construction before the storm? And no worry about money. If she has some leftovers or whatever, though, I'll take those."
The people of New Orleans will not leave their homes and their communities. And they shouldn't be asked to. It is the sense of community that made this city what it was before the storm, and it is the sense of community that is keeping it together in the aftermath. They rebuild on devastated lots and live in moldy trailers because they know that some day their neighborhood will be filled with their friends and family again.
Lucy, a grandmother raising her two young grandchildren in a FEMA trailer, put it like this:
"You see that corner over there with the light? Before the storm, I would drive to get the kids from school and I would sit at that damn light and wait and wait. The traffic was so bad. And I'd curse at all the cars in my way to get my grandbabies. But when I got back after the storm, I could drive straight through without hardly stopping. There were no cars and no traffic. I wasn't happy about it, though, I missed the cars, you know? It's taken a long time, and now I see a few more every week. And more are coming. I don't curse sitting at that light anymore, I just smile and drive. 'Cause, baby, this place ain't nothing without it's people."

Coach

As we turned the block, a large man waived down our car, asking if we were the folks interviewing the FEMA trailer occupants. We responded that we were and he asked, "Why we need to have a trailer for you to talk with us?" As we attempted to explain the goals of our projects, he shook his head and said, "Some folks who need a trailer still can't get one. This lady here," he gestured to a woman who was walking up to our group, "She can't get the keys to that trailer right beside her house. It's been there six months."

Then Coach (he never did give his proper name) began to tell us the story of his neighborhood. "Spike Lee, he ain't got nothing on me, baby" he'd say after a particularly graphic detail. "I saw people droppin' babies in the water 'cause they didn't know what else to do. Bro, we had a bad time down here."

Coach shared his house with his elderly mother. Both lived on opposite sides of the second floor, above their garage. As the storm approached, he suggested to his mother that they leave the city (Coach was fortunate to have two cars), but his mother did not want to leave. They weathered the wind and rain, and though the house shook, it suffered little damage. After Katrina passed, he and his mother sat on the front porch, surveying the neighborhood and Coach saw water running down their street from around the corner. He assumed that a water line had broken and thought little of it as the water simply ran down into the storm drain in front of his house. After several hours, the drain stopped taking in water and slowly it filled the street and reached the sidewalk. Heavy rain often flooded the street, so Coach was not overly concerned. But when water reached his garage doors, he began to think something more serious had happened. Soon the water had risen several steps up towards his porch and when one of his students passed by in a boat, he called him over. By this time, the water was chest deep and still rising. Coach took the boat over to a nearby lot where another boat was stored and waded up to it. After hotwiring the boat, he began to travel through the neighborhood, checking in with people to see how they were fairing. Quickly, it became clear that everyone needed to evacuate, so Coach organized the shuttling of the remaining neighbors over to the highway overpass and from there to the Superdome. "Some folks refused to come," he said, shaking his head, "they wouldn't leave they house and they gone now. I went back twice to ask, but they wouldn't leave." He added that his neighbors either drowned or were forced to evacuate when the National Guard came for him. His next door neighbor's son was sick at the time of the hurricane and rescuers didn't reach him in time to save him. Coach eventually made it to the Superdome himself. (His neighbor, Mr. Singleton, described that experience starkly, saying "Only two people know what happened in there, the folks who was in there, and the Good Lord.") His mother was ill and through a connection, Coach was able to get her up into the offices at the Superdome and thus to a safe shower and some chairs for her to sleep on. After three days, they evacuated to Texas and eventually to Chicago. Even though she is a life-long New Orleans resident, his mother has since remained in Chicago because Coach does not believe the city is safe enough for her to return. The lack of services and public transportation means she would be forced to remain in the house all day and he could not let her spend her days cooped up alone.

After inviting us into his renovated home, and proudly displaying the group of volunteers from Dartmouth College who helped gut his destroyed downstairs, he treated us to more stories, drinks, and photos of the storm and its aftermath. He left us with a book of Katrina photos, some directions and information about the best neighborhoods to visit, and the request that we promise to stop by and say hello next time we are in the neighborhood.

Connie

Connie's stepfather, who lives across the street from Connie, waited on the roof of his home after the storm until a boat arrived to evacuate him. As he was climbing down the roof into the rescue boat, he caught his foot on a lose nail and was wounded deeply. The cut was met by dirty water. Due to lack of adequate medical care, his cut worsened. His foot swelled and the infected area began to turn black. He ended up in Texas with his family, who immediately took him to the emergency room in Houston. The doctors dressed his wound, prescribed a course of antibiotics, and diagnosed the wound as a severe infection. However, because he was on Medicaid, he was only allowed one in-house visit a week. Connie and her family were busy finding jobs and trying to scrap up enough money to pay rent and buy airbeds in their one bedroom apartment. Since there was no car in the family, and no one to take him to the hospital, Connie had to administer the antibiotics through his IV four times a day, and change his bandages. Every time she removed his bandages, pieces of his foot fell off. In his weekly consultations with the visiting nurse, Connie relayed her concern about the changing color and growing odor of the infection, suggesting that it might be gangrene. On each visit she was rebuffed, and told that the nurses had seen worse. After this went on for some time, it came time for Connie to leave Houston. Fearing for the health of her stepfather and his worsening condition, she brought him to the hospital specifically stating that he had gangrene and needed medical care. After forty-eight hours, the hospital discharged him. Unable to walk and with the very little money he had, he took a cab back to the apartment, but he did not have a key, so he spent the next two days sleeping at the Laundromat next door. Upon her return, Connie discovered her stepfather's worsening condition, and sent him back on a Greyhound to New Orleans, where she knew he would receive better care. The next morning, he went to a hospital in New Orleans, where the doctors reluctantly informed him that he had gangrene, and the infection had spread so far up his leg and into the bone that they had to amputate. They also noted that had he not come in and received care, the infection would have killed him within a month. At this time, he may be pursing a medical malpractice case for the neglect of the Houston doctors and nurses, who never once informed him of such a possibility.

One Visit, eighteen months on

We met Michael at our first trailer of the day. We were in a hard-hit neighborhood with few trailers and fewer inhabited houses. The street was broken into rubble and outside one or two of the houses sat the massive piles of trash that signaled the early stages of the gutting process. Unlike the area just a few blocks away, many homes here looked as they must have immediately after the water had been pumped away: the interiors soggy, moldy and in disarray, a child’s doll under the upturned kitchen table, pictures still hung on the dark splotchy walls. Michael’s trailer was in the yard outside one such house. As we knocked on the door, he growled out of the rear window, asking who we were. When we explained that we were volunteers, he said he’d be out in just a moment.

When he opened the door, he immediately invited us in to talk. His niece was asleep on the couch and there was barely enough room for the two of us and Michael to fit in the small central room. He was a large man, over six feet tall and 300 pounds, and the trailers are only seven feet wide and barely that high. As we began to ask our standard questions, he explained that he owned the house behind his trailer and had evacuated before the storm, caravanning up to Baton Rouge with his sister and her family. As they bounced from Louisiana to Tennessee to Atlanta, they had no word of their neighborhood, nor their houses (his sister lives next door) until, at a hotel in Atlanta, they saw them on the news, under six feet of water.

When Michael finally returned to his neighborhood, where he’s owned his home for 18 years, the devastation was greater than he had imagined. While he’s lived in his trailer for over a year, on the yard of his own house, he doesn’t feel capable of going in side his destroyed home. The burden is too great, he says, and he gets emotional thinking about his whole life, trapped under that water for all those weeks. He wants to rebuild, but his homeowners insurance didn’t cover any of the water damage and he had no flood insurance because his house sits above sea level. Now he waits on the massive government bureaucracy to sort through his application, weigh its merits, and, hopefully, grant him the money to begin to rebuild his life.

Even living in the trailer, he doesn’t feel safe in his neighborhood. Neighbors have not returned and the streets are dark and empty at night. In order to visit friends, he walks across the city (buses are worthless, he says, as they rarely run and only cover a small portion of the routes they once did). He mentions incidents of police harassment as he walks through the city, yet feels he has no choice but to endure it as the price of getting some sense of his lost community.
As we left, he urged us to come back and visit his neighbor, an older Vietnamese man. He didn’t leave during the storm, Michael says, he just sat on his porch to protect his house and keep an eye on the neighborhood. As the water came into the house, he continued to wait, hoping it would go down. When it got to chest height, he decided it was time to evacuate and with no boat and no one left in the neighborhood, he swam over a mile, through the streets to a highway overpass. He slept there for two more nights before being rescued. He’s has returned to his house, but he’s in a bad way, Michael relates, his head isn’t right any more, not after that. We hope to return to meet him in the coming days.

Time Does Not Heal All Wounds

Today, like yesterday, and the day before, I spent the day in the Midtown District of New Orleans. The days have been rough and long. I do not have much energy left at this point today but I will do my best to put down my thoughts in a cohesive manner.
I want to talk about Coach. I met Coach today while we were driving through Midtown. We waved to him from the sedan and he flagged us down. We pulled the car over and the four of us got out and met Coach and several of his neighbors. The first thing Coach asked us was why we we were only talking to people living in FEMA trailers. I responded to him that we had been assigned the FEMA Trailer Survey Prjoect and explained the idea behind the project. Coach looked at the four of us and said that he was not living in a trailer and that folks not living in the trailers needed held just as much as those who had received FEMA trailers.
We spoke with Coach for a while and with several of his neighbors. They told us how the city of New Orleans made it so difficult for them as to where they could place their FEMA trailers that many of the folks in the neighborhood simply gave up. The trailers could not be placed under power lines, or phone lines, or be touching any part of the sidewalk. One of his neighbors was lucky enough to have received a FEMA trailer but they were never given a key. FEMA never answered any of their requests for the key, so the trailer is sitting empty in the driveway of a now abandoned house.
After some time had passed Coach began to open up more about his experience. He invited us into his house and offered us root beer and dinner and Coach gave me my first Sasparilla. He asked us if we had seen Spike Lee's documentary and proceeded to tell us that Spike Lee had nothing on him. After listening to Coach recant his story to us I realized that watching a documentary and sitting in person with someone who experienced this catastrophe and is still experienceing this catastrophe are totally different experiences.
He told us how the day after Katrina had made landfall that he and his mother were sitting outside cleaning up and that for the most part their neighborhood and home had weathered the storm very well. More importantly, one of the reasons they chose not to evacuate is because they had always been told that Midtown had too high of an elevation to be flooded out by more than three feet even if a Levee were to breach. Furthermore, most people in their neighborhood did not have flood insurance because in short they has been told they would never need flood insurance. A full 24 hours after the storm had passed Coach noticed that water was starting to flow down the street. After an hour the water had risen to the curb level. He and his mother figured that maybe a water pipe had ruptured. Or worse case scenario if the 17th street levee had breached than maybe the water would rise to about three feet or so and they decided to wait. The water rose above the level of the street up to the first step leading to the front door. Then it rose to the second step, and then the third step, and then the fourth step. Coach realized the water was not going to stop rising at three feet.
Coach was able to find a boat that had washed out from a nearby storage facility and for hours he waded in six feet of water rescuing as many of his neighbors as possible and pushing the boat to the bridge so these people could walk to the Superdome. After several hours he was able to hotwire the boat engine and continued to rescue as many people as he could and who were willing. I could see the pain in his eyes as over and over again all he could say to me to express how unbelievable the situation was by saying, "It was bad. It was bad. I can't tell you how bad it was." He gave us a book that was published by the Times-Picayune, the largest local newspaper for the New Orleans Metro area, that had hundreds of photographs of the devastation. He was pointing out pictures of friends and relatives that were in these published photos. Coach asked us that we bring the book back to San Francisco and show it to as many people as we can and to tell his story and let people know that New Orleans needs help now more than ever.
As a fellow member of our group stated earlier tonight in conversation, this is our duty as Americans and as Humans to be here in New Orelans, right now, and in the future. As far as I have seen in the last three days, this event has really shined a light on the absolute best of humanity and the absolute worst. We cannot forget about these people and this city just because it has been a year, or a year and a half or two years. We cannot ever forget until we can bring this community back to be bigger and better than it ever was before Katrina. To anyone who may read this blog, I may not be the most eloquent or grammatically correct writer, but please see through to the deeper level I am trying to express. New Orleans and its people are a part of us as Americans and as fellow human beings and we cannot just walk away or forget their plight.

Pictures: Each Worth A Thousand Words

New Orleans' 9th Ward: 18 Months After Katrina