In late July, Miriam and I spent a week in New Orleans with Nechama, Jewish Response to Disaster (www.nechama.org), cleaning out houses damaged in Hurricane Katrina.
If you're not familiar with the group, Nechama was founded in Minnesota in the late 1990s to provide volunteer clean-up assistance to communities hit by tornadoes or floods, two kinds of natural disaster common in the Upper Midwest. You can read more about Nechama's history and goals on its website: in brief, their focus is to provide help to people in the greatest need, such as the poor, elderly, or disabled, who don't own the equipment needed, or have the physical strength, to clear tornado-flattened trees from their property, or haul water-soaked furniture and other belongings out of a flooded basement.
Within a week after Katrina hit, Nechama sent a team to the Gulf Coast to see how they might help. Since then, Nechama's staff has led hundreds of volunteers in doing thousands of volunteer-hours of work in the region. Nechama owns trucks and trailers full of disaster clean-up equipment--chain saws, shovels, buckets, wet/dry vacs, pry bars, sledge hammers, work gloves, masks, bleach, brooms, and so on--and trains its volunteers how to safely perform the clean-up tasks required.
This was my and Miriam's second trip to the Gulf Coast to do volunteer disaster relief, although our first trip together. (We've both also gone, on separate occasions, on local--within Minnesota--deployments with Nechama.) I went with Nechama to Mississippi in October 2005, just 6 weeks after the storm, and Miriam went in March 2006, during her college spring break.
For me, this trip to New Orleans was emotionally more difficult than my previous experience in Mississippi. When Nechama went to the Gulf Coast area in the weeks immediately after Katrina, the disaster relief needed was similar to what Nechama has been doing in the Midwest for years, though of course on a vastly larger scale. In Mississippi in October, I saw more or less what I expected to see: houses and businesses damaged or destroyed by the wind, fallen trees everywhere, and, close to the coast, lots of evidence of the storm surge and flooding, such as cars and boats washed up and stranded in unlikely locations (cars on porches and roofs, boats on highway medians). The devastation was awe-inspiring and humbling, a reminder of how puny we humans are, and how ill-prepared to stand up against the forces of nature.
My experience in New Orleans was different. I wasn't completely unprepared, of course. I follow the news; I'd been hearing reports for months about the glacially--criminally--slow pace of recovery, I'd seen pictures, and I knew that Nechama was spending the entire summer working in New Orleans, keeping teams of 10 or 20 or more volunteers busy week after week after week. But knowing the state of affairs in the abstract, and seeing it with my own eyes, were two very different things.
Miri and I arrived at the New Orleans airport on Saturday night, July 22, and were picked up by one of Nechama's staff members, Seth, and another volunteer, Justin. We waited an extra half hour so we could also pick up another volunteer, Kimberly, a midshipman at the Naval Academy who had decided to devote a week of her leave time to our disaster relief efforts. Once she arrived and we had all collected our baggage, we left the airport and drove north, across Lake Pontchatrain, to Slidell, Louisiana, our home base for the week.
Normally, when Nechama does tornado and flood clean-up in Minnesota and neighboring states, the projects last only a day or two. Volunteers bring a bag lunch and meet at a central location in Minneapolis early in the morning, ride in the Nechama van or their own car to the scene of the disaster, spend the day working, and drive home again that night. If some people choose to stay for several days, there are always local motels and restaurants available for their use.
In order to work in Mississippi and Louisiana, Nechama had to find long-term sources of meals and lodging for its volunteers. Home bases have included smoke-jumper (fire service) camps and Jewish and Christian summer camps, each of which provided different living experiences, from the quality of the meals to the comfort of the sleeping quarters to the availability, or lack, of amenities like laundry service or Internet access.
When Nechama made the commitment to spend the entire summer working in New Orleans (I think it came to 13 weeks, from the beginning of June to the end of August), they arranged to team up with what might sound like an unlikely partner: Operation Blessing International (OBI), an affiliate of Pat Robertson and The 700 Club. When Miri and I first heard where we were staying, we laughed out loud, and felt almost as if we were getting away with something, wondering if Mr. Robertson knew there were Jews living and working among his flock (from the sermons and speeches Mr. Robertson has given over the years, we've never thought of him as being particularly accepting or tolerant).
However, we quickly learned that the arrangement was a good one, and equally beneficial to Nechama, OBI, and the Katrina survivors we had all come to help.
I heard a little about OBI's history while we were in New Orleans, and glanced through their website (www.ob.org) as well. I learned that they had been doing disaster relief work for several decades, sending teams around the world in the wake of hurricanes, earthquakes, and other natural disaster to provide medical aid and rebuilding assistance. Although they've also run programs to provide medical and other assistance to impoverished Americans, Katrina was the first time they set up a large-scale disaster relief operation within the United States.
The OBI headquarters, and Nechama's home for the summer, was in one end of a former shopping mall (the other end is occupied by a furniture store). Within the mall, they walled off two areas for sleeping dormitories, one for men and one for women, on either side of a central corridor/lobby where the men's and women's public restrooms were located. They set up a TV lounge with half a dozen couches and comfy armchairs and a rug on the floor and, against the opposite wall, a desk with a computer with Internet access. They replaced the two big glass windows on either side of the main entrance to the mall with plywood panels, through which they ran big, plastic air-conditioning conduits, with the air-conditioning units themselves sitting on the sidewalk just outside the entrance. Not sophisticated or pretty, but it kept the living quarters cooler and more comfortable than the outdoor high heat and humidity in New Orleans in the summer!
The parking lot was divided into several areas. Equipment vans and trailers were parked in one section. Nearby, a big tent served as kitchen and dining hall for the staff and volunteers on site. There were also several shower trailers, one or two air-conditioned, the others not, and several parked trailers full of supplies, including one refrigerated trailer for the groceries for the kitchen. Another part of the parking lot held more air-conditioned trailers outfitted as offices for the OBI staff (they gave Nechama its own office trailer, too), and separate housing and showers for the medical volunteers: doctors, dentists, nurses, and technicians who staff OBI free clinics. (I guess they needed to provide nicer amenities for people donating such high-skill professional services, although the medical volunteers did eat in the dining tent with everyone else.)
Enough background--on with the story!
No volunteer teams were sent out on Sundays, so we spent the afternoon playing tourist. Eric Isaacs, a very nice person and professional photographer from California, who was with Nechama as a volunteer back in October during the same week I was in Mississippi, served as deployment manager for Nechama in New Orleans all summer. He also kindly offered to drive Miri and me down to the French Quarter and act as our guide on Sunday afternoon.
We parked in a public lot on the riverfront, and spent several hours exploring the French Quarter, which was only lightly damaged during the hurricane and has been almost completely restored. We had lunch in the Market Café, then walked through the French Market, which reminded me a little of Pike's Place Market in Seattle, only more open to the air, and with less fresh food and more t-shirts and jewelry.
Then we walked most of the length of Bourbon Street, all the way to Canal Street. Being there in daylight, we got to admire the architecture of the old buildings. Many had second- and third-storey balconies overlooking the narrow street, with elaborate wrought-iron railings and wonderful displays of potted plants. At street level, though, it was obvious that this is a place designed for people who love alcohol! As you walk along, the businesses you pass are, quite literally, bar, strip club, bar, bar, t-shirt shop, bar, bar, strip club, bar….
At Canal Street, we headed back toward the river. Canal Street is broad and has lots of big-name hotels and chain stores. It reminded me a little of Broadway around Times Square, lots of huge advertising signs and neon lights, but with more of a dingy, sleazy edge to it than I noticed on my last visit to New York. In one block, side by side, I saw Payless Shoes, Foot Locker, Lady Foot Locker, Foot Locker Junior… there was quite a vivid contrast between all this slick commercialism and the 1830s architecture and unique ambiance of Bourbon Street, just around the corner!
Then we wandered up Decatur Street toward Jackson Square. We bought some luscious pralines at a corner candy store, then stopped at Café Du Mond for their infamous beignets… people call them a "French donut," but that's not an accurate comparison; they're square, not round, there's no hole, they're denser than a typical American donut… Hard to describe, but wonderful. They were served in a small paper bag, fresh and hot and buried in powdered sugar. Yum!
Our real work began on Monday. We all finished breakfast by 8:00 a.m., loaded our truck with coolers full of water and other drinks and a box full of MREs (military "meals ready to eat," our lunch all week), and piled into the van for the drive to the day's work site. We had a different number of people working on our team every day, but usually around a dozen. I've already mentioned Seth, Eric, Justin, Kimberly, Miriam, and me. Eliza drove to New Orleans from Texas. Bob, a pediatrician, and Whitney, an artist and teacher, flew in on Sunday from Minneapolis. Eitan, a high school English teacher from New York, had worked with Nechama the week before and decided to stay on. Gay, another woman from Texas, had been doing various volunteer jobs around OBI for several weeks, including going out on work assignments with Nechama; and a local New Orleans woman, Carol, also had been working with Nechama for the past week or two. Last but not least was Aaron Parker, who I thought of as our personal Clark Kent. He is a college student who grew up on a farm in the Midwest (I want to say Missouri, but I'm not sure) and came to New Orleans early in June, wanting to help people. He is built like--well, like Clark Kent!--and was an unbelievably hard worker, willing to tackle any job, and with amazing strength and stamina. He was almost always the first person to start swinging a sledge hammer in the morning, and the last person to leave the work site at the end of the day. Most of us were dragging after 6 or 7 hours of work, but I think he could've happily kept going from dawn to dusk, or longer!
OBI was running several different programs in the New Orleans area. They had set up medical/dental clinics, and organized the schedules for those professional staffs. They also provided work assignments for church groups, youth groups, and school groups that came down to volunteer. But, although OBI provided food and housing, basic equipment these groups needed (shovels, wheel barrows, gloves, masks), and some fundamental training in what work had to be done, they did not provide transportation or direct, on-site leadership. Each group was expected to complete its assignments by functioning as its own, independent team.
As you can imagine, OBI had to exercise good judgment in making work assignments. A church delegation of twenty young to middle-aged, able-bodied men with backgrounds in building trades and factory work would be better qualified to tackle some jobs than a junior high youth group consisting of seven teenagers and two chaperones. Sometimes, if a couple of small groups were at OBI during the same week, they would be sent on assignments together; logistically sensible, but not always practical if the leaders of the two groups couldn't agree on how to share authority, or the group members didn't quite get along.
OBI also wasn't set up to accommodate the single volunteers who sometimes showed up, wanting to help. It might not be comfortable, for instance, for a 30-something lawyer to have to spend a week working with a bunch of teenagers.
This is where Nechama provided a nice service to OBI. Nechama already had in place our own skilled leadership, our own transportation, our own equipment, and our own methods for integrating each week's new volunteers into a smoothly functioning team. Also, although part of Nechama's mission is to bring Jewish volunteers to communities where many people may have never before met a Jew, we've also always welcomed non-Jewish volunteers who want to help. So, it quickly became routine that, whenever OBI found themselves with the occasional lone volunteer, they sent that person to work with Nechama.
That's how we acquired Aaron Parker. He arrived in New Orleans during Nechama's second week there, and ended up staying and working with us the entire summer!
During the week Miriam and I were there, it so happened that most of the people on the Nechama team were Jewish. However, there were other weeks where the majority of volunteers were non-Jews. The great thing is, it didn't matter. We were all there because we wanted to help people who needed our help.
On Monday, we worked on gutting a house in the Lakeview neighborhood of New Orleans, which looked like it had once been a fairly nice, middle-class area. The Nechama team had done a couple of hours of work on the house on Friday, but we still had all of the major demolition to do.
Gutting a house is exactly what it sounds like: you remove everything that has been damaged or contaminated, from furniture and personal belongings to wallboard, floor coverings, and ceilings, leaving nothing inside but the bare wooden studs. All the debris were piled at the curb, where various private contractors (hired by the city or county or state) could collect the trash and haul it away.
This was my first experience with true house gutting, though I've cleaned a few flooded basements in Minnesota in past years. (When I worked with Nechama in October, all we did was cut trees.) When Miriam volunteered in March, they did a lot of house gutting, and she told me that removing normal drywall from a flood-damaged house is kind of fun, because water softens the material and you can often peel off huge pieces of a wall with your hands.
Unfortunately, this house was abnormal, because the owners had added a layer of concrete on top of the wallboard! If they had removed the wallboard during their remodeling, and installed plain concrete, we could have left the walls intact and simply sanitized them. Unfortunately, the paper on the wallboard soaked up moisture and was now full of mold, so all of the walls had to be removed. The concrete/plaster layers were hard to break (physically tough and time-consuming!), produced huge amounts of cement dust, and were very heavy to carry out to the curb.
On Monday night, we attended an OBI orientation meeting, and learned a little more about the way they worked. One of the things they required is that every volunteer group that stayed with them leave one member behind at the compound each day to do basic clean-up and odd jobs. As the OBI manager explained, helping clean the kitchen tent, restock toilet paper in the bathrooms, or sweep the floor in the supply warehouse may not be as obviously useful to the people of New Orleans as gutting a house, but relying on volunteer help for maintaining the compound was part of what had enabled OBI to bring thousands of volunteers to the area over the past 11 months.
So, every morning, Seth asked for a volunteer to stay behind and said that, if no one offered, we'd have to draw straws. Once you stayed behind, you were immune for the rest of the week. Fortunately, we always had someone willing to stay behind, so the job never had to be assigned to one of the people who was deeply determined to do "real" work every single day and would have resented being stuck at the compound instead.
On Tuesday, Bob the pediatrician agreed to stay behind, and Eitan, Gay, and another OBI "orphan," Matt, went to help with a greenhouse project they had heard about. A group from one of the universities was working with the Botanical Gardens to propagate swamp plants which, once they reach a healthy size, will be transplanted into areas around the city that need to be revitalized. The rest of us went back to the Lakeview house to pick up where we left off on Monday. Water had risen to only about 8 inches deep on the second floor of the house, so we didn't have to remove entire walls on that floor, just the bottom couple of feet. We also removed the family's belongings that were still up there (furniture, clothes, books, hangars, papers), and then swept and vacuumed much of the house.
The one frustrating thing that happened was that a crew with a bobcat, plus a dump truck with a claw, arrived around 2:00 p.m. to pick up garbage from the curbside, and announced that we couldn't come outside and add to the pile while they were working. Apparently this was the first time Eric had encountered any pick-up crew with such an attitude. At other times, either they would let us keep adding to the pile at one end while they worked on the other end, or we had told them when we expected to be completely finished and they simply arranged to come back later.
This crew, though, insisted on picking up our trash right that minute, with no regard for the fact that our work had to grind to a standstill. We continued to sweep up concrete and plaster pieces and dust for a little while but, once we filled all of our muck buckets and wheelbarrows, we had to stop and wait for the dump truck to leave before we could take them out to empty them, and do more cleaning. So, thanks to that unplanned break, we weren't able to finish work on the house that day.
When we got back to OBI, we learned that Bob would no longer be working with us. The OBI staff had discovered that he was a pediatrician, and convinced him to work in their medical clinic for the rest of the week! Although I think he had been looking forward to a "vacation" of house gutting as a change of pace from his normal routine, he couldn't say no to OBI's request that he use his medical skills. After all, they had plenty of volunteers who could swing a hammer; licensed physicians were harder to come by. OBI had all of the bureaucratic tools in place to enable doctors from anywhere in the country to work for them; by the end of Tuesday they had gotten Bob's license and other credentials sent from Minnesota to New Orleans. We saw Bob at meals during the rest of the week, and he seemed to find the work interesting; he cared for some children, but mostly treated adult patients, and so got to deal with some issues he rarely saw in his practice at home, such as hypertension.
On Wednesday, Miri offered to be our stay-behind person at base camp. The rest of us went to Lakeview one more time, to finish the last of the sweeping and vacuuming. As we were doing that, one of the neighbors came over to talk to Eric. This neighbor had doubts about whether anyone would ever do anything with the house, or whether it would end up getting bulldozed. The owner is a woman in her 80s, and it's doubtful that she'll ever return to live in the house-she has resettled in another state-but she was adamant about wanting to have the house cleaned, repaired, and sold to a new family who would make it their home. Her daughter also had no intention of ever occupying the house, but was willing to sell it to someone who would fix it up and then live in it. However, at least according to the neighbor, the daughter also might decide to sell it to a new owner who would find it easier and more cost-effective to raze the existing structure and build a new house from scratch.
The situation with this house was a perfect example of the kinds of logistical problems that are plaguing much of the Katrina clean-up and recovery effort. Seth and Eric originally accepted the assignment for us to gut this house on good faith: they were told that the house would be remodeled and reinhabited, if we could clean it up. But if it does turn out that the house is eventually razed, it would mean we had essentially wasted our couple of hundred person-hours of volunteer work. There's no need to laboriously remove furnishings and wallboard, and sweep and vacuum the floors, if the whole building is going to be bulldozed and hauled away to the dump!
Imagine if this kind of garbled communication is taking place all over New Orleans and other Katrina-devastated communities. No matter how many willing volunteers you have, you don't want to waste their time. As it is, there is far more work to do be done than there are volunteers to do it, so that makes any waste of time and effort doubly regrettable.
As Eric pointed out, though, even if the worst happens and this house is razed rather than reoccupied, the fact that we worked on it has given emotional comfort to the owner, and relieved some of the stress of the ordeal she has gone through, and that alone is a valuable service to provide.
Rather than give the house a complete power-washing (whenever the daughter sells it, it may be months before a new owner starts remodeling, and by then it will need another cleaning anyway), we left just a couple of people behind to do bleach sanitizing to hopefully prevent any return of mold, while the rest of us went to the Botanical Gardens at City Park to work at the greenhouse. The park originally had 260 employees; now they're getting by with about 20 full-time and 50 part-time workers. As we drove through, it looked to me like the park is as big as or bigger than Central Park, but at the moment it's an overgrown, shaggy shambles of un-mown lawns, damaged pavilions and playgrounds, and bedraggled plantings.
The problem of too-few employees was noticeable all over the city. In late July, the population of New Orleans was approximately half of what it had been one year earlier. People can't return to their former jobs if they have no place to live. Businesses can't reopen if they don't have workers, so even people who want to return and can find a place to live may have no job to return to. It's a vicious circle. We talked to some people who were living in their cars, waiting for insurance money to rebuild their homes. There were "help wanted" signs everywhere; fast-food places were offering $15/hour, and still could not fill their staffs.
Also, as we drove each day from Slidell into New Orleans, there was more than one stretch of highway that passed through entire neighborhoods of vacant houses and apartment buildings and abandoned shops and businesses. You could see block after block of damaged roofs, broken or boarded up windows, yards overgrown with weeds the height of small trees, and not a car or person moving on any of the streets. I don't know what New Orleans really looks like from the air, but my mental image is of a piece of swiss cheese; some areas of the city have come back to life, but others are gaping holes of uninhabited silence.
The Botanical Gardens had received donations of healthy swamp plants from nearby communities, to be used for repopulating the park's wetlands and other wetlands in the area. A few of us worked at dividing these clumps and planting them in soil in small pots. Hopefully, a couple of stalks in each pot will flourish and become a thick patch of iris or swamp grass or whatever, ready to be transplanted. Others in our group cut ground tarps and built new work benches for the damaged greenhouse.
At noon, we ate our lunch, using a big stack of relatively clean, dry cinder blocks as our picnic table. Then, we drove to the nearby New Orleans Museum of Art and spent about an hour looking at a few of their exhibits, including several rooms full of photos of Katrina and its aftermath.
Our last stop of the day was back in Slidell, about 10 minutes away from the OBI compound. The neighborhood is poor, containing a lot of Habitat for Humanity houses--in fact, one of our volunteers, Matt, remembered putting the roof on one that we passed on our way to our work site. Our assignment was to clean up a double-wide mobile home that is a combination church/youth center for the neighborhood. Its ministry is to try to keep teens away from drugs and crime. They have no money, so whatever we could do to help get their building usable again would be welcome. We spent a couple of hours there, pulling down wall paneling and moving some of the furnishings out of the way (much of it stayed dry enough that it should be possible to clean and reuse it) so that we could remove carpeting and other unsalvageable items when we returned the next day.On Thursday, I volunteered to stay behind and work at the OBI compound. As expected, cleaning up around the headquarters didn't feel as productive as going out with our work team would have, but someone had to do it. Miriam told me that they were able to finish all the work that could be done at the little church, and left it in a condition where the church staff and the neighborhood youth could, hopefully, start rebuilding. Seth talked to OBI about possibly donating construction materials, which would be a huge help.
Throughout the week, it was interesting for me to listen to what various volunteers and staff members from Nechama and OBI had to say about the whole Katrina recovery situation. Everyone had opinions on how things might have been handled better from the start, or at the very least with more fairness and less corruption. What I heard, and observed, again and again, is that a small group of people can join together, cooperate, and get an incredible amount of useful work done. If the group grows just a little too large, it becomes cumbersome; at that point, more people working does not guarantee more work getting done. To get several small groups to combine forces and not work at cross purposes requires a special kind of leadership, from people with the confidence and knowledge to take command of a situation, and yet with enough lack of self-aggrandizing ego to be able to negotiate and compromise successfully with leaders from other groups. And the larger a group becomes, the more complex the bureaucracy that evolves to support it, with more leaders and assistant leaders and sub-leaders brought in to add layers of complication to any task you want to accomplish.
I puzzled over a lot of this when I was with Nechama in Mississippi in the fall, and the same questions continue to nag at me. Nechama is very effective in accomplishing the jobs we're qualified to do. Our greatest problem is finding the right people to help. There's no question that there are plenty of home owners in New Orleans who desperately need the assistance we can offer…the trick is getting connected to them.
During the week I was in New Orleans, Israel was in the midst of its war against Hezbollah, and the fighting had turned much of southern Lebanon into a disaster area. Several of the volunteers from Nechama and the church groups staying at OBI followed the news closely each day, and there was a lot of conversation about the whole subject. One topic that caught people's attention was President Bush's pledge of a multi-million dollar aid package to help Lebanon rebuild. Naturally, many of us looked at the situations we were facing every day and asked, if the United States can afford to send that much money to a foreign country, why haven't we been able afford to rebuild one of our own cities? The mismanagement of aid funds in New Orleans is mind-boggling--an ongoing morass of corruption and confusion. Even in late July, 11 months after the hurricane, basic questions had not yet been answered about whether certain neighborhoods--such as the Lower 9th Ward--should be rebuilt as they once were, or in some other form, or just razed. And as long as such questions remained answered, little if any work could be done. Maybe razing whole neighborhoods would be safest and most efficient in the long run, but would there be any compensation given to the people who would lose their houses and their land, which quite often was the only asset they possessed? Another ongoing controversy was the question of who would make these decisions, and whether the choices would be based on racial and economic discrimination; basically, an attempt to make the city "less black." From some of the anecdotes we heard, it was easy to understand people's suspicions. If someone in one neighborhood has to pay $5,800 to get a permit to rebuild, yet someone in an adjacent but more "desirable" neighborhood pays no fee at all, you have to wonder.
On Friday morning, we started a new project, a small house in the Gentilly neighborhood, only a short distance from the Lower 9th Ward. The house had water in it almost up to the ceiling during the flooding, and it hadn't been touched since, so it was a pretty disgusting mess. One description of such houses is to imagine the interior as a washing machine. During the storm, all of the furnishings float round and round in the swirling, sloshing flood water and then, as the waters recede, everything settles wherever it happens to be, in a haphazard, sodden mess.
This house also had a number of holes in the roof over several of the rooms, plus a whole corner of roof missing entirely at the back, so that, on top of the flood damage, the interior had been rained on for the past 11 months. Miriam said this house was in as bad or worse condition as any of the houses she mucked out in Mississippi back in March.
(Miri adds: "This is where I learned my lesson about trying to choose what work I do: I volunteered to stay behind on Wednesday because I thought I might be able to avoid just the sort of work we faced on Friday. Instead I missed out on the art museum and the botanical gardens. Oh, well.")
When we first arrived, Eric inspected the house and yard to assess the overall situation and look for hazards. There was a tree stump right out front by the curb, where we would want to dump debris, and a small tree fallen in the back yard, blocking the door there. So, while Aaron and Justin set up ventilation fans in the windows to start airing out the very moldy-smelling house, and others in the group set up our shade tent and started getting out equipment, I took a chain saw and cut the front yard stump down to near ground level, and cut up the tree in the backyard, and Miriam hauled the pieces out to the curb. That was the easiest part of the day!
Once we got some fresh air moving through the rooms, we started the long, dirty process of gutting the house. Much of the wooden furniture was so rotten from the damp that it fell apart in our hands, and the walls crumbled at a touch--the exact opposite of the aggravating concrete walls we'd struggled with at the beginning of the week. Some of the wallboard peeled away in layers, as did the paneling in the kitchen. It was inexpensive and flimsy to begin with, little more than cardboard, and being wet for almost a year had brought it to the edge of disintegration.
There were bugs everywhere, from big cockroaches to smaller, scurrying things nesting between layers of paper and pressboard and wood. A neighbor lady came over to see what we were doing, and warned us to look out for brown spiders that give a nasty, painful bite--we guessed she was talking about brown recluse spiders. We saw many spiders of all sizes during the day but, thankfully, none of us was bitten!
We took a welcome break for lunch, and then most of us climbed into the van for a quick look at the Lower 9th Ward. The chaos and destruction there is appalling--still appalling, after all this time. It was truly disheartening to see how little had been accomplished since the storm. When I was in Mississippi in October, I saw incredible devastation everywhere, but it made sense that it was taking several weeks to get the recovery operation up and running. But, 11 months!? It's hard to imagine how people can cope with having their entire lives turned inside out and upside down, with no end in sight.
One of the consequences of the general confusion is that there's no guarantee that any group's hours of work will result in a family being able to return to their home. The house we were gutting on Friday, for instance, was so heavily damaged it might prove to be structurally unsound and impossible to renovate at an affordable cost, if at all. The only option may be to bulldoze it. But the homeowners couldn't make that decision until they saw what they had left, and they needed our clean-up efforts to enable them to do that. Whatever else happens, Nechama's presence in New Orleans at least helped a few families overcome some of obstacles that are preventing them from moving forward with their lives.
We returned to the house and put in several more hours of gutting work before it was time to pack up and return to base for badly needed showers, and dinner. It was truly remarkable how much a dozen of us were able to accomplish in a single day. By the end of the afternoon, we had hauled most of the contents of the house outside (furniture, rugs, clothes, kitchen appliances, cabinets) and torn out most of the interior walls. On Monday, a new group of Nechama volunteers would come back and finish up, much as we had started our week finishing the cleaning of a house started the week before.
After dinner, although we've never been interested in bar-hopping as a social activity, Miriam and I decided a trip to New Orleans wouldn't be complete without at least a brief visit to night-time Bourbon Street. We joined a bunch of the other Nechama volunteers on an excursion to the French Quarter, and went in two cars: one for those who planned to stay out late, and the other for the rest of us. Our "early" car left Slidell about 8:30 p.m., parked near the river, and went first to Café Du Mond for beignets and coffee. Then we met the rest of our group at the Hookah Café, on Frenchman Street at the eastern edge of the Quarter, which had really good beer for a couple of our members who were interested in that. From there, we walked up Royal Street, which is full of interesting-looking art galleries, unfortunately closed at night. Then we took a short cut through the famous Pat O'Brien's, home of the "Hurricane," a potent mixed drink. Inside the sprawling bar/restaurant were two piano bars, a "fire fountain" in an inner courtyard, and of course lots of people, drinking. After passing through the building, we emerged on Bourbon Street, which is closed to cars at night, so that people can stroll freely wherever they like, on sidewalks or in the road.
We posed for some group photos, and Miriam and I enjoyed watching the crowds for a while, and listening to the noise. Every bar was playing music, loudly, some from live bands, some recorded, to entice passersby to come inside. Kimberly told us that this was a very quiet evening on Bourbon Street. She had visited in the past, not even at Mardi Gras time, when the street was packed shoulder to shoulder with people drinking and laughing and fooling around, and if the crowd surged in one direction, you had no choice but be swept along with everyone else. Also, she said that the later it got, the louder the music would get, until you couldn't talk to the person next to you except by shouting.
As we walked along, three mounted New Orleans police officers trotted by, going right up the middle of the street through the crowds. One of the horses looked more nervous than the other two, and it made me think that might have been the most dangerous moment of the whole week--not our work in damaged houses or any chance of encountering lawlessness on the streets of Slidell, but the possibility of getting kicked by a police horse in the middle of the French Quarter!
All during this hour or so, as we walked along from our starting point at the Hookah Café, one or another member of our group would duck into a bar and buy a drink to go (plastic cups provided), and then we'd resume our stroll. We passed, and were passed by, a bunch of people on foot and on bicycles playing Capture the Flag; apparently interested folks gather at the Cathedral every Friday night and put together a game. In addition to beer, frozen daiquiris in a multitude of flavors and colors (smurf blue, mango, 190-proof antifreeze, to name just a few) were available at many bars, as were "test tube shots"--neon-colored alcohol of some kind, served in a test tube, of course.
After a couple of blocks of Bourbon Street, our group of not-serious drinkers had had enough, and returned to where we had left the car. We watched the Mississippi River for a few minutes, and the reflections of bridge lights sparkling on its surface, and wondered how wide it is at that point. A half mile, or more? Much wider than here in Minneapolis!
On Saturday, our flight home wasn't until early evening, so Miriam and I went with others in our group on Dr. Wagner's Honey Island Swamp Tour. Seven of us from Nechama, plus about another dozen tourists, boarded a flat-bottomed boat with a shade canopy. Paul, our pilot, told us all about the plants, birds, and reptiles we saw, and talked about swamps and marshes (swamps are trees and water, marshes are grass meadows with water), bayous, sloughs, canals, and how Hurricane Katrina had affected the whole Pearl River system, part of which forms the border between Louisiana and Mississippi. We saw great blue herons and egrets and turtles, and several alligators. The alligators come close to Honey Island Swamp Tour boats because the tour guides regularly feed them marshmallows! The alligators like the taste, but the marshmallows aren't really satisfying in any way, so the gators still hunt and eat their usual, nutritional diet, and don't come to depend on humans for meals. The gators associate the marshmallows only with the big tour boats; if fisherman come by in ordinary small boats, the gators stay out of sight.
The Honey Island Swamp includes about 35,000 acres of wildlife refuge, another 6,000 acres owned by the Nature Conservancy, and a stretch of riverfront privately owned by someone who leases parcels for people to build "camps"--cottages on stilts that local people use as vacation spots, much the same way people in Minnesota have their favorite summer cabin on a north woods lake.
When Katrina happened, I remember hearing a lot of talk about how all the development along the Gulf Coast, including clearing of swamps and wetlands, had made the hurricane's impact worse, because the straight canals and low marshes presented no barrier to the winds and storm surge. It was fascinating to see evidence for this all around us during the tour. Paul took us through one area, just 8 miles away from the main channel connecting Lake Pontchatrain and another big lake, where riverside houses suffered no flooding at all, because the storm surge was dissipated by the dense trees of the swamp before it reached them. However, the closer we got to the edge of the swamp, the more damaged buildings we saw.
All in all, it was an interesting tour, and a nice way to end our stay in New Orleans.
When we were on Bourbon Street on Friday night, one of our group got into a conversation about house gutting. One man she talked to gets paid $28 an hour for such work, and could not fathom why anyone would volunteer to do it! Someone else said that people in New Orleans who could afford the expense were paying $5,000 or more to have an 1,800-square-foot home gutted. Those figures gave us an idea of how much our donated time and effort was worth, especially to families who don't have insurance or cash savings to pay for the work that has to be done.
Eitan, the New York teacher, decided he was going to stay and work for a couple or three more weeks. Kimberly also decided to stay on for at least one more week, rather than continue her leave in a more conventional, restful way. We knew several other people--Matt, Gay, Carol, and of course the indefatigable Aaron--who also ended up devoting more weeks to Nechama than they had originally intended to do. Miriam and I agreed that, if we didn't have people and activities we wanted to go home to, we could see getting hooked on the simple routine and sense of accomplishment that is part of this kind of volunteer work. You have no responsibilities other than to show up each morning and do the work asked of you, and you know that whatever you do, you are making a difference in someone's life. Disaster relief work, hard as it is, can be addictive!
I'm glad I went to New Orleans, but it was a difficult experience. Although we did the best we could, it was clear that our efforts barely scratched the surface of what needs to be done--still, after all these months!--if the people who call New Orleans "home" are ever going to be able to return to the city and resume their lives. Hurricane Katrina provided, and continues to provide, tragic evidence of how poorly we, as a country, are prepared to deal with a major disaster. True, those of us who are well off--who have cars and savings accounts and insurance and education--are able to take care of ourselves in an emergency. But the old, the sick, the poor, the uneducated or undereducated have been almost completely abandoned by the larger society around them.
It's said that you can judge a culture by the way it treats its most vulnerable members. By that measurement, we Americans are a cruel, self-centered, criminally short-sighted nation.
The aftermath of Katrina also has demonstrated the limited effectiveness of "volunteerism." Thousands and thousands of well-meaning people have donated time, money, and effort to helping the survivors of Katrina all along the Gulf Coast over the past year, and continue to help as best they can. Nechama, for example, is already preparing to return to New Orleans for another five weeks of work in December and early January.
But the truth is, it's not enough. It's too little, and FAR too late for many homeowners. How many of the homes that are now damaged beyond saving, by over a year of sitting untouched, their contents and basic structure rotting with damp, might have been cleaned up and made habitable again if we, as a nation, had responded immediately to the emergency? We'll never know for sure…. All I know is, the whole situation was mismanaged from the start, and hordes of volunteers, no matter how well intentioned, can never make up for the original negligence.
When Katrina hit, we didn't need the private citizens of this country to step forward to donate their efforts to help. We needed, quite literally, an army (for instance, the National Guard troops of several states) of disciplined, organized workers, fully equipped with heavy machinery and supplies and muscle-power and monetary resources, to do the clean-up and recovery that was needed, promptly and correctly. But our country could not, would not muster those resources.
I'm fortunate that I've been able to do a tiny amount of work to help a few families. All of us who volunteer feel the same way.
But it's not enough. Not for all the people, elders and children and everyone in between, who have lost their homes, their jobs, their neighborhoods, their schools, their friends…the whole fabric of their daily lives…with no indication of when, or even if, they will ever recover what they once had.
And the question that haunts me is, what will happen the next time? (Because, where natural disasters are concerned, there is always a "next time.") Will the next big hurricane, or earthquake, or other disaster find our country similarly unprotected and unprepared?
I wish I knew.