New Orleans Part 1

3/5/06
This afternoon we got off the plane in New Orleans. As it was landing we commented on the roofs replaced by tarps and the barren coastline. The temperature was a moderate 63 degrees with a sweet smelling breeze as we exited the revolving doors at the airport. We then patiently waited, huddled under a tree outside the car rental place "Dollar Rental." Getting our keys we scrambled into the vans and started our adventure.
At first it didnt look like anything had happened at all.The land and houses near the airport were mostly intact and there were countless businesses open...but as we moved southeast there was a descernable change.
Saint Bernards Parish is about 15 minutes outside the city. A parish is a county, like "Albany County." This was where we would be working. There had been 3 types of flooding here. Rain, levy and river/lake water. There are no images or words that could convey what we saw appropriately. IT looked like a war zone. We drove for a half hour,all the way to the end of St Bernard, or the town Chalmette and were stunned to see house after house after house, after business after business completely destroyed. Nothing survived. All of the trees are dead. All of the houses either untouched since the hurricane six months ago, or gutted to begin rebuilding.
There are no open businesses, no electricity, gas or water lines. Nothing enhabitable within 30 miles. Each building is marked with grafitti labeling them checked for survivors.Easch still holding appliances, furniture, magazines and shampoo bottles.Homes where families had been, baby's first steps taken, fighting and fucking and love and family and connections all destroyed,or left in a pile. Private businesses that would never again see a customer. There are sporadic cars on the street and intermittent groups on front lawns using shovels and rakes, searching for everything, anything that had been lost. There are personal affects strewn on street corners, childrens shoes in gutters,boats on highway medians, cars full of mud and piled on top of one another in front yards. There are no children anywhere. Tired mothers and fathers, aunts and cousins continue the mass exodus of muddy, moldy sheetrock and dirty mattresses. They are trying to piece together a life for their children to come back to. There are 5 schools open out of 40. There are no animals either other than the well fed birds who scavenge the piles of refuse and debris on each front lawn.The mayor says there is no where to put the garbage and debris. I can see why. There are literally tons on every street corner.
We pass an empty lot with a car turned on its front end, leaning against a light post and a gutted house with a children's ball in the driveway. There are ghosts here where lives used to be. One thousand people found dead, one thousand still missing. The only store open is a makeshift Home Depot that has tents outside for the timber. The people needed them to even begin thinking of rebuildng.There are no gas stations,no restaurants. If we need something we will have to drive into the city.It is a deserted 1950's Western Movie. The savages came in an burned everything down leaving the people to move on or try again.
One house in the 9th ward is pushed right out into the street.Their bedroom window is eyelevel to the passing cars. They got it the worst. It is a bit closer to the city, still in St Bernard. The houses there didn't even stay on their foundations. It's no wonder they talked about just bulldozing eveything .There is literally nothing to salvage. Not even the wood. The houses were beaten and flooded for 2 weeks with no relief. In Chalmette at least, most houses stayed in tact, it was just the inside that was destroyed. Not in the 9th ward. There is nothing. People can't even drive on the streets there, there is still too much in the road. Trees, cars, wood, boats...
An hour into our circular drive, we found our tent village. It is run by FEMA. There are armed guards ar every gate and pictures are not allowed to be taken under any circumstances within the camp. We must wear a badge at all times and we will sleep in tents and shower in communal showers. I cant help but think each citizen on Chalmette would kill to live where we are staying. They are sleeping in shelters, or in their cars. They sleep in deserted schools.We all feel selfish for being worried about our living conditions. At the orientation they showed us a video taken the day after the flood. Each scene is a reiteration of what we had just seen only this time there were people. And water.There is 20 feet of water in some spots.Water up to the red lights, water up to the roof of the Taco Bell, resients living on roofs with buckets to pee in and blankets for the night. Old men and women in boats crying, the elderly in a nursing home sleeping on cots in the hallway of a school, a child on a mat sleeping on a bridge, we had seen first hand the gutted frame of the Walmart and here it is on the screen underwater.There were no sounds in the room, just the soundtrack of the video. The song was "Dreams."

New Orleans Part 2

3/6/06
This morning we rode a greyhound to our work site. The first group got off the bus at their stop . It was a one story(as most are) and in the front yard was a tall medium build blonde on her cell phone. As the kids(most are 17-21) piled off the bus, the woman stared in disbelief. They old her they were there to clean out(gut) her house. She dropped her cell phone. She started to cry. She was not crying because of the tragedy that was losing her home and all of her possessions, she cried because we were there. She cried because we cared and because the emotional stess of throwing out her ruined belongings was no longer hers to carry alone. I was so moved that I could not restrain myself from crying. I sat staring at her and cried. I could not stop it from coming out of me.I shook and sobbed silently in my seat. Heath patted my shoulder.
And then we got to our stop. I understood on a whole new level now why it was so important, what we are doing.I couldn't help but think how I would feel if this were my home, if I had to stand outside my front door and witness what we were seeing. Noone had stepped foot into our house since Hurricane Katrina six and a half months ago. Even the pictures I took( it was hard to find pictures taht where appropriate plus I felt guilty) did not accurately depict the atrocity of this event, the horror that 20 feet of water could cause.I wanted to get to work.
We could barely get the front door open. When we did, mud spilled out in congealed chunks. Furniture was upside down. A wedding dress hung from a door frame. There was not an inch of clear floor. The room was a pile...literally a pile of mud and stuff.It looked like a mountain that we could never conquer. We thought to ourselves, "this will take us all week."
So we began, grabbing the shoes and clothes, bottles of cleaning solution, mud mud and more mud, dishes, appliances, tv's and stereos, cabinets, beds, all covered in mud. All covered in mold, covered in mud, stuck in the mud. It looked nothing like a home.For that matter the town doesnt look anything like a town.It doesnt seem like people should be here, or that they have been here for ages. It seems that this just happened yesterday, yet it seems that people havent been here for years. It's a ghost town with random looters in the streets. A house here or there will have a sullen man or woman with a shovel, a rake, slowly but steadily removing the rubble, the caked mud, the backed up sewege, the destroyed photographs.
I still haven't seen any children.
All day we dug out the kitchen and the livingroom, stopping only for lunch or to catch some air that didn't wreak of mold or rotten food. In the kitchen the pots in the cupboards were filled with six month old mud water spilled onto my pants and shoes and cracked glass jars of pickles rolled out from under the fridge. We had duct taped the fridge to save ourselves the stench of the rotting meat in the freezer, but the stagnant meat water drained out when we turned the frige upright anyhow.
We found all sorts of animals in the house. Crawfish, minnows in the bath tub, frogs and cockroaches.Giant black spiders waited behind every column of insulation. It was very difficult to breathe with the N95 mask on, but they are the only one's approved for working in black mold which apparently is very dangerous. My back began to ache around noon. The repetitious shovelling of the mud proved too much for my poor back. But I kept working. I felt a reverence, a respect for the people who had lost everything. Even the frequent panic attacks from the claustrophobic masks did not deter me from working because I felt I owed it to them. I didnt have much time to get involved, to make a difference.

Fron 8am to 3pm we dug and hauled and hammered and grunted. We were exhausted, but by 3 o'clock we all looked around the filthy but strangely more liveable space we had created. We finished the large livingroom and kitchen and we were half done with the bathroom. We had torn down the moldy sheetrock(whuch crumbled in our hands like cake) and shoveled out the majority of the stagnant, modly six inch sludge that covered everything. For tomorrow: the bedrooms....

New Orleans Part 3

3/8/06
Last night I got very sick. I had a very high fever. I could not sleep and my already aching muscles could get no relief from the chills and aching that came with the fever. I felt like death. Some time in the night my fever broke. When I woke up this morning I felt a lot better. I decided to go to work. I mean, I only have a short time to make a difference here. I want to use every second and make it count. So I got dressed and packed my back with clean clothes to take a shower this afternoon. The walk out to the bus was painful and then Heath asked me to take the cooler. He works harder than all of us put together, so I never say no.
This afternoon one of the firemen came to check us out. I sat and talked with him while I ate lunch. HE said that his house was gone too, but that everything was great because his family was fine. He told me how it was to be here during and after the flood. He said he spend 2 days finding the floating bodies and tying them to lamp posts. He said he spent several days getting people off their roofs. The house next to where we are working has a hole in the roof from the residents who chopped their way out. They had been in their attic until the water got too high. He pointed and said, “There were hundreds like that.” Then he showed me a picture of his boss’s house the day of the flood. You can barely see the roof in the picture. He had tears in his eyes when he talked about breaking into the gas station to get the Slim Jims and Coke to feed to the people he had brought to the gym of the school. There was no where for them to go. He said they didn’t see outside help from Sunday until Wednesday. Then he said, “You know who the first people we saw where? No, it wasn’t the National Guard and no it wasn’t FEMA, it was the Canadian Mounties. They came all the way down and when they got in they told us they had tried to get in the day before, but the Guard wouldn’t let ‘em through, so they went down the river and convinced a barge owner to take them across. They were the first one’s we saw. The Guard was keeping people out!” I shook my head in disbelief. What a concept. If New York had a natural disaster, I have no doubt I would be telling the same story. Leave it to Canada to take better care of our people than we give.
- - -
I was having a very hard time breathing today. It was very humid; my throat is thick with mucus and then the mask on top of it all. It was tough to work. I kept going. It was very important to me not to waste any time. We finished 2609 Shannon St., and then moved on to help another group. They had a very big house. They had a terrible system. Not nearly as organized as we had been. It was frustrating for us. So we took over. We finished the front room in about a ½ hour and then moved on to the rest of the house. If I had to guess, I would say we did about 40% of the house that day, without their help for the most part. They took a lot of breaks, they sat and smoked, they broke windows for no reason. We all got a little annoyed, but we just kept on truckin’. We said a prayer for the house like we did the last one, giving it all of our good energy and blessings and then our group of 10 women showed those boys how work is really done. Surprisingly, by the end of the day, they were telling us how inspirational it was to work with us, that we were really motivated and that they wanted to work harder because we had shown them how it was done. We were all surprised to hear that. Turned out they were from Georgia. Most were from a college and were getting class credit for being there. That in itself was the difference between our two groups. All of us from St Rose were there because we wanted to be, because we were deeply affected and because we wanted to get involved and make a difference. To them, it didn’t matter whether they worked hard or not. They got credit either way…

New Orleans Part 4

3/10/06
Our second house is in a better area…and by better I mean less damaged. 2619 Legend Ave. There is only three inches of mud instead of the traditional six that we are used to. This house has not been touched since Katrina either. It is a lot bigger. I had a terrible fever last night which broke around 2am. I cried because I was so uncomfortable on the cot. I can’t recall the last time I was sick like that. Even the feeling of having to pee was excruciating. Good stuff. I felt great when I woke up, all the way to the bus and driving to the site, I felt fine. I feel good now too, but I know it is probably not the best idea for me to work. It would be better for me to rest, but I feel a responsibility to work while I am here. I have so little time to make a difference. Plus, it feels so good at the end of the work day, so accomplished, so content, I don’t want to miss that even for a day. Shyla is staying home today. She’s had this bug for a day longer than I have. We are supposed to go to the city tonight to celebrate. She wants to feel good for that, so Heath told her to stay and rest.
It is extremely hot today. I went outside and the humidity hit me like a wall. The sun is intense too. We all will be tired today. Its so hard to breathe with it humid like that.
Off to work I go.
- - -

What a day! We finished the house. It only took us 2 days. It’s such a riot when the fire men pull up to check on us they always comment on the fact that we are an all female crew. Truth be told, we worked harder than any male crew I saw down here. We work so well together. Each of us has a place and our movements are almost choreographed. It’s really beautiful. We never argue or get in the way, we just work, each of us sensing the importance and the gravity of this work. Each of us have spoken to the locals, and heard the horror of it all. We have bear witness to the hugeness of this catastrophe and we all take great pride in being here and being a part of this process.
It still is strange to me to talk to someone who says, “Oh everything is great. I couldn’t be happier” and then find out later that they had lost everything just like everyone else. They are so strong, so brave. We all share a reverence for them.
- - -

We just had our nightly meeting. This was our last .We leave in the morning. Sister Sean facilitated, as always, and asked each of us to share one thing they would take with them and one thing they would leave behind. I said I would leave behind all of my prayers of strength for the people of St Bernard’s Parish and all of my anxiety that I had before the trip. And with me I would take the awe of human spirit and the bonds I had made with the people on my work team. We all felt a sense of wonder and mystery over the sheer power of Human Will here in Chalmette. It is sad, but sometimes it takes the biggest catastrophe to bring out the best in people. None of us want to leave. No ten page paper or speech will ever bring us the satisfaction or sense of peace that this place did. Each day was a gift, tired and hungry and sun burned, each day we got up smiling and ready to take on the world, because the palpable energy was invigorating! We wanted to be in it every day forever. All of us. I am sad to go back to school. Even being sick, I would rather stay and continue this fight. I have never done anything so rewarding, so necessary, so beautifully and essentially good. I don’t think college will feel the same now. How could it? College is all about selfishness and self-centeredness. It’s about what you want, what you need. And really, there is nothing better in the world than giving to others and the gift that we gave them, taking the burden of digging out their belongings, throwing out their memories, was the best gift we could have given. Each of us did it whole heartedly; we left a whole lot more than prayers in Chalmette. We left blood, sweat, tears, skin, and most importantly, a piece of our souls. Day after day we worked with all the might that we had…for them, for their families. We wanted to badly to be a part of their lives and their new beginnings. I think we succeeded in that. Meeting the woman whose daughter owned the house we cleaned on Monday and Tuesday energized us to work even harder the next day. She was so kind, so selfless. There was no way we couldn’t have been moved.

I found a sort of religion in St Bernard. I keep talking about God, but it’s not your typical God. Not the bible, Jesus and Mary sort of God. It is a God that is life. Religion is a celebration of life. I found a beauty that I had never seen before. I looked around every day and found things to be thankful for. I found out what the human spirit is made of and I found out what is truly important. I think I knew that part all along. I mean, I consider myself petty minimalist to begin with. I don’t care about material things and I don’t give a shit about money. I have always been poor and yet somehow I have never gone without. Now, some might say that’s the power of positive thinking, but I say it’s Karma. If you do good things, good things gravitate to you. Period. I’ve always found happiness in giving back, but something is different here. It’s a whole new level of giving. It is very personal. I found myself so respectful of every piece of furniture that I threw out, each picture that I wiped the mud off of. I felt as if I were an advocate for the owners of those houses.
I found God buried under the mold; a will to survive that I didn’t truly believe in before now. The residents of Chalmette come out each day and help their neighbors unbury their house. They look you in the face when they speak to you. They have more concern for everyone around them than themselves. They inspired me to be a better person, a more compassionate, loving person.
This is what Courtney and I have been talking about all along, but now I see it more clearly than I even knew I could before.
God is the human spirit and it is life. It is the flower that grew in an empty, dusty lot. It is the crawfish that survived six months in a moldy house. It is the fireman who broke into the Quickie Mart and stole Slim Jims and Coke to feed the homeless of his town. It is the signs that say “We’re coming back” and “We will rebuild.” It is the 1300 college students who have up their spring break to give a little slice of reprieve to the citizens of Chalmette.

- - -


I am outside. It is 5:30 in the morning. I still have a fever. I am shivering and it is 80 degrees. We went to the city last night and celebrated our victory. We had finished two houses on our own. Ten women and one man finished two entire houses from start to finish. We are beside ourselves. We ate at a local favorite called Café Maspero.
The food was cheap and delicious. I was feeling nauseous, so I didn’t eat a lot, but it was great. A group of Sister’s from New Orleans came to show us around. They paid for dinner. They were such a treat. They told us about their experiences during and after the hurricane. They brought us maps of the area and took us to all the local favorite spots. What a beautiful city. I want to live here. Everything was lit up and there were flowers and palm trees everywhere. We saw St Louis Cathedral, which looks like a Disney castle. Out front on the street people take rides in horse drawn carriages all night and then there is the trolley, with its wooden seats and little bell. There are street performers everywhere and they are all so talented. This one man played wine glasses filled with water. Tim asked him to play Mozart and he did! He was very funny. He told stories while he played. We walked down a series of streets behind the cathedral and all the shops had beautiful art in the windows and the sidewalks were cobblestone. There is music everywhere. Heath and Amy danced in the street as the rest of us clapped along. We were all so full of joy. It was amazing. I fell in love. Later we took a walk to the Mississippi River to watch the ferries go by. The sun was setting on the water and there was a wedding going on in the building behind us. Everyone was laughing and smiling and the music floated out onto the water and the rhythm matched the waves on the shore. I have never felt so alive and so at peace all at once. None of us were prepared to leave. We wanted it to last forever.

Right now I am staring at a flower that I found growing on the camp site. There is not a living thing for miles. All the trees and shrubs have drowned here. Chalmette was submerged in twenty feet of water for two weeks. There is barely any grass, but these flowers are growing next to the fence. They are light purple and I can’t help but stare at it. Each petal is perfectly symmetrical, the same number of petals to pollen makers. It really is art. How can anyone deny the math behind nature? For me it is completely undeniable that something, someone did this on purpose. To me that is God. It’s not a person, as I said, it’s things like this. It is a perfect sixty-five degrees right now. The sun is coming up for the last time on me in New Orleans. I have to get back on a plane today and go back to college, back to my dorm and my residents and classes and work. I would rather stay here. I’d rather perform this physical labor every day. It’s so much more important. I will feel silly in my classroom, typing on a computer. I haven’t watched TV, used a computer or flushed a toilet in over a week. What a concept.
I no longer identify myself with any sort of entitlement to my possessions. I feel like I belong in this tent, on that cot, eating in that mess hall, under this sky. How did all that change in a week? I don’t even feel like the same person. I feel like some higher version of myself, like I mutated from a larva to a butterfly. Will I be able to go back to the way things were? Because it is going to feel strange…I guess I have to. Maybe I can come back. I feel more home here than anywhere I have ever been in my life. Maybe I was meant to find this place…

Hi.

I have a journal somewhere else.


My journal

That is the link. YAY
I think I may use this for actual writing...like words instead of pictures, like I do in that one.
xoxo