It's really exciting to see how well those two houses came together, and how quickly we got it done! The houses that we painted didn't have any water damage - likely because they were at the highest point of the block - but they sustained a lot of wind damage. That exposed underlying layers of lead-based paint, which has obvious health hazards. So the government is making these homeowners repaint. A lot of times they can't afford it, so we worked with this group Acorn that does it at little or no cost.I think more fulfilling than the accomplishment, though, were the stories that I got to hear today.
The man who owned the house that was painted on the first day was incredible
in sharing his stories with us. He said the water came up to his front steps but stopped there. But since the utilities and everything else were all down, he wasn't allowed back in for weeks. The water stayed for days. He said that he was dead set on not leaving because this was "his turf," and the only reason he left was because his family and friends were leaving, and all of the adults in that group were women. He said that he couldn't let them go off onto the highway alone because people were going crazy. The trip to Baton Rouge normally took him 5 hours, but before the storm it took 17. He said he snuck back into the city before he was allowed to because "this is my turf." He said the city was almost in chaos when he came back. He said he didn't understand the looters - he didn't know why you would steal a television when "you ain't got no electricity! Why you gonna sell me a tv when I ain't got no electricity!" He spoke with such frankness that we all stood around him in silence as he told us what it was like before and after the storm. Someone asked him if he would come back if another storm devastated the city, and he said that he wouldn't leave in the first place. "It's my turf."
He was also immensely grateful for the work that we were doing. He said that New Orleans would never be able to come back if not for the work of the volunteers who are coming to help. It felt really good to not only to hear his stories but to see how much we were really impacting someone's life on such a direct level.
Also that day, we talked briefly to the woman whose house we painted green. She didnt' seem to want to talk much, but she kept coming outside and standing back across the street and looking at the progress we made on her house. The satisfaction and pride I saw on her face made up for her not speaking too much. I can't put into words how happy she looked, and that felt really good.Finally, I also spoke with a man from Acorn, which was one of the most moving conversations I had during the entire trip. He grew up in New Orleans, and the storm left him with 6 to 8 feet of water in his house. He lost everything. I asked him how he got involved with the cleanup and/or Acorn, and he said that he had so much emotion in him that he couldn't just sit around and think about what happened to him. So he started volunteering in helping others gut their house and clean up. To this day, this man is still not living in his house. He works on it during nights and weekends and other times when he's not working with Acorn. This man was and still is giving his time and energy to help others even before his own home is taken care of. I can barely wrap my head around that. Two years after the storm, I just worked for a week in cleanup efforts, and I already have a home and food and too many belongings. This man has nothing, and yet all he does all day is help others fix their homes. It boggles my mind, but also inspires me.
When I toured the Lower Ninth, it looked like a ghost town. A third-world country. People lived there and died there, and two years later it still looks like a war zone. There's something fundamentally wrong with that, but what we did this week helped. It made a difference in a handful of people's lives. A student on the trip who is from Afghanistan said that there's a saying that roughly translates to "drops make a river." Each small group - each person - each nail you pull out of a 2x4 is a drop in the river of recovery. And that makes me not want to leave New Orleans.
One of the most interesting parts of the recovery effort is that many times, houses that are rebuilt are painted in ridiculously bright, cheery colors. These ones are in the Musicians' Village, but the two that we painted were also very bright as well. Any other place, I think these houses would look fairly obnoxious. But in NOLA, it's really nice. The houses stick out and really tell the world that the city is recovering, house by house.
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