Lower Ninth Ward Village

I'm really glad we got to be a part of the work being done at the Community Center. I only got to talk to Mack briefly, but his story is really inspirational.

It's another one of those things that makes me think about what I'm going to do with my future. I know I have more to give to the world than I've given so far, which is why the AmeriCorps option seems so attractive to me. We'll see I suppose.

At any rate, short post today. I had a longer one typed up, but it got lost when Firefox unexpectedly shut down.

New link at right for keeping an eye on the progress at the Lower Ninth Ward Village.

meeting people in bars

So during the trip, a small-ish group us who were 21+ visited the Half Moon bar almost every night. There were several reasons for this.

a.) work hard, play hard.
b.) we were in New Orleans! I think it's almost a requirement to go out regularly.
c.) it was a 5-minute walk from St. Vincent's.
d.) it was really chill.

The last night we were there was, coincidentally enough, trivia night - a favorite of our from the bar at home. I was one of the first ones through the door, and I started freaking out about trivia. The guy sitting next to me at the bar slipped me a few stickers and explained how Half Moon's trivia worked.

The stickers said NoLA Rising on them, and now I'm curious about the movement. I'm also wondering about the guy at the bar - I didn't pay all that much attention to what he looked like, but my memory says that he strikes at least a small resemblance to the picture of Mr. Dingler in that article.

It's really such a small world...

Christmas compassion

"Goodwill shines in shadow of overpass"

"I could not sit in my warm house, eat food and open presents, knowing that there are people out here on the streets," she said.
...
"It makes me feel a little better," said Dwight Johnson, who lost his job shortly after Katrina and has been living beneath the overpass for about a year. "It's not like when you're with your family but, you know, it's better."


Strangely (or not), I've been feeling the same way since I've gotten back from New Orleans - that I can't sit by and carry on my day-to-day business while I know that there are people - real hardworking everyday people - out on their own in that city.

We drove by the spot they're talking about - where volunteers handed out meals to the homeless - nearly every day on the way to our work sites.

Everything I read about New Orleans feels so much more personal now. I've seen that overpass. I've seen Magazine Street.

I can't get this city out of my head. Or my heart.


The result? I'm very seriously thinking about joining AmeriCorps in May/June. Please share any thoughts/experiences/advice...I'm fast approaching a crossroads in my life, and I don't do well with change.

Day Seven

So the trip is over. I'm flying somewhere between Chicago and Baltimore. I had such an amazing time. I know I'll never forget this experience. It's really changed the direction of my life. I don't want to just get a job as a reporter somewhere covering local crime. I need to make a difference with what I'm doing. I can't forget how I feel right now.

Day Six

Today I forgot to bring my camera to the work site, but we went back to the community center. Pretty much all day, we worked on tearing plaster off the walls. It was hard work, but it felt good. I took out a lot of aggression by beating on the walls with a hammer and crowbar.

I did a bit more thinking today at work about the community center and the whole "It takes a village" mentality. It not only takes a village to raise a child, I think it also takes a village to create this community center. Building a playground and painting a house are certainly "community" endeavors, but I think we sometimes could lose sight of the larger picture while doing some menial tasks at the community center. But we supported each other through all of that, and we came together to do a very substantial amount of work in a short amount of time. And like I said after the first day, we've paved the way for other groups to come in and start finishing floors, walls, etc. The community that will help build that space will likely stretch across the country, and it feels really good to be a part of such a large effort.

I can't believe this was our last day of work. There's so incredibly much work left to be done...I really can't imagine going home for Christmas after this. The trip as a whole has really changed who I am as a person. You rarely hear about recovery efforts in the mainstream national news media, but there is so much left to be done. I don't understand how we can just ignore what's going on down there.

Maybe a lot of it has to do with the fact that the population scattered when the storm hit, so the people don't really have as much of a collective voice.

I really don't know, but I'm so grateful that I've had the opportunity to come here and make an impact on a few lives. I wish I could have done more. I want to do more.

Day Five

Today we painted a house in East New Orleans. Yesterday, the other half of the group painted the house next door to the one we did today. 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.

Day Four

Today was another good day. I worked on an old warehouse that is on its way to becoming a community center. The building was huge. I didn't actually get to talk to the guy in charge, Mack, but people said that he had plans to use the building for antique cars, but when he walked in, all he saw was a community center where people could come together and support each other. He says that he made something of his life thanks to the support of his community, and so he wanted the people of the Lower Ninth to have the same opportunity. It's really impressive to me to take such a big step toward rebuiding what used to be there.

So during the morning, we had to take wood out of this one side room. The room was stacked from the floor to the ceiling with wood, and it was a lot of work. A bunch of us from SU did a lot of the work here, but there were also groups from California and West Virginia, I believe. It was mostly 2x6's that were pretty much as long as the entire room, and a bunch of them were nailed together, which made it difficult to maneuver. Anyway, then we had to pull nails out of the boards so they can be reused in the future. That part was harder than I was expecting. The nails were rusty and broke off really easily, and the wood had warped around the nails so they were in there really tightly.

Then we got to work on that smaller room, which is going to be used for sports equipment storage. We broke in the window panes that were broken so they could be replaced with plexiglas panes. And then we had to start really cleaning out the windows to get rid of the pieces of glas and plaster and dirt and whatnot so the panes will fit in flush.

The best part of today was the sense of accomplishment that I felt at the end. A lot of the work that we did felt like nothing in itself, but when you look at the amount of space that we cleared out, it's pretty amazing. It's a big step toward being able to start making the space somewhere that's usable. It's a huge building located right in the middle of what used to be a neighborhood in the Lower Ninth, and it will have the potential to touch a lot of people's lives.

The only question is will they come back? Patrick and Spence have said all along that the people from this area are extremely resilient, and their homes were symbols of their accomplishment in life. But what happens when that big achievement is washed away? How do you start over again? I can't even start to think about what that must be like. There aren't even street signs there yet - the house numbers are spray painted on the ground or posted on plywood signs. A lot of people in New Orleans in general and even more in the Lower Ninth in particular haven't come back yet, and I honestly don't know how many people actually will come back. But I guess the community center is a prime example of a way to make the neighborhood whole again and maybe to encourage people to come back. Brad Pitt's Make It Right initiative is another big step in the right direction, I think.

Day Three

Today was...eerie. That's the only word I can use to describe it. It was our day off from work, so we went on a tour of the Lower Ninth Ward, one of the places damaged the most by the storm. It was like a ghost town. You'd pass the plot of land where a house used to be, and all that was left would be the front steps leading up to the door and the foundation. Sometimes there wasn't even a foundation to the house. People's entire lives were just washed away. The only places that were really left standing were the houses made of brick or stone. There is some rebuilding, but for the most part the worst parts of the area are just flattened. Driving through the devastation felt more like a third-world country than somewhere in the richest country in the world, and that's really upsetting to me.

We passed a house that had a hole torn through the roof, presumably so that the family inside could escape the rising waters. You could see the water line on a lot of the houses - always much higher than my height and usually pretty close to the roof of the house. On this one, it's right below the roof, which was probably at least 10-12 feet above the ground.

The worst part was that I felt like I was violating someone's home. On our tour, we went into a few of the houses that Katrina Corps had gutted. This was someone's house, and I was inside taking pictures of what was left. It felt infinitely wrong. This person hadn't even come back yet, most likely, and there I am violating their home. Their life.

I stood next to the place where the levee broke, and that shook me up. That darker patch of the levee is new, and when it collapsed, an entire community was simply washed away. I don't even have words to describe what I was feeling as I stood there. I'm still choking up as I look at these pictures.

We also saw Brad Pitt's pink village. Each tent represents a home that will be rebuilt completely green and eco-friendly in the Lower Ninth. It's an impressive sight - these tents are literally right next to where the levee broke. I'm curious to see what will end up happening with the rebuilding efforts there. Will they actually be rebuilt? There's talk about making the homes buoyant so that if another flood happens, the houses will still be intact.

Patrick and Spencer were telling us on the tour that a lot of people in the Lower Ninth feel like the city doesn't want them to come back. The city has been posting notices on houses there telling homeowners they have to mow their yards to clear out the overgrowth that has taken over in a lot of places. But since many people haven't come back yet, they don't get the notice. The city then mows for them and charges them $600 for the "service." When the owner doesn't pay, the city takes over the property.

Regardless of local issues like this, I could also see where the people of the Lower Ninth got that impression. What struck me the most was the physical separation from the rest of the city. You have to drive over the canal to get to the community. The city itself - the skyline, the French Quarter - seems so far away. And for eminent domain seizures to be threatened and for the government to take back properties...it's no wonder to me that the people think they're not wanted back.

Day Two

Today was incredible. We went to Schaumberg Elementary School to build a playground with Kaboom! It's an organization that seeks to have a safe place to play within walking distance of every child in America. They were trying to build 100 play- grounds in 100 days, and we were number 79.

I was put on the mulching crew and carried/spread so much mulch I thought my hands were going to fall off. It was amazing though. I talked with the vice superintendent of the school, a few teachers, some parents, neighbors and of course the kids. They all had incredible stories to share. One lady came out who just lived nearby and wanted to help. One of the teacher's mothers came to help. The teacher lived just a few blocks away from where the levees broke. The school itself was under 6-8 feet of water.

The kids were so excited about the playground. Their enthusiasm was contagious - long after I knew my muscles were done, I was so proud to be a part of that day. I carried the one boy, Willy, across the playground on my back even though I could barely hold him up. The kids were so excited to be helping build the playground - I can't imagine what they'll do once they can actually play on it. We really bonded with a few of the kids, and I know that we made a difference. I feel like they were so grateful and happy to be at school, which is probably something that will help them tremendously in the future. Making school a good place to be is a big step toward keeping them in school and is a step toward making the community whole again.

The superintendent told me that all 400 seats in the school are full right now, after just opening back up in the fall. When people come back to their neighborhood - which is still happening slowly - they sometimes have to be turned away and sent to a different school because Schaumberg is at capacity.

Lauren and Beth built benches to go around some of the shade tree trunks in the area. They did a lot of work on that.

Adam and Craig - and a few others - worked on assembling the playground equipment. There were a lot of people there that day. It seemed like there were a million AmeriCorps workers out, plus all of the other people that showed up. I think the assembly part seemed hardest.

At the end of the day, it felt really good to be able to accomplish something so big. The kids got to help design the play- ground, they helped build it, and they'll get to play on it. Their excitement and positive energy proved to me that I made the right decision in coming down to New Orleans. Anybody can make a difference in someone's life, and I really believe that we have made an impact on all of the kids from that school.

It was a good day.

Day One

Today was a good day. We arrived at both Chicago and New Orleans safely, which is always a good thing.

The biggest surprise of the day was when we got our luggage in NOLA and went outside to catch our vans. Spence Paschal, who graduated from Susquehanna last year, was loading our bags into the van. He'd gone on two HRT trips with Susquehanna, and he ended up getting a job with Katrina Corps, the nonprofit that we worked with.

The ride from the airport to St. Vincent's, which is where we stayed, was strange to me. We couldn't see a whole lot because it was starting to get dark, but what we did drive by was very commercialized and built up. It didn't really seem too damaged, but that was obviously just the car ride.

So we got back to St. Vincent's, which used to be an orphanage. It's a really cool building - basically a square with a courtyard in the center. We did typical orientation stuff there in the evening before going to dinner. We ate at
Voodoo BBQ, which was voted best barbecue in the city. It was quite delicious.

It looks like we're going to be split into two groups for our first day of work tomorrow (Saturday), and my group is going to be building a playground. I'm pretty excited. The other group is going to the Lower Ninth Ward to work on a community center. I would like to go there to see what it's like, but I'm sure that I'll be there sometime this week.