NOLA (september)

SEPTEMBER

Well, I've now spent a good week and a half in New Orleans. So far, I've seen two hurricanes, have found an apartment, and have learned how to drywall! For Hurricane Gustav, I ended up meeting my organization, Project Homecoming, at a Presbyterian Retreat Center in rural Norwood, Louisiana, next to the town where they filmed Dukes of Hazard. It's about an hour and a half North of N'Orlins, as I've been told to pronounce it. On Tuesday, Gustav snapped lots of pine trees off at the trunk, knocked out power, and turned the retreat center's dirt road into a river, making it impassable for a day, but certainly was not the "storm of the century" that Mayor Ray Nagin had told us over and over to expect. We were holed up for a day after the storm but not once during the storm did I feel anything other than curiosity and excitement.

Before arriving Saturday night (two days before Gustav was set to make landfall), I did drive down to see Lake Pontchartrain, the huge "lake" which connects to the Gulf and borders NOLA to the North. I'd been told to go straight to the center as evacuation routes were already getting clogged, but I wanted to see the Gulf before this massive storm struck. The lanes of Interstate 55 South were largely empty, save for some National Guard convoys, ambulances coming down to help from as far away as Indiana, and lots of buses either donated or contracted to help bus people out of the city. The Northbound lanes were already congested with cars, trucks and RVs stuffed to the gills with people and belongings. On the radio, Gov. Bobby Jindal compared Gustav with Katrina, saying it had the potential to be worse, and hammering over again and again the need to evacuate, now. Every so often, his endless press conference would be interrupted by Emergency Broadcast System announcements that a Hurricane advisory was in effect. Many counties, or "parishes" as they're called down here, were already under mandatory evacuation but I really wanted to see the Gulf, expecting dramatic waves and hoping not to get stopped by a cop and redirected North. Instead, when I arrived at a state park on the North shore of Pontchartain, the lake was as smooth as glass and people were sitting on piling stumps, fishing for catfish, drinking Bud Light, enjoying the warm late afternoon and seemingly unperturbed by the oncoming storm. Seagulls rested on a half submerged steamboat right off shore. There was a little seafood shack nearby doing a brisk business selling clams and crawfish. After four days of driving, I finally felt like I'd arrived at this exotic new region that I'd been picturing for the past two months, with its snaking bayous lined with house boats, its slow pace of life, and its love of frying all types of strange sea creatures like crawfish and catfish. Of course, it was soon time to head North and, after struggling to find a gas station that still had gas (three were out already with plastic bags over the pumps) and trying in vain to find batteries at a mobbed Walmart (they were all sold out of batteries, gas cans and coolers), I with all the traffic, it took me a good three hours to get there.

The evacuation turned out to be the best possible orientation. We were thrown right into helping out with setting up generators for our intimidating Construction Manager Mark, who issued every task, from doing dishes to arranging chairs in the meeting room, in a charged tone that implied that the completion of this task was essential to the survival of everyone at the camp. Anyway, us Construction Assistants got to know each other well pretty quickly through marathon monopoly games and hours of sitting around, munching on prepackaged Smuckers PB&Js. I met my flat-mate, Monica, who is turning 23 and who just completed a year with AmeriCorp's NCCC program, where you spend a year with a service team working in five different locations around the country, spending about two months at each place. Right when she arrived at the retreat center from her long road trip down from her home in New Jersey, she went for a jog and I immediately knew we were going to be compatible as roommates. My roommate at the retreat center was Alex, a big, jolly, smart guy from California who loves history and the comedic tv show Adult Swim and can talk at length and with great conviction about both.

As Project Homecoming is run through the Presbyterian church, there were several pastors and their families at the center as well from random congregations who'd come to evacuate. We had a service early Monday afternoon, as the storm was about to make landfall, and boy did I feel like I was in a movie: a group of people huddled in a room, our pastor and director leading the prayer and giving a sermon about Jesus parting the sea for Peter or something like that, the violently swaying tops of pine trees visible in the window above the altar. Most of the construction assistants do come from a religious upbringing, but for the most part it seems that for them church, and the community that it fosters, is more of a pleasant addition to their lives than a controlling or constraining influence.

Anyway, the night before we left Feliciana, one of the pastors, unfamiliar with Project Homecoming, wanted to hear more about what we did and why we were here and so he organized a meeting, apparently something, along with committees, for which Presbyterians are known, according to Alex. We all grumbled a bit, as it was interrupting a heated Monopoly game where vast sums of paper money were rapidly changing hands, but it actually was fascinating to hear, officially, why everyone in the organization, from the director to the office assistant, were with Project Homecoming. We learned that Mark, the Construction Manager, had come down with his wife for a week of service and, when they returned to their island off the coast of Washington state, they couldn't stop thinking about the city and the people. It only took a couple weeks before they decided to take leaves of absence from their jobs and move, with their two young daughters, to New Orleans to work full time rebuilding houses. Mark, who has got the gruff bearing of a jock turned dad, seemed on the verge of tears when he described how fulfilling life could be when one let oneself be an "instrument of God" and he said how thankful he was that God had blessed him with a purpose.

As people went around the room, what struck me was how many couples had been brought together by Katrina and how many people had found purpose and direction in their lives through the disaster, whether through sweeping them out of 9-5 ruts into more fulfilling assistance positions or through a crash course in what's truly important in life. Multiple couples met because of Katrina: one of the construction managers, Noelle, met her future husband, Nick, who is a New Orleans native, when she came down to do some volunteer construction work. The current office manager, Allie, grew up in New Orleans but was "miserable" in Nashville, Tennessee working as an electrical engineer for a firm for which she says she was both "too creative and too ethical," when Katrina struck. It brought her back to New Orleans to care for her parents. Soon after, she too met her future husband. They now have a baby. The director of Project Homecoming also met her husband, who is a cook for an offshore oil rig, when she came down after the storm to counsel as a Presbyterian pastor. On the eve of returning to NOLA, I stood outside with some other Project Homecoming staff, who were smoking, and for the first time we could see stars. I remarked about how many people had, in the long run, been positively influenced by Katrina. Susan, a short, stocky, spunky 40-something-year-old with a pretty face and a whole string of wild stories bout growing up in Waveland, Mississippi, snapped in a Southern twang, "Not everybody" the stress of Katrina and the subsequent displacement had taken her mother's life and had dissolved her marriage.

But certainly for a whole host of non-natives, Katrina brought them to a city to which they might not otherwise have come, certainly not in an assistance capacity, and with which they immediately fell in love. Christina is a 43-year-old construction assistant (same position as me) who was formerly a Private Investigator in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania and now is beginning her second year with Project Homecoming. "New Orleans just feels like home, I can't imagine living anywhere else now. I felt like an alien everywhere else - like what's wrong with me? - and when I moved here, I was like, 'There are people like me.'" The city's slogan - "Laissez les bon temps roulez" - expresses more than passing out on Bourbon St.; it means passing out on a friend's porch, and no one judging you for it.

Anyway, on Wednesday, we returned to New Orleans, a bit before the majority of residents did. There were lots of trees and branches down and there was no power (not even for traffic lights) and there were police cars everywhere to prevent looting of evacuated houses, but overall things were in good shape. Over the next week, Monica and I stayed at the "Blue House" which is a house provided for some of the other volunteers for Project Homecoming while we hunted for an apartment.

The day we returned, we went with construction managers to check on some of the houses that they'd been working on before the storm. This took us into the Upper and Lower Ninth Wards as well as into St. Bernard Parish (called "the Parish") which lies to the East of New Orleans and was heavily flooded during Katrina by Lake Borgne. The Parish was first: driving along Chef Menteur, the main drag through, I assumed that the strip malls full of boarded up Family Dollars and Winn Dixies were closed because of Gustav but Noelle, our construction manager, said they hadn't reopened since Katrina. Some residential streets - long, straight, surburban - intersected off Chef Menteur and looking down them, you couldn't see a single car or any sign of life, just overgrown sidewalks and lawns. This wasn't Gustav - people hadn't come back from Katrina.

There are many reasons why areas like St. Bernard have been so slow to crawl back. The way one homeowner described it to Noelle was to imagine that your house was destroyed, say in a fire. There are people that you'd turn to for help, from friends you could stay with to that whole slew of professionals - plumbers, electricians, general contractors, etc. - that it would take to rebuild. Now imagine that every single one of those people's houses had also been destroyed, along with the houses of the community's police officers, fire fighters, and teachers. You have no place to stay and no place, any longer, to work, as the company you worked for was also heavily damaged by the storm. Your insurance company says it will not cover damage due to flooding - only wind damage - so they pay you 30 percent of the value of your house. Stuck in a hotel miles away, your savings dwindling daily, you are not in a position to contest the settlement in court. Perhaps you have some savings, but now many of the general contractors who are in the city have no shortage of business and are charging exorbitant rates. Building supply prices have skyrocketed. Every single other person in your community is in the same situation so there is no guarantee that anyone is going to return to your neighborhood, which is now abandoned. The first family back on the block faces the risk of looters who have largely free reign over the city thanks to a police department who is handcuffed by flooded headquarters and officers abandoning their posts or evacuating. This would be a formidable challenge for anyone; now imagine that you were just scraping by before the storm.

As for government programs like Road Home, applications have been processed at a snails pace and promised financial assistance has yet to materialize. One woman in the office is a social worker from New Orleans, used to dealing with the maze of bureaucracy surrounding government assistance programs. In our orientation meeting about Katrina, she described trying to get money from Road Home after her insurance company paid a meager settlement. She applied, and then heard nothing for months and months. She called and called and was put on hold again and again, or they said they'd yet to process her application. After a year of living with her parents, with no sign or assurance that money was on its way, she was driven to tears, pleading with the Road Home operator, "Just please help me." This was a college educated social worker and an ordained minister.

So, outside the Quarter and CBD (Central Business District), New Orleans is eerily quiet. In the Lower Ninth Ward, along the Industrial Canal where an unfastened barge punched a hole in the levy during the storm, there is an expansive field, broken only by the occasional house every couple hundred yards. Driving into the Lower Ninth over the canal on North Robertson St., you can make out concrete slabs in the field, their edges overgrown, spaced close apart like the other shotgun-house neighborhoods of New Orleans. The flood of water from the levy breach simply washed the houses right off their slabs. It's a formidable challenge, but the Lower Ninth, where many of the area's jazz musicians grew up, is an essential part of New Orleans and the city won't be near complete without its revitalization.

As for our living arrangements, we finally did find a place - kind of a converted attic - that's located on Esplanade Ave. in Mid-City, a neighborhood about a 15 minute bike ride northeast of the "Quarter." We're a block away from Bayou St. John, a river that comes in from Lake Pontchartain and close to City Park, which is a huge, slightly overgrown park with lots of twisting Bayous and old trees where the fishing is apparently really good, according to construction manager who knows about such things. We're also quite close to where Jazz Fest is held every year so it will be great fun to be able to walk back and forth to the fairgrounds to watch that this spring.

Our landlords, a spunky, middle-aged couple, live downstairs with their son and two pugs. They own a small dive bar nearby where we've watched a couple Saints games with local fans. Going means being ready to accept a formidable number of free drinks - either from Gary and Laura (our landlords) or from the other patrons, who are thankful for what we're doing...or who think Monica's cute and feel obligated to buy me a drink as well. So we always bike there.

Overall, NOLA's been swell; it's a genuinely comfortable place to live, especially now that I'm getting my bearings. People say hi from their porches and touch your arm gently and say " 'scuse me, babe," if they need to get by you at the supermarket. I'm quite glad I moved here with something (AmeriCorps) already in place; I was immediately tied in with a group of people. This would be a lot harder if I'd just come planning to start from scratch. The first weeks at a new place are always rocky - it's no fun feeling like people don't really know you - but it's gone about as well as it can - I think I'm getting to the age where befriending new people is a bit easier; we've finally gotten a well of experience that we can draw from in regards to people and making friends. It's not exactly a piece of cake though.

Well, I hope you all are well and I'd love to hear updates about what everyone is up to, if you can find the time. Love,

Phil