I cannot tell you how important it is to me that you look through this.
You are a fifty-six-year-old kindergarten teacher with an elderly mother and two houses to gut. We save four Aunt Jemima bottles, your brother's old lunch box, two bottles of whiskey. You have a big smile and call us angels as we peel out your dry wall, bang on your appliances, strip your childhood home until it is unrecognizable. You circulate a notebook to get our addresses, say you want to thank everyone for how they've helped you. This was the first upper middle class black neighborhood in New Orleans, you say. Would have been a big celebration for its 50th anniversary in October, but everyone was gone by then. You and your mother are too stubborn to move; you'll stay in Baton Rouge and drive in to sort through the houses until you can move back home.
GJPix Photos
GJPix Photos
GJPix Photos
GJPix Photos
You are an eighty-one-year-old man with seven great-grandchildren. You survived Hurricane Betsy, so you stayed in your attic til the water reached you. Then you pounded through a vent, slipped, and had to swim behind your house to climb on top of the roof. (I hope I can be that strong at eighty-one.) A boat came for you a day and a half later, took you to an elementary school with forty others, no flooding but no food, either. They flew you to Austin, but were out of room, and your son finally met you there. He is a doctor and managed to find someone to take you both in. I ask if you are a painter, and you say no, your wife was until she got leukemia and became too fragile to paint. I clear a drawer of her paints to the curb. It is still filled with acidic water. Your wedding pictures are destroyed; I can see her veil but not her face. She died in 2000, you say. Pneumonia. We break the cabinets down with sledgehammers, though you say you built them yourself and I can't imagine watching someone break all my own handiwork. Your father and grandfather were carpenters, but I think you are an architect. I find a dozen antique watches. Someone spills a box and five thousand brightly colored coins fall to the floor - Mardi Gras coins you've collected since the '60s. You say to throw it all away. I ask if you want us to save the silver, and you laugh and say it's stainless steel, but it's not so stainless now. A sunflower grows in your back yard. Half of your wind chimes still remain.
GJPix Photos
GJPix Photos
GJPix Photos
GJPix Photos
GJPix Photos
GJPix Photos
You are a middle-aged lesbian, I gather. Car magazines, a thousand Betty Boop trinkets, nude Polaroids in your top drawer. We have to step over your dead cat to get to the bedroom and kitchen. Someone scoops it up in a plastic bag. We ask about the air conditioner, and you tell us to "whack the hell out of it." I get a bad vibe in your house, the smell is thick and the cat has me unnerved. There are holes in the ceilings of your barn and your house's roof. The heater is ripped apart. Someone finds a piece of glassware, intact, and hands it to you. You cradle it and begin to cry. This is your grandmother's glass, you say, the only thing you wanted to save. You have been searching since you were allowed back into the house. Your siblings didn't offer to share their glasses with you when you said you might have lost it. You have lost everything. You won't let us take out the walls or floors - our leader calls it denial, denial, denial. The mattresses are molded through and the bowls in the kitchen are still full of flood water. A hundred dollars' worth of comic books are discarded by the road. I wonder if I would like you if I had met you on the street, far away from here.
GJPix Photos
GJPix Photos
GJPix Photos
GJPix Photos
GJPix Photos
GJPix Photos
You are a pair of families in an apartment duplex. Someone has thrown a big stuffed monkey into the tree in front of your house. We save a wedding dress, and break a dozen mirrors throwing them from the second story to the street. Everything is covered with an inch of black mold when we enter; a closet makes us gag, it is still filled with hurricane water. I break through your counters, bam, a circle clean through the center. I unscrew your ovens, and each leak with gas. The smell is strong - we ask if the gas is off - you signed a contract saying it was. We evacuate the house and play cards til the smell dissipates. I am in love with your refrigerator: it is still covered in magnetic poetry.
GJPix Photos
GJPix Photos
GJPix Photos
GJPix Photos
You must run a sweatshop: a pillow maker in the back yard and a few industrial sewing machines. We are warned that a loaded gun is still in the house, and not to touch it if it shows up. We break through the front of the house; the door has to be taken out so we can get inside. We salvage some paintings and a pile of board games: Scrabble, Sorry.
GJPix Photos
GJPix Photos
GJPix Photos
You are a beautiful family. I know from your picture, a framed photograph of maybe twenty, with several pretty little children mixed in. A check and a school ID sit beside the picture. That is all we save. We break through your walls and shovel for what feels like forever. It is humid in the house, and the smell is unbearable. I find the remains of your dog outside the door. Where is the SPCA? I don't want you to find him like this, all bones and rotten fur. There are cockroaches inside your wall and I kill them with a shovel, whack, whack, without thinking. I feel sorry for them, but I do not want you to come home to the bones of a house and the bones of your dog and a thousand cockroaches in between. That would be too much. One of your ceilings is okay, and the chandelier-like light is in perfect shape. It is juxtaposed against the rest of the house. I hope your family is safe and smiling.
GJPix Photos
GJPix Photos
GJPix Photos
You must be quite wealthy; you have several bathrooms and gorgeous kitchen cabinets. We can still make out the wallpaper in each room, and I imagine you are a woman with taste. You have a mini egg beater still in the box, and it seems to me a symbol of the luxury of your previous life (who knows where you are now?). A plastic octopus is still in the bathtub. You must have a child or two. I guess you don't want more; someone stumbles upon birth control pills and I find Lifestyles when I break through the bathroom counter. The storm only opened two of them, maybe the company can use this in a new advertising campaign. Lifestyles: the Hurricane-proof condom. We pile everything from your attic on the driveway next door, and your neighbor comes out to yell at us. She paid $3,000 to have someone gut her house, she says you are getting out easy. She suggests we throw your attic things away. We do not. I save your light fixtures, then pull the insulation from your ceilings. The fiberglass showers down and burns along the V-neck of my shirt. A man who says he is president of the local homeowners' association brings us a big, orange, Gatorade container and fills it with ice to make our bottled water cold. It is a very warm day, especially when we're dealing with insulation. I find a lizard on your window screen; we open it and let him free. We hear an ice cream man and all buy popsicles, and eat them in the shade of your other neighbor's roof. We shatter the glass in your kitchen cabinets, we haul your oven outside without anything leaking, I disarm the water in your sinks and little of the water is black like the other houses'. We feel satisfied when we leave because your house was so big and we accomplished all this in a day. It felt very final.
GJPix Photos
I want to stress that you can go stay in Camp Algiers, the FEMA camp that hosted our group, for free. They provide boxed lunches plus hot breakfast and dinner. If you're vegetarian, you're out of luck, so come prepared. There are 1500 people in the camp and it was filled to capacity while we were there. It's below the Bible belt, so there are bible studies all over the place each night and several kids from our group were approached by converters. The tents covered about three hundred people. There was a generator for the whole camp, so we had electricity and hot water. Laundry is free but it will take more than one cycle to get the soap out of your clothes. They provide sheets. You have to have an "occupied" sign on your bed whenever you are not in it so that the staff won't throw your things away. You have to wear a badge every minute you're in the camp. There are a few bathrooms, only one or two of which will be working at any given time, so you may have to resort to Portapotties. When you're out working at the sites, there will be no bathrooms. We ended up in two neighborhoods that still had running water, but when the homeowners said their bathrooms had no walls, we thought they were kidding. Be prepared for a total lack of privacy. The camp's in a bad neighborhood, so the New Orleans Private Patrol is guarding the place 24/7. The lunches were often these self-heating meals that we heated by adding water to a little packet. They are nearly identical to what the soldiers have in Iraq.
Half a million houses is inconceivable until you drive or walk around the city for a while. Sections of it - like the French Quarter - are still in perfect condition, and they were still Mardi Gras-ing and Saint Patrick's Day-ing the nights away. Jobs are available everywhere because no one can move back to their homes yet and businesses are severely lacking employees. People are still waiting for FEMA relief; Deborah, the first woman we met, requested a trailer in October and hasn't received word of it. She hasn't had her house gutted yet, either.
GJPix Photos
Here's the most important thing I can tell you: the levies are being patched, but not redesigned. Hurricane season is in two and a half months, and New Orleans will have the same sorts of levies that failed them during Katrina. Dan, our leader from the Episcopal church, is fond of saying that the government failed on the local, state, and national levels. You can see a film of the governor telling Bush that N.O. was headed for mass devastation the day before Katrina hit, and you can just as easily find videos of him announcing to the country just days later that the national government had no idea this could happen.
Dan was also fond of reminding us that "everything that could possibly go wrong in New Orleans DID go wrong in New Orleans."
There are areas recently hit by a tornado as well. Businesses that are reopening are often closing because they have no customers. Lowe's is doing quite well, as you can imagine - the parking lot is filled by the time they open in the mornings - but they've raised all their prices to maximize their personal profit. Looters have hit all over the place, as well. Neighborhoods are mostly deserted, except for one or two sad-faced individuals sitting on their front porches looking for volunteers to help them. People who have to rebuild their entire homes are getting checks for $5,000 to redo their roofs, because the insurance company and/or the government will not cover the rest.
GJPix Photos
GJPix Photos
GJPix Photos
GJPix Photos
GJPix Photos
Above is the levy at the London Avenue Bridge. When it broke, the layers of sand actually carried a house a block away. The whole place is still drowning in layers of sand and dirt and debris. The houses above are from the 9th Ward, the area that was hardest-hit. The whole space is in pieces and the houses are, for the most part, unsalvageable.
All I can say is I don't want this to happen again.
EDIT: You can now view a full album of my photos at http://gallery.greatestjournal.com/index.php?cat=1400502
If you're interested in Camp Algiers, you can see pictures of the camp here: http://dan.louis.home.att.net/camp.htm
To find out more information about volunteer programs, click here: http://neworleans.craigslist.org/vol/136756444.html
Or just go to Craig's List: http://neworleans.craigslist.org/
Please spread the word. It's been seven months, but it's far from over.
GJPix Photos
GJPix Photos
GJPix Photos
GJPix Photos
You are an eighty-one-year-old man with seven great-grandchildren. You survived Hurricane Betsy, so you stayed in your attic til the water reached you. Then you pounded through a vent, slipped, and had to swim behind your house to climb on top of the roof. (I hope I can be that strong at eighty-one.) A boat came for you a day and a half later, took you to an elementary school with forty others, no flooding but no food, either. They flew you to Austin, but were out of room, and your son finally met you there. He is a doctor and managed to find someone to take you both in. I ask if you are a painter, and you say no, your wife was until she got leukemia and became too fragile to paint. I clear a drawer of her paints to the curb. It is still filled with acidic water. Your wedding pictures are destroyed; I can see her veil but not her face. She died in 2000, you say. Pneumonia. We break the cabinets down with sledgehammers, though you say you built them yourself and I can't imagine watching someone break all my own handiwork. Your father and grandfather were carpenters, but I think you are an architect. I find a dozen antique watches. Someone spills a box and five thousand brightly colored coins fall to the floor - Mardi Gras coins you've collected since the '60s. You say to throw it all away. I ask if you want us to save the silver, and you laugh and say it's stainless steel, but it's not so stainless now. A sunflower grows in your back yard. Half of your wind chimes still remain.
GJPix Photos
GJPix Photos
GJPix Photos
GJPix Photos
GJPix Photos
GJPix Photos
You are a middle-aged lesbian, I gather. Car magazines, a thousand Betty Boop trinkets, nude Polaroids in your top drawer. We have to step over your dead cat to get to the bedroom and kitchen. Someone scoops it up in a plastic bag. We ask about the air conditioner, and you tell us to "whack the hell out of it." I get a bad vibe in your house, the smell is thick and the cat has me unnerved. There are holes in the ceilings of your barn and your house's roof. The heater is ripped apart. Someone finds a piece of glassware, intact, and hands it to you. You cradle it and begin to cry. This is your grandmother's glass, you say, the only thing you wanted to save. You have been searching since you were allowed back into the house. Your siblings didn't offer to share their glasses with you when you said you might have lost it. You have lost everything. You won't let us take out the walls or floors - our leader calls it denial, denial, denial. The mattresses are molded through and the bowls in the kitchen are still full of flood water. A hundred dollars' worth of comic books are discarded by the road. I wonder if I would like you if I had met you on the street, far away from here.
GJPix Photos
GJPix Photos
GJPix Photos
GJPix Photos
GJPix Photos
GJPix Photos
You are a pair of families in an apartment duplex. Someone has thrown a big stuffed monkey into the tree in front of your house. We save a wedding dress, and break a dozen mirrors throwing them from the second story to the street. Everything is covered with an inch of black mold when we enter; a closet makes us gag, it is still filled with hurricane water. I break through your counters, bam, a circle clean through the center. I unscrew your ovens, and each leak with gas. The smell is strong - we ask if the gas is off - you signed a contract saying it was. We evacuate the house and play cards til the smell dissipates. I am in love with your refrigerator: it is still covered in magnetic poetry.
GJPix Photos
GJPix Photos
GJPix Photos
GJPix Photos
You must run a sweatshop: a pillow maker in the back yard and a few industrial sewing machines. We are warned that a loaded gun is still in the house, and not to touch it if it shows up. We break through the front of the house; the door has to be taken out so we can get inside. We salvage some paintings and a pile of board games: Scrabble, Sorry.
GJPix Photos
GJPix Photos
GJPix Photos
You are a beautiful family. I know from your picture, a framed photograph of maybe twenty, with several pretty little children mixed in. A check and a school ID sit beside the picture. That is all we save. We break through your walls and shovel for what feels like forever. It is humid in the house, and the smell is unbearable. I find the remains of your dog outside the door. Where is the SPCA? I don't want you to find him like this, all bones and rotten fur. There are cockroaches inside your wall and I kill them with a shovel, whack, whack, without thinking. I feel sorry for them, but I do not want you to come home to the bones of a house and the bones of your dog and a thousand cockroaches in between. That would be too much. One of your ceilings is okay, and the chandelier-like light is in perfect shape. It is juxtaposed against the rest of the house. I hope your family is safe and smiling.
GJPix Photos
GJPix Photos
GJPix Photos
You must be quite wealthy; you have several bathrooms and gorgeous kitchen cabinets. We can still make out the wallpaper in each room, and I imagine you are a woman with taste. You have a mini egg beater still in the box, and it seems to me a symbol of the luxury of your previous life (who knows where you are now?). A plastic octopus is still in the bathtub. You must have a child or two. I guess you don't want more; someone stumbles upon birth control pills and I find Lifestyles when I break through the bathroom counter. The storm only opened two of them, maybe the company can use this in a new advertising campaign. Lifestyles: the Hurricane-proof condom. We pile everything from your attic on the driveway next door, and your neighbor comes out to yell at us. She paid $3,000 to have someone gut her house, she says you are getting out easy. She suggests we throw your attic things away. We do not. I save your light fixtures, then pull the insulation from your ceilings. The fiberglass showers down and burns along the V-neck of my shirt. A man who says he is president of the local homeowners' association brings us a big, orange, Gatorade container and fills it with ice to make our bottled water cold. It is a very warm day, especially when we're dealing with insulation. I find a lizard on your window screen; we open it and let him free. We hear an ice cream man and all buy popsicles, and eat them in the shade of your other neighbor's roof. We shatter the glass in your kitchen cabinets, we haul your oven outside without anything leaking, I disarm the water in your sinks and little of the water is black like the other houses'. We feel satisfied when we leave because your house was so big and we accomplished all this in a day. It felt very final.
GJPix Photos
I want to stress that you can go stay in Camp Algiers, the FEMA camp that hosted our group, for free. They provide boxed lunches plus hot breakfast and dinner. If you're vegetarian, you're out of luck, so come prepared. There are 1500 people in the camp and it was filled to capacity while we were there. It's below the Bible belt, so there are bible studies all over the place each night and several kids from our group were approached by converters. The tents covered about three hundred people. There was a generator for the whole camp, so we had electricity and hot water. Laundry is free but it will take more than one cycle to get the soap out of your clothes. They provide sheets. You have to have an "occupied" sign on your bed whenever you are not in it so that the staff won't throw your things away. You have to wear a badge every minute you're in the camp. There are a few bathrooms, only one or two of which will be working at any given time, so you may have to resort to Portapotties. When you're out working at the sites, there will be no bathrooms. We ended up in two neighborhoods that still had running water, but when the homeowners said their bathrooms had no walls, we thought they were kidding. Be prepared for a total lack of privacy. The camp's in a bad neighborhood, so the New Orleans Private Patrol is guarding the place 24/7. The lunches were often these self-heating meals that we heated by adding water to a little packet. They are nearly identical to what the soldiers have in Iraq.
Half a million houses is inconceivable until you drive or walk around the city for a while. Sections of it - like the French Quarter - are still in perfect condition, and they were still Mardi Gras-ing and Saint Patrick's Day-ing the nights away. Jobs are available everywhere because no one can move back to their homes yet and businesses are severely lacking employees. People are still waiting for FEMA relief; Deborah, the first woman we met, requested a trailer in October and hasn't received word of it. She hasn't had her house gutted yet, either.
GJPix Photos
Here's the most important thing I can tell you: the levies are being patched, but not redesigned. Hurricane season is in two and a half months, and New Orleans will have the same sorts of levies that failed them during Katrina. Dan, our leader from the Episcopal church, is fond of saying that the government failed on the local, state, and national levels. You can see a film of the governor telling Bush that N.O. was headed for mass devastation the day before Katrina hit, and you can just as easily find videos of him announcing to the country just days later that the national government had no idea this could happen.
Dan was also fond of reminding us that "everything that could possibly go wrong in New Orleans DID go wrong in New Orleans."
There are areas recently hit by a tornado as well. Businesses that are reopening are often closing because they have no customers. Lowe's is doing quite well, as you can imagine - the parking lot is filled by the time they open in the mornings - but they've raised all their prices to maximize their personal profit. Looters have hit all over the place, as well. Neighborhoods are mostly deserted, except for one or two sad-faced individuals sitting on their front porches looking for volunteers to help them. People who have to rebuild their entire homes are getting checks for $5,000 to redo their roofs, because the insurance company and/or the government will not cover the rest.
GJPix Photos
GJPix Photos
GJPix Photos
GJPix Photos
GJPix Photos
Above is the levy at the London Avenue Bridge. When it broke, the layers of sand actually carried a house a block away. The whole place is still drowning in layers of sand and dirt and debris. The houses above are from the 9th Ward, the area that was hardest-hit. The whole space is in pieces and the houses are, for the most part, unsalvageable.
All I can say is I don't want this to happen again.
EDIT: You can now view a full album of my photos at http://gallery.greatestjournal.com/index.php?cat=1400502
If you're interested in Camp Algiers, you can see pictures of the camp here: http://dan.louis.home.att.net/camp.htm
To find out more information about volunteer programs, click here: http://neworleans.craigslist.org/vol/136756444.html
Or just go to Craig's List: http://neworleans.craigslist.org/
Please spread the word. It's been seven months, but it's far from over.