—by Victor Escamilla

I was lucky to have been one of the members at the All Souls Young Adults Planning Committee meeting in September 2006, when Andrea Riquier suggested that we plan a trip to New Orleans to assist those who were still in need after the Katrina catastrophe the year before. Andrea got in touch with First Unitarian Universalist Church in New Orleans (FUUNO) which is partnered with St. Andrew’s Episcopal Parish. We were going to help clean up after Katrina—whatever that meant to us at the time, we really did not know—but we knew it involved “gutting houses.”

We flew down to New Orleans on January 11. From the north coast of New Orleans, Louis Armstrong Airport juts out of Lake Pontchartrain as if it was a port to take ships not aircraft. The city is based on water. Three bodies dictate its course: the aforementioned Lake, the Mississippi River and the series of waters that lead to the Gulf of Mexico. You get out of the airport and a water scent fills your nostrils.

It was dark when we got there at 9:00PM, and empty. The night is cool and fresh, but you feel an air of desperation.

It felt desolate. Yes, there is a prevalent desolation in the city. People are still devastated because their city is still in shambles. Katrina and Rita destroyed the city in a gargantuan way and the government response is just not there or at best, it is inadequate. Half of the Crescent City’s inhabitants have fled. Can you imagine four million New Yorkers leaving the five boroughs? Can you imagine L.A. with a half million? But can you imagine them without services? There’s but one public high school for 200,000 people; the rest are a few charter schools. Some areas just got back running water—I mean just—like four weeks ago. Christmas has been tough. The police have been decimated. The ones who fled have been given the worst of a dishonorable discharge, and most of the ones who stayed have post-traumatic distress. Crime therefore, has risen. Average people don’t feel safe. The death factor haunts a city already invested in other-worldly things—voodoo influence and saints, a Creole Americana. Fire departments? I didn’t see any. Post-office boxes? There were only two. Traffic signs? Be careful driving.

When we arrived in New Orleans, we were housed by FUUNO on the second (undamaged) floor of their otherwise recently gutted church, while St. Andrew’s Episcopal Parish coordinated where we would go and supplied crew leaders and tools. Our First Unitarian Universalist Church in New Orleans has had to share with the Presbyterian Church across the street. We went to Gentilly, one of the neighborhoods that was heavily flooded with a good four feet of water above the floors. The homes that were flooded need to have their walls removed as they are no longer safe, for the flood water was extremely toxic. For two and a half days, our group took out the walls and trimmings of two and a half houses. The contents of the homes (food, furniture, personal objects, and carpeting) had already been removed by previous groups of volunteers. We stripped the insides of the empty houses down to the studs and carted out all the wood, drywall, and plaster debris. The first homeowner was still in a daze at seeing his home suffer such devastation. The second homeowner was not there; she was an 87 year old woman who had been displaced and was living in Baton Rouge. The third homeowner was so grateful; she was a widow who had to make immediate decisions as to what to do with her home the very day we were there. Doing good works mean comforting those in need. Sometimes that means gutting a house. We feel we succeeded in our intention of “living the faith” as Rev. Cheryl Walker termed our shared holy work.

Camaraderie does exist even in this fragmented society. Unfortunately, the field becomes a checkerboard of Black and White: in its history, slaves lived in the poor black blocks, their masters in the rich white blocks and a lot of it has stayed that way, but it is no longer white and black. There are Latinos in town and also Vietnamese. It’s strange, for this is about as mixed as it can get. People here do not move much, or if they do, they’ll move to the house next door, or perhaps two blocks away. And if that’s the case, they’ll be nostalgic about the old neighborhood. The problem arises when this valuable inter-web is squashed, as it was by the storm. People lost their neighborhoods, the ones they depended on—both an intangible and a tangible catastrophe.

The hardest decision for a home-owner now is, “what do I do with my house?” And, they have to make those decisions quickly, for the government will take a house by eminent domain and give the owner nothing, because the city is more than broke. Most of the people who are still there are home-owners. It is a myth that it’s all public housing just because pre-Katrina, 60% lived under the poverty line.

We gutted two and a half houses in their entirety. We took out the walls and all the wood trimmings. We exchanged our words for sweat. It was messy. It was dusty. It was dangerous. It was beautiful. We know how to use crow bars in the most effective way. As many in our crowd have pointed out, we now look at walls and say, “yeah, we could take that on!”

Not only were the residents very thankful for our efforts, but everybody we’d come across blessed us—New Orleans style: “Who Dat? God Bless You!” Can there be anything more rewarding than physical work, especially when someone needs it? This kind of work helps the residents because in this way, they can decide what to do next with their homes. They can try to sell to private developers. This may be the best recourse, but it undervalues all the money spent on the home—they may get only 20-30 thousand dollars for a home that has been passed down through generations. And after that? The mortgage may not be fully paid, and if it is, what about insurance? And what about, where to go next? The trailers are only available for a few months, if they are available at all. As we learned from graffiti scribbled on a the wall of a house, FEMA stands for “Fix Everything My Ass,” or as a T-shirt read, “Find Every Mexican Available.” The government has created a vacuum that brings all down here, from volunteers to migrant workers. But here’s another myth dispeller: Most of the Latinos here are skilled builders, contractors and carpenters who are rebuilding the city, and there are also those who wait out on the streets at mall complexes waiting for vans to take them to sites where they can sweat some more.

There is so much sadness. Some areas look post-apocalyptic, perhaps worse than war-torn. Xs are still inscribed on many houses indicating the number of people found dead, pets, toxic water flooding, etc. Water lines are still visible, even on the expressway—that’s how toxic the water was.

There are many problems, and perhaps it was inevitable that a storm would do so much damage to a city like New Orleans which after all, is below sea level. It is a port city, and it has an unsustainable way of existing. There are water canals underneath the medians which normally pump storm water out to the lake. Well, Katrina and Rita were bigger than the Gulf and they trampled the system. The Native Americans used to move with the water, but the western world brought the French and they decided to move the water instead. Well, once you start moving Mother Nature, she’ll move you too, eventually.

In terms of the economy, most of the fuel is in tourism, which has been shot. The residents do not want to brag about their desolation so that they can bring money in, so they are “faking it,” as our group leader, Emily told us. They show a smile to the world so the world can visit, not realizing that the smile hides a sadness.

Our experience was an eye-opener. The one thing one must say is that people are upbeat and friendly and they want to rebuild, but they are tired. When I signed up to go, I intended to do it because the residents needed help. I didn’t know how much. Well, it turns out a lot, because they have lost everything. Their socio-economic structures are completely gone and there is no sign that they are coming back. Then I think: “Wow, here we are spending $345 billion in a failed Iraq war when a city in our own country is worse than in the ‘fifth world.’” It doesn’t make sense from any perspective of values.