New Orleans

I got a complaint today that I haven't posted in a while. I know. I was in New Orleans, and then I was trying to catch up. I still am trying to catch up. But it's all but the weekend for me, and I don't have to do a lot for my theology class. So I'll update.

We went to New Orleans the week of fall break. Christine (our trip leader and history professor) was supposed to come with us, but she had a family emergency and had to stay in Cincinnati. Due to that, Jennifer (our service learning professor) and Megan (the assistant to the head of all the academic service learning semesters) came. Chris (our trip assistant, who lives with us) couldn't drive a 15-passenger van to New Orleans by himself, so we all took the Greyhound. Due to family and work events, Jennifer and Megan couldn't be there the entire time we were, so they both got to fly. So Friday night (at around 10 p.m.) we left on the Greyhound bus. We arrived in New Orleans around 4:30 p.m. on Saturday. Once we got our vehicle for while we were there, we got lost. (We got lost a lot.) It was nice for a while though to drive through different areas of the city and see them, mostly areas we didn't see on the tour we took later in the week. I specifically remember Mid-City and seeing the mix of houses that were recovered and had people living in them with the houses that still had the mark of the national guard unit that searched that particular house. The dates listed were almost three years to the day of when we drove through. (But those were some of the later houses searched, and many of the dates on other houses were a week or two before.)

We stayed at a Catholic Charities volunteer house in Marrero, just south of the Mississippi River. On the property, which spanned both sides of the street, there were many buildings. It took us a good half an hour and the help of an employee to find the cottage that had a key under the door mat. The house itself was pretty nice. There were four bedrooms, two with two beds and two with four.

Sunday some of us attempted to go to mass. We picked a church from the list of churches in the reference book in the house, and Erin called to make sure we had the right mass schedule. The voicemail said mass was at 11:30, so we got there right at 11:30. As we walked in, they were playing quiet music without words, so we thought it was the beginning of mass. We weren't particularly quiet, and we sat down in the middle of the church. All the sudden, someone realized that the priest and the altar boy were up at the altar preparing it for communion. So we went to half of mass. And we can legitimately blame it on the church.

Sunday we went to the French Quarter and did the tourist thing. We wandered around, bought some things, went to Cafe du Monde for beignets, etc. Megan arrived at the airport and met us at Cafe du Monde, and she and Chris took her stuff to the vehicle. We wandered around some more, and then met up as a group to walk around and possibly find someplace to eat. We walked down to the riverfront, and were walking along the river when Erin misstepped on a crooked brick in the sidewalk and sprained her ankle. So Austin and Chris P. played human crutches while Chris G. and Graham went to get the car. My'eka walked ahead and found a security guard who drove Erin to where the car could meet us. So we ended up just eating at Subway because it was a random place still open by the time we got there.

On Monday we started working with Catholic Charities. We were in a town called Jean Lafitte, which is south of New Orleans. We started out at two different homes. Chris G., Graham, a woman who was helping for a few days named Kelly, and I went to the house of Charles and Theresa. They were the funniest people. Theresa told a lot of jokes. It was really fun to work with them. In their house, we took out the furniture and insulation, salvaging as much as was reasonably possible. Their house was a very small house with just a few rooms. In the middle of the trash piles we were creating, though, Charles cooked us a barbecue. They said they wanted to do something to thank us and that they didn't have a lot of money. It was really sweet. The really frustrating thing for Charles and Theresa is that they had been getting ready to stilt their house. They had the stilts sitting there and were just waiting to have enough money to get the jacks to do it (something like a $3000 expense). And then Hurricane Ike hit and destroyed it.

The other group was gutting another house, what had been a much nicer house. They did a lot of pulling out sheetrock and so forth. We joined them for a little bit when we had finished with Charles and Theresa's house. We worked there for the rest of the day, and then left everything to come back in the morning.

Monday night we took Erin to the hospital to take care of her ankle. We tried to take her to an urgent care center, but the one that we looked up wasn't where it was supposed to be, and the one we found wasn't open. So we finally gave up and just went to the hospital. We found out that it was just a sprain and got real crutches to replace Austin and Chris as the human crutches.

Tuesday morning we returned to the second house in Jean Lafitte, and some people finished it off while others moved on to the next house. Essentially over the course of four days (Wednesdays are in-service days for Catholic Charities employees, so we didn't work), we gutted five houses. Some already had the furniture out, others didn't. One house we worked on Thursday was filled with mold. We had to wear masks (we were provided with them at other sites, but not nearly as strongly encouraged to wear them). We moved out furniture and other belongings, and then begin to rip up floors and rip out walls. Everything had to go. We had to be the ones to throw away the family Bible. This house we worked all the way through - from fully furnished to frame-only.

On Wednesday, we met Jennifer for lunch when she flew in. We went to a restaurant called Mulatte's, a supposedly really good one for traditional New Orleans food. It's just near the waterfront. It was some good food. We had alligator. I think my favorite was Chris's corn shrimp bisque. Then we went back to our cottage and had the tour guide come pick us up. We did a post-Katrina tour with Tours by Isabelle (although Joseph was our tour guide). We drove through downtown and then saw the Ninth Ward, Lakeview, and other areas around the city. Lakeview is starting to rebuild, but the Ninth Ward is all but empty. There are still FEMA trailers sitting around in some areas, but the Ninth Ward doesn't even have that.

Amongst our group (and within myself) there were mixed feelings about the tour. I think it was important and that we learned a lot, but we were also intruding on the fact that so many people lost so much. It was like we were intruding on something sacred. We were staring at people trying to rebuild their lives or at the lives that were destroyed beyond rebuilding.

We also met with a Tulane social work professor (on Tuesday night) and (on Wednesday night) two Tulane students who had grown up locally (at least in the summer). They provided some interesting perspectives and some good conversation.

Thursday night we went back to the French Quarter just to explore a little more and hang out, as well as to get more beignets.

Saturday morning, we arrived at the bus station around 4 a.m. so that Chris could take Jennifer to the airport and drop off the van (Megan had left Friday to get to a family wedding) and take a cab back to the bus station. The bus left around 7:30, and we returned to Cincinnati at 6:15 in the morning on Sunday. When we were in Nashville, we had about an hour layover, so Graham's beautiful family (they are the cutest family EVER) came to meet us at the bus station and bring us food. It was good food too. Sandwiches (really good ones), chips, apples, brownies, and drinks. And then they sent it back with us.

The trip was fun, and we learned a lot. It was also hard work. By Friday, I was taking frequent breaks (and long ones) at the house we were working on. I even almost fell asleep sitting on the stoop out back. Oops.

One thing I loved about the trip was getting to know Jennifer more personally. We heard stories of her son and her family and so forth. And we found out that she makes stereotypical comments too, even though she is an anthropologist and tries to fight stereotypes. We jumped on her hard for one comment that she made. We got her for being ageist and sexist for a comment about "Daddy still bought him a BMW." Ageist because she assumes that he didn't buy it himself, and sexist because dad bought it and not mom. I even realized that it could be racist because she probably wouldn't have said that if he were a black young man. But it was good to have conversations with here, even academic ones, outside of a classroom setting.

Then we're still discussing race/class relations and how they played into who the disaster hit and who received the aid afterward and how the city is rebuilding. Last night in history we had a discussion about it with the other members of our history class. It was definitely valuable to hear their views based on what they knew and how they compared it. We don't claim to be experts on New Orleans; we barely got a glimpse of it. But it's definitely a city (and Katrina a disaster) to use to explore race and class and poverty in the United States. Because it's not concentrated in New Orleans.

The other thing that we learned about was the evacuation itself. So many people blamed those who were stranded on the tops of their roofs for not evacuating, but we forgot to consider the reasons they didn't evacuate. Evacuation is expensive. It was the end of the month, so many people didn't have a lot of money to use to evacuate. If you don't have a car, how are you supposed to get out? There wasn't a lot of public transportation out. One person even got arrested for stealing a bus to try to bus people out of the city. So there are all these factors involved that so many of us don't have to deal with in our daily lives, so we don't think about them. Should they have evacuated? Yes, of course. But are there extenuating circumstances that we need to take into consideration before we pass judgment. I certainly believe so.