Finally, Friday

Today was the day to wrap it up. We all felt great about completing our assigned tasks to the best of our abilities. The people we worked with thanked us profusely, gave hugs and well wishes. Some expressed hope that we would spread the word and get more people to come here to work.

For our last night in NOLA some took the dinner cruise on the Natchez others did some dining in the French Quarter or around town. Many of the gang wound up the evening at Cafe Dumond for beignets. The perfect confection for a sweet trip.

Evening Coffee House

For starters this coffee house had no coffee. The good news was it was Carol Miller's birthday so we all get to share her wonderfully delicious birthday cakes.

How can it be possible to have this much talent in such a small group? This was an inter-generational feast of music, dance, readings and comedy. Our friends from New York joined us and added the energy only youth can bring to any show.

Thursday Day 4

Mission accomplished at the recreation dept. We completed all the work assigned early and we are off to a site in the 9th ward today. The work at Pastor O'Neil's food pantry in the upper 9th is progressing nicely. Tom Davie spent three days in the pink bathroom and started with destruction and moved on sheetrocking and taping. He says he will never set foot in that bathroom again. Julia and her team are trying to get a congregant's home livable so she can move back in. Julia tells us that she remembers the woman from when she was a youth here in the Broadmore area of New Orleans and felt good about this circle where she now can be part of this person's home restoration.

Wednesday Day 3

Today we had a chance to be a part of something exceptional. Corey, our Americorps worker received an urgent call from a women who was in danger of losing her property in the Lower 9th. The Center had renovated her home in a different location, but this property, where once sat a community center, would be taken over by the city because it was considered blighted. According to the notice she had until a hearing on Friday to show that the property was being tended to and not neglected. So Corey called John Paolini and his team and they headed over to the Lower 9th. According to Phuoc the weeds were over her head. With the combined efforts of our team and the New York team, and a bit of equipment, the lot was cleared, and photos were taken for the court. Corey said this was the best he'd felt since he bagan working here. He felt fortunate to be able to have the people power to remedy a difficult situation and save this women's property that has been in her family for years.

Tuesday Day 2

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Tuesday all the kinks were out and we settled in to work at our respective sites. There was painting to do, sheetrock to put up, molding to cut, and New Orleans history to catalog.

One team (Diana, Glory, Margaret, Nancy, Pat and Sue) has been working at the Amistad Research Center. The Amistad Research Center maintains the oldest and largest archives of documents, original manuscripts, and primary sources chronicling the history of African Americans and other ethnic minorities. The collection housed on the Tulane campus was not damaged by Katrina, however, the Center was closed for six months after the storm. Many potential collections that could have added to the Center were lost in the flooding of homes throughout New Orleans. The staff at the Center has been collecting oral histories to determine the extent of the document losses due to Katrina and to fill the gaps. We have talked to the staff about their experiences during and after Katrina and have gotten a sense of the continuing trauma and distress that they are feeling. One example of the concern that they have for the center is demonstrated by the action of one member who returned early after Katrina to check on the condition of the material that is held in storage (it had survived).

The team is helping to organize the documents and photographs included in several collections that have been donated to the center. One collection includes the correspondence of Joseph Himes who was the first African American Fulbright Scholar and a Sociology Professor at various southern colleges. A second collection includes the photographs taken by Tom Dent, a New Orleans native, best known as a writer and poet. His photographs show many of the leaders of the Civil Rights movement. The team is also helping organize the Center's large collection of magazines.



But it can't be all work. We have taken advantage of some of the wonderful restaurants and musical venues here in Crescent City and haven't been disappointed.

Monday Work Day 1

We all eagerly woke up, had breakfast and were ready for a day of work at 8 AM. By 3 :30 PM the work teams started straggling in making a mad dash for the showers. We realized how fortunate we are to have these lovely showers this easily accessible warm water to refresh ourselves after a hard day's work. Did New Orleans ever earn its reputation today as hot humid and muggy.

Today we broke up into teams and set off to different assignments. Our team went to the Treme Recreation Center that is near the French Quarter. This center was a thriving community place with a pool and gym, but during Katrina and the aftermath, because they hadn't flooded a lot of the space was used by the National Guard and the Red Cross. Each group used the space for their own needs and most of the upper lever became a dumping ground. The mission was to clean up the space and make it usable. Mission was accomplished. The members of the group which also included youth and advisors from New York felt a sense of pride at the end of the day.
(Gerry Pizzi)

One team was assigned to work on a house owned by a member of the church, "Miss Gwen", in mid-city. The first floor of her two-story house filled with six feet of water, and sat for 6 weeks before the authorities were able to pump the water out of the city. Meanwhile, she had been spending much of her time in Chicago, and was recently diagnosed with a serious illness. When the team arrived, the first floor was empty except for some upper cabinets in the kitchen. The walls had been painted upstairs and down, but there was paint spattered on the floors. Furniture, full of plaster dust, was piled in two bedrooms upstairs. In the first two days, the team was able to scrape paint off the upstairs floors and staircase, clean and organize her belongings, move everything out of one room so that the floors could be refinished, and start work on hanging doors in her living room and putting up a picture rail. Miss Gwen's trailer is still in the front yard, and she is under a deadline to make the house habitable so that she can be reimbursed by her insurance company.



Another team worked on a formerly flooded home in the Upper 9th. This home is owned by two pastors who want to turn the space into a food pantry. This place needs an incredible amount of skilled labor. The team also did some landscaping at the food pantry and church.

Some of us signed on for non physical work and had the opportunity of sorting through letters and filing documents at the Amistad Center.

And finally another team was assigned to the Lower 9th Ward where they did carpentry.
Our group is working on the NENA project to help finish some of the homes that are currently being built. It's very satisfying to meet the home owners and talked with them to understand more what is going on. Hopefully, after we leave here, the people will able to move into their new homes or see the progress on their homes.

Sunday in NOLA

Sunday was a day filled with infinite choices. There was the Easter service at FUUCO which was inter-generational. Our group was well represented and the congregation expressed their appreciation for our visit here. Some then chose the Easter Parade in the French Quarter. This was a colorful site complete with floats, music and lots of beads. It was a little slice of Mardi Gras in April.




Sam & Candice Chaleff scooted off to the famous Arnoud's for their Jazz Brunch. The food was DELICIOUS and the music sublime!

During the afternoon we got in the car and took a self-guided tour of some of New Orleans hardest hit neighborhoods. The devastation in some areas is heart wrenching and overwhelming even as some fortunate enough to have been able to rebuild pull their lives together. We walked along the levee and saw where they broke- big vacant areas where homes were swept blocks away. Throughout there were foundations of where homes once stood. One lot had steps to a place that was home to a family - a home no longer there.
We were heartened by the homes that Brad Pitt's foundation is building - "just" 150, but it is a start. Some neighborhood homes have been rebuilt, but it will be a long, long process, especially in the poorer areas which were hardest hit. Lots of work (and paperwork) ahead.

Late afternoon was our workshop on racism, classism and Katrina lead by Dr. Kimberly Richards and Bay Love from the Peoples Institute for Survival and Beyond. After the Katrina hurricane and flooding were described through participants' memories of the events as they unfolded through the media, the leaders provided a deep and compelling interpretation of how endemic racism is in the United States. Here are some of their statements:
-- this country is structured around race -- the 3/5 compromise in the constitution in which slaves were counted as a 3/5 person for reasons of taxation and representation
-- slavery in the US is a "peculiar institution" in which slaves were separated from the human community, seen as animals
-- "in the black" expression came from slave owners being able to sell their slaves to cover for a bad financial year
--"race is the glue that holds class in place"
-- New Orleans is the canary in the mine of our country's systemic destruction of communities of color
-- contemporary examples similar to the 3/5 compromise: permanent residents and prison residents are counted in the population but cannot vote -- this adds power to the white communities
-- individual acts of racism are supported by institutional racism and nurtured by a culture of racism
-- Hope lies in greater understanding of the role racism plays in our culture and our systems and bridging across the artificial construction that is race. (Carol Haag)


After a traditional red beans and rice dinner cooked by our Americorp person Corey, we settled in for our serious meeting, What would our responsibilities be. Who would clean the toilets or the kitchen and when. Then we selected our work assignments for the week which included helping to convert part of a minister's home into a food pantry, painting etc. NO community center, flooring at something called NENA, completing necessary work in a congregants home, and archiving and office work at the Amistad Center.