This is part two in a series of posts leading up to the five year anniversary of hurricane Katrina on August 29th
“You know, given the response we’ve received since the symposium on the disaster, we’re thinking we’re going to offer a topics course on Katrina. We’re thinking of adding a service-learning component, and taking the students down there.”
A friend I had met in my first master’s class (we had been friends since then) also worked for the university. In the aftermath of the hurricane, even our university, hundreds of miles away, had been affected. We had absorbed faculty, students, and service workers from the Gulf Coast. We also had a faculty member who had taught at Tulane for several years, but had joined us well before the storm. Divergent paths converged.
The class would be offered. The faculty member formerly of Tulane would lead it. The students would be taken down to perform community service during the course. Would I be interested in helping to set this all up? Would I be willing to go down there?
Of course I was interested. I helped to develop the resources for the course, and I developed the service learning component, including planning the trip.
My step-dad, who was working with evacuees in Texas at the time, started sending me any information he ran across. He compiled notes and tips for me. He sent me a backpack full of supplies for disaster relief.
In the following months and years, many things were written about what had occurred and what was occurring. However, when I started looking for lodging, an organization to work with, the basic services we would need, it was tough going. There were no books—and no academic texts for the students in the class. No matter—there were plenty of primary materials. There was relatively little on the internet, and the news that was on the internet was vague, and sometimes incorrect. I worked from contact to contact, trying to find people to talk, people on the ground, people who knew where the undergrads could stay and what they could do and how it was all going to work out.
Three months after the hurricane, there was no trash service. No postal service. There were no people in the Lower Ninth—even for look and leave. There were few churches open, only one radio station operating (that I could find), and very few contractors. Most places had no infrastructure—no running water, no electricity, no gas service. I worked so hard to find a place where we could help. I found it in Emergency Communities—a grassroots organization operating out of Arabi, LA (later in the Lower Ninth). They were doing many things: hot food three times a day, work groups going out to help the neighborhood, free store, water distribution, and a daycare center.
I fretted, and fretted some more. What were we doing, sending a group of inexperienced undergrads down there? Would we really be able to help? Would they hate us? Were we just another incarnation of the Misery Tours?
When our caravan showed up, phone service and internet was back up in some spots for the first time in seven months. There was still no trash service in many parishes*. There was one water pod for the entire St. Bernard/Plaquemines parishes, being operated by the Red Cross. Home Depot had reopened the week before.
You could see the water lines on all of the buildings, so much higher than the tallest man’s head. You could see the spray painted X’s on each building. The date it was searched. The number of bodies that may have been found there. The Humane Society followed, leaving spray painted signs on the animals they found there.
We were led to our army surplus tent (our home for the next week), and set to work immediately in arranging it—making it habitable. Then orientation, dinner, and signing up for our hours of work.
Emergency Communities was the best place we could have possibly landed. They were running smoothly, given the circumstances. The policy of the camp was no alcohol, no drugs. People camped in tents, teepees, campers. There was a whole tent city filled with volunteers—and organized signup sheets, and protocols to follow in the kitchen and community meetings and coffee.
There was damn good food, and lots of coffee.
Residents, law enforcement, volunteers, contractors, even the parish president; anyone could eat there for free, based on the fundraising of the founders. Later came a FEMA water pod designation and monies from the United Way.
You could clear your lot or gut your house and not have to worry about where you were going to get food. We helped with this. We helped feed people. Teams of able bodied volunteers went out and helped local residents gut houses and clear lots. We handed out water—creating a drive through system—placing cases of fresh bottled water in the backs of cars.
The Sherriff’s department drove through every day. Those men and women were maintaining order during the day and going ‘home’ each night, to whatever may have remained of their home.
There weren’t many FEMA trailers in use at that time.
When I finally got back home, I sat in the bathtub (all I wanted was a bath, although the solar powered showers had helped while down there) with a gin and tonic leaving condensation on the lip of the tub. I cried as my husband sat beside me, and I tried desperately to describe what it had been like.
It had not been my first trip to NOLA—I had been to the city pre-Katrina. Those memories are vague, hazy. My post-Katrina experiences, both good and bad, have pushed those old memories aside.
We had instructed the students not to take pictures of others’ misery—not to trespass, not to impose, before we got there. There was no need to add to the troubles of the residents—especially for the purpose of morbid curiosity. At Emergency Communities, that first night, they told us otherwise. Take a walk, they said, take a walk and talk to people. See their houses, listen to their stories. We walked the neighborhoods in off times, talking to people, touring what remained of their homes. People requested, over and over again, that we take pictures, and take them back and show people how they were still living.
But we didn’t have the words to do it justice, and the pictures did not show the whole panorama of the landscape. The students sat in the classroom afterwards, saying over and over again, “I keep trying to tell my friends/family/roommates what it was like, but…” everyone else nodded their heads.
How can I describe the smell of coffee and food and mold/mildew and oil refineries (Murphy Oil) and trash and death and destruction? How does anyone describe that?
Seven months. That, ultimately, became the mantra the students left the course with—seven months. It had been seven months since the hurricane when we went down there, volunteered our time like so many other students that semester, and still, the town was so horribly, desperately broken. Even after seven months, New Orleans and most of Louisiana was still in the midst of a disaster.
*A parish is the equivalent of a county.
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