New Orleans 2011

Two weeks ago the guys and I were leaving for New Orleans. That’s enough time for the memories of the trip to start accumulating that daily life haze. I better write this all out before I lose it.

So, while I was going down to work, the boys went down to play. And learn a little bit. But mostly play.

This is what I was doing.

And play they did:

That's not to say that I didn't have some fun. I did. As per my usual in NOLA, it revolved around coffee and food:

We learned as well. The boys learned what the effects of a category 3 hurricane can do to a historic city. They learned about the ecological effects on Lake Pontchartrain. They learned why New Orleans is special, and worth saving. 

I learned that there are, six years after Katrina, houses coming back in the Lower Ninth. And people in Saint Bernard parish.

I do not support misery tours, and I won’t take pictures of other people’s property without their permission. This means that I have to give you my feeble attempt to paint the scene. The last time I was in the Lower Ninth it was filled with waste high weeds, debris of lives left over from the haphazard bulldozers, and silence. I cannot say that it is filled with sounds and people now, because that would be a lie, but there are houses. And sometimes there are streetlights. There are still waist-high weeds on many plots, but there are also street signs and pavement (more often than not). Sprouting up in patches, trying to bleed together into blocks and neighborhoods, are houses.

The structures are some of the wildest amalgamations I’ve seen. Bright colors and the shotgun style-- so indicative of the neighborhood before Katrina-- meshes with stilts and pilings, category 3 (supposedly) structural integrity, and energy efficiency. Rooftops are lined with row after row of solar panels. Cars are parked underneath living rooms and kitchens—more like what you see in beach front properties or wetland camps. Everywhere I go, people claim it’s Brad Pitt’s doing. I don’t know if they’re right. I do know that they make shake their heads in confusion when they say this, but they do not complain about him, at least not in my presence.

In Saint Bernard I was shocked to see strip malls open again. New stores. Cars parked in front of houses that were, four years ago, often still filled with mildew, or stripped down to the studs and bleached, awaiting the contractors that may or may never come.  Near where we volunteered at Emergency Communities, there is now the Community Center the residents were only beginning to discuss while we were down there seven months afterwards. I did not see a single FEMA trailer. I did not see those hateful blue tarps.

That’s not to say that everyone has come back. There are plenty of empty tracts of land. There are ghostly silent shells of homes. There still looms the ever-present oil refinery in the background, spitting out smoke and fire and a noxious smell, just like clockwork. The streets near the levee walls on the industrial canal are still shockingly bare.

And yet, I can feel it. I can hear it. I can start to see it. The streetlights through the Lower Ninth on Claiborne all bear signs stating “Breathing Life into the Lower Ninth”. It gives me hope—not just for NOLA, but also for Joplin. For rebuilding everywhere. For overcoming.