And now onto one of our most interesting days of life on the road. One of the best things about having Elise along on this trip is that she is an inveterate reader of brochures and travel guides about upcoming places and events. At the New Orleans Welcome Center, she found a booklet about New Orleans which included 25 things one could do there for free. Item number 25 was, "Volunteering to help at a rebuilding project in New Orleans." I knew that parts of New Orleans still remained to be rehabilitated after the flooding from hurricane Katrina five years ago and was not surprised that there were projects helping with this, but I hadn't considered that we might actually be able to spend a day on very short notice involved with one of these projects.
The article didn't mention the name or number of any specific project, but after thinking about it for a moment, the lady at the Welcome Center did come up with the name of a project that she thought might be able to use our help. The project was located in Chalmette which is a near suburb contiguous to New Orleans where all of the homes had been either washed away or made uninhabitable by twelve feet of water and sludge from a nearby oil refinery that was also damaged by the hurricane flood waters.
This morning I asked the clerk at our hotel desk for a phone book so I could look up the project's phone number, but he didn't have a book which included Chalmette; however, when I explained who I was looking for, he said, "Oh, I know about them. We deliver ice cream to them." He then looked them up on his computer and gave me their phone number. When I called them a little after nine o'clock, there was no answer, so we decided we would just drive out there and hope to talk to them in their office. Even if we didn't get to talk to them or weren't accepted on such a short-term basis, we would at least get to see something of New Orleans after the flood besides the French Quarter.
As we drove through Chalmette, we did not see any collapsed homes, but we did see a lot of vacant lots. When we arrived at the office of the St. Bernard Project, we were warmly greeted by the young man behind the front desk. A brief conversation revealed that he was, like myself, a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania - although his graduation date was considerably more recent than my own. He thought that they might, indeed, be able to use us that day and called out the volunteer coordinator from some back office to speak to us. She said that yes, there was a house being rehabilitated that could use our help today, unskilled as were. She then took a few minutes to give us some background about the project and how it was started by two volunteers who came down from Washington, D.C.; they saw how great the need was beyond what the government was doing, went back and raised some startup money from their friends, and then came back to New Orleans and started this project.
We punched the address of the house where we would be working into our GPS and away we went. Along the way we saw many houses that looked in pretty good condition, at least on the outside, and a lot more vacant lots.
When we arrived, it was explained to us that the flood waters in Chalmette had reached twelve feet high and that every single home was either washed away or made uninhabitable. Some of the vacant lots were sites from which houses had simply been swept away. Other houses which were beyond repair were torn down by the government and the material removed from the site.
Many houses, however, were still standing but in various states of disrepair. The outside of the homes might still appear to be in good shape, but the insides had been completed gutted. The government gave people money to compensate them for their lost homes, but it generally was not enough to rebuild the home. Some homes had been completely rehabilitated by families who had the resources to do this and families were living in them again. Others, however, had simply been gutted but not repaired. Many people chose not to return and sold their houses to the government. If the home is repairable, it will eventually be rebuilt and sold to another buyer.
The home where we were sent, however, is one to which the original homeowner is intending to return once the work is completed. It will be one of over three hundred houses that have already been rehabilitated by this project. In addition to the forty homes on which they are currently working, they have a waiting list of another 130 homes. The project is also in the process of developing a mental health program to help those in need of psychological help as a result of Katrina and of the more recent oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
We were given a one-page summary about the homeowner of the home on which we would be working, and I am including it below in its entirety because I think it gives a better picture of what these people have gone through than anything I could describe:
Reflecting on the progress of her home, Karen G. says, "Every time I go there and see a little
bit more done, I cry and ask myself, 'Is this real?'"
Far from the months following Katrina when she could only look at her home from the outside
because she was too paralyzed with grief to go inside, Karen's life is starting to take shape
again.
"It's amazing the way things just fall into place sometimes," she says.
It took Karen six months to gather the strength to see her home after Katrina. Her home in
Chalmette was also one of the properties affected by the Murphy Oil Spill from a neighboring
plant, and when she walked in after all those months, the oil covered every inch. Even her
wedding dress, 12 feet high in the attic, was stained.
What was most difficult for Karen was the sense of losing her position in life that she had
worked so hard to achieve. After she and her husband divorced, she bought him out of the
mortgage, returned to college and eventually landed a job at a law firm to support her
daughter. She worked at the law firm for 23 years before the storm. She was securely on her
own and happy.
After the storm, Karen says she remembers asking herself, "How do I get my life back? I
couldn't see any way that I could get started again. It was hopeless. I thought it would never
happen, and then it did."
After relocating to Gonzales, La. with her parents for a few months, where they eventually
chose to stay instead of returning to New Orleans, Karen returned to her home city. She
rented an apartment in nearby Kenner and eventually a place closer to her home in Chalmette.
She received some assistance from the federal Road Home Program, but like 75 percent of
recipients, it was not enough to hire a contractor to completely rebuild her gutted home. Karen
felt paralyzed about where to turn next, when a co-worker referred her to the St. Bernard
Project (SBP). With SBP's efficient rebuilding model, Karen's assistance can be utilized, along
with volunteer labor, to rebuild her home.
Karen vividly remembers seeing the first busload of volunteers working in her home and
feeling a rush of mixed emotions to see work being done on her dormant house.
"The first time I saw anything done on my house, it was such a shock," she says. "It's still
unbelievable because I never thought it would happen."
The outpouring of support from volunteers still overwhelms Karen. She remarks, "I wouldn't be
in this hopeful situation without all of you."
Not only is Karen ready to finally be home, but her friends and neighbors have patiently been
waiting for her return. With two of her original neighbors home, she says, "They're just so happy
and waiting for me to be back, too."
When we arrived at the house around 11:00, there were half a dozen people already at work sanding and plastering, a few younger people in their twenties, a couple people roughly in their forties, one black man and a couple women in their sixties. Quite a mix! The supervisor was a young woman who had been a translator for the deaf in upper New York State. She had come to work on the project for short periods of time during the last few years and finally decided to stay. Like many of the workers for SBP, she received a modest stipend from Americorps which enabled her to support herself. In the meantime, she met her fiancee and is intending to relocate here permanently and eventually return to her former profession. She was well organized and put us right to work. I did ceiling sanding first and later plastering. The plastering turned out to be a real learning experience, since it took more skill than I had anticipated. By the end of the day, we were tired and dirty, but it had been a very satisfying day!
We just happened to arrive on a day when another of SBP's houses had been completed and we were invited to attend the "Welcome Home Party" for the family that was moving in. At the end of our work day, we drove over to the home where the celebration was being held. There were about twenty-five of us, mostly volunteers.
The director of the program made a few brief remarks along with the social work director and the case manager who had worked with the family. There was a quintet of singers from a nearby college who sang a song, and a ribbon was cut. Then everyone went into the house for cake and punch. It was all very nicely done and obviously a very exciting experience for the mother and her daughter who were moving into the house.
For us, it was time to move on. We got as far as Slidell, just outside New Orleans, and took a room in a motel. Except for the fact that the doorknob came off in my hand and we had to use the plunger to flush the toilet, it was quite a nice place except for the fact that the refrigerator could only be plugged in by first unplugging the TV, and the bulb of the lamp beside the bed lay on its side rather than in the socket. Well, we have had some very pleasant motel rooms, and as the saying goes, "You can't win them all."
Appreciate the full story. Nancy
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