New Orleans

For nearly five days now, I have thought about how to summarize this trip. I have journaled about it privately and talked about it to friends, family and staff at W&M. Each time I tell a different piece of the story; there is so much to tell.

First, the city. For those who've been to New Orleans pre-Katrina (I hadn't), there is an awareness that this is one funky city, in so many senses of the word. New Orleans has such good food and music that even the locals can't help but talk about it; they ditch work, many of them, at 2 or 3 p.m. every Friday to go downtown or to the French Quarter. There is no shame in indulging in the good life, they recognize, when it's literally around the corner. The other side of New Orleans' funkiness, though, is that this is — and has been since well before the storm, I gather — quite a dysfunctional place. The government, the school system, housing, public health ... the list goes sadly on. Katrina only shone a 1,000-watt spotlight on problems that had consumed this place for decades.

But Katrina also made them worse. The Ninth Ward, once a segregated, destitute home for many unlucky and impoverished souls, is now a Military Police-ridden, segregated, destitute home for a lot fewer unlucky and impoverished souls. More MPs patrol the Ninth Ward than NOLA police. They pat down residents as they walk into businesses, with an assuredness that some law is probably being broken. Last Wednesday, my friend Myron and I sat in the van while this happened to one of our co-workers, Mildred, a N.O. native and a black woman who, it turned out, had violated the terms of her probation. She was trying to sell some electrical wire for cash, legally, and the MPs sent her to jail instead.

A student from Virginia Tech, who I worked with throughout the week, tearing out nails and knocking down dry wall, said that the MPs were right to do what they did. After all, they probably wouldn't be searching people if laws weren't regularly being broken. That's one way of looking at it, I suppose. And if Mildred hadn't done anything wrong, then she could have gone on about her day. Another way of looking at it, as I pointed out, is that this Virginia Tech student may feel differently about such searches if she were black. I didn't see many white people in the Ninth Ward. The ones I did see were mostly volunteers, like myself, or MPs.

The point of all this is not to say that all MPs are bad, or that people who break their probation shouldn't go to jail. The point is that while we worry about how many hundreds of millions we should spend on our embassy in Baghdad, there is a city within our own borders, a city that suffers every single day. The Ninth Ward was leveled by Katrina, absolutely leveled. The people there say that the place looks so much better than it did two years ago, but I think many Americans would have a hard time telling today's Ninth Ward from a poor African village.

Of course, there is reason to hope. The contractor we worked with, through Desire Street Ministries and C.U.R.E. (Churches United for Revitalization and Evangelism), is a reverend, Joseph Merrill, an amazing man whom I would trust to lead any project. Men and women like him, blessed with non-profit boards that have donated millions to the cause, are the ones rebuilding the Ninth Ward. The process is slow, painstakingly slow. The City cannot use eminent domain, cannot take control over most of the property, because some homeowners cannot be located or say they will return, someday. If you're the City of New Orleans, the State of Louisiana, the U.S. government, you can't take a person's home away from them after your levee collapsed under the weight of water from a barge, and the person had to flee for their life, carrying only the shirt on their back, riding a bus if there was one available, to a faraway city.

And so the rebuilding is slow, one house at a time, perhaps, on each block. At the current pace, I imagine it may take 15 or 20 years to return the place to normal, whatever that might look like. The houses are stripped to their foundations and frames. We tore down wet ceilings, ripped up buckled tile from the floors, pulled rusty nails from soggy boards. Then the good Rev. Merrill will go in with his crew and fix the places up so well you couldn't tell the difference between the inside of one of his houses from a new interior display at Home Depot.

So those were the days for three of us — Myron, Kathleen and me, along with a crew of five or six students from Tech, a Christian group that had come to pray and work, like Rev. Merrill does every day. He showed us the churches of the Ninth Ward, including a large church with only a foundation standing. We asked him about it, and he pointed to another smaller church, two doors down, still fully intact. He said that the smaller church, with a congregation of 400, had been preparing to expand. The concrete had been poured for a new, larger church — two months before Katrina. After the storm hit there was no reason to finish it. The church's congregation went from 400 to 75. But Rev. Merrill does not dwell on this, the sadness of it all. He says that Katrina reminded him of that Bible verse which declares that we are all one people before God, that denominations do not matter. I asked him if he was a Baptist, and he said, "Yes, but I am all faiths." I asked him if he was also a Presbyterian, and he said, predictably, "Yes." He cannot be choosy about his congregation, even if he wanted to be. Unlike the rest of the city, only 15% of the Ninth Ward's population has returned.

Others in our group worked for the Center for Racial Justice, helping to organize a walk-out by in southern Mississippi by about 100 Indian immigrants, who had been told by Signal Corporation that they had been granted permanent working status in the U.S., only to get here to discover that they had temporary visas, and would be deported if they reported their poor working conditions. Shortly after we returned from our trip, the NY Times, CNN and the AP reported on the story, another sad example of an overlooked minority group. Still others of us worked at the American Red Cross and the City Attorney's Office.

I should mention that at night, we had a great deal of fun. It has been years since I've been on a trip like this one with peers. We bonded, as people often do on these kinds of trips. We ate crawfish and beignets, gumbo and jumbalaya, walked down Bourbon Street and around Jackson Square, and heard the jazz piano of Ellis Marsalis. We sang on the rooftop of our bed and breakfast in the Garden District, enjoyed the company of good friends. I have so many good memories that I am already thinking about a return trip next Spring Break. The good City of New Orleans will still be there, and it will still need our help.