New Orleans, Day 10

So we waited until the end of our trip to experience some excitement.

After cleaning up the church housing, a number of us headed down to the French Quarter to get in some last-minute sightseeing. Martie stayed behind at St Paul's to relax and recover from the illness she was battling. After lunch, we started to make our way to the airport when we heard from Morgan and Jimmy. It turned out that they had been in an accident and their van was in sad shape. They had been on their way to pick up Martie and all of their luggage, when they were hit in the side navigating one of the more complicated intersections under the highway downtown.

We arrived on the scene to find them shaken, but not injured. Meanwhile, we all had a plane to catch! So, the team jumped into action. Alan was redirected to pick up Martie, and after a bit of work on the wheel well with a prybar and the jack, we were able to bend the metal enough so that it only rubbed the rear tire just a little bit.

Morgan drove the van slowly down the highway (alone so there wouldn't be any extra weight pressing down on the tire.) He did an impressive job, even maintaining control when a huge tow truck blasted its horn next to him at another car that had cut through traffic.

Finally, we started trickling in to the airport. Jill, Janice and Aleta were there early starting to coordinate ways to get us in through check-in quickly. (I believe they were recommending that Martie rush Wayne through by telling people that he had had a stroke and she was his minister.) Jean and I dropped Morgan and Jimmy off at Hertz with and instructed to tell them that they thought the scratch on the side was there when they picked up the van. We took Karen to the curbside check-in where she waited for Alan, Tom, Wayne and Martie who had gotten off course in Metarie. Eventually people started showing up at the gate and, thanks to a last-minute call from Wayne to Alan and a fortuitous 7 minute delay of the plane, Alan was able to check-in on our flight instead of being rebooked on a flight through D.C. that would have gotten him to Denver after 11pm.

With that said, I'm starting to reflect on the work we did here, and why I'm now convinced it's important. When I first came down, I believed that this area needed our help, but I carried some misgivings and worries: Who would we be helping? Will it even make a difference? Should people even be living in those areas? Now, after seeing the area, meeting a few of the people who live there and getting a small understanding for what happened, I too am convinced that we should be helping them rebuild.

Jean and I were able to visit the Historical New Orleans Collections museum in the French Quarter and watch a really well-made video called Surrounded by Water. It described how the waterways (the Mississippi, Lake Ponchartrain, the canals and the ocean) are all an integral part of the geography, economics and culture of not just the region, but the country and world as a whole. Not only does New Orleans provide a culture unlike any other, but most of the grains exported by the U.S. goes through it's ports. I feel convinced from what I've heard that what happened when Katrina hit was not a natural disaster, but a human one -- poor engineering and bad planning in the way that we've attempted to constrict and control the Mississippi river. Others can explain it better than I.

As John "Wilkes" Booth said, when we asked him why he hadn't left St Berndard Parish, "Where am I gonna go?!? All my friends are here." To me, the largest tragedy of the floods were the families that were ripped apart. From what I heard, while Orleans parish (where the city is) is back to 70% of the pre-storm population, St. Bernard parish is only at 30%. These were not the same neighborhoods that we have in Boulder, either -- extended families all lived within minutes of each other, and now they've been scattered. As John Booth told his stories, he included details of what seemed to be hundreds of people that he had been close to -- names, addresses, ages, etc. Most of them are no longer anywhere near. Again, others can attest to this better than I can.

As for whether I made a difference -- I'm still overwhelmed by the scope of the problem. If you look at this one image of Chalmette, just one of the towns in St. Bernard Parish (which was just one of the parishes affected), you can find the house I worked on. It's somewhere just NE of the double bend in the large road (Judge Perez) :
http://www.globexplorer.com/disasterimages/images/new_orleans_chalmette_aug31_2005_dg.jpg
We just put in one week of about 10 that it will take to make the house re-inhabitable. Obviously there are plenty more in the area that need help. So, what I did is hardly even measurable in the overall size of the problem. However, I have to assume that there are others who will come after me (as I know there have been many before me) that will continue on helping these people who, unless they are very lucky or happened to have saved up extra money before the store, don't have the means to help themselves.

Are you next?

http://www.stbernardproject.org/