Monday at Plaquimines

It is impossible to know what Phoenix, Louisiana, Plaquimines Parish looked like before Katrina. Nor is it possible to know what it looked like right after the storm. After working with a class of fourth graders (ages 9-13) at Phoenix School, a van-load of us rode with Rev. Tyrone Edwards of Zion Traveler's Cooperative Center along Hi-way 15. He's been around the world, he says, but Phoenix is home. This community of 400 pre-storm has about 65% of it's residents returned. Many are living in FEMA trailers on their own land, others live in "FEMA concentration camps" (according to Rev. Tyrone). We are told that it is important for people to be living on their family land, often next to the house they are rebuilding or even just the foundation or concrete steps of the house that had been carried by flood waters to rest on top of the levy. This land they own.

I spent a lot of our time thinking about whether or not I would have come back. It seems like a stupid, a selfish, even a racist question to ask, but I've been asking it a lot. And, in doing so, trying to understand why folks have come back. Why rebuilding has become a way of life....

But when I sat in Ms. CooCoo's FEMA trailer after she invited me in and then after I walked through her soon to be reinhabited home...after I saw all the dishes she had salvaged from around her home when she returned months after the storm....that's when I understood. She had lived in Phoenix her whole life (The town seems to me really a village by the side of hiway 15. They had one store and one bar before the storm and "nothing now") . That was CooCoo's home, her family heirlooms. Her dishes. I thought of the importance of dishes in my own southern family. It is important to me that I have inherited and will inherit grandmothers' china sets and other precious things. As Ms. CooCoo showed me hers in her bathroom ready to be cleaned and told me about the china cabinet she was planning to buy, I understood better that this was and IS home. How could I ever question the desire to return and the need to rebuild?

Now, the question comes: What does it mean for and do to folks emotionally, mentally and physically to rebuild and recover from this devestation? ("the worst ever" people told us today). And then, what is MY role here and at home to assist in whatever way possible?