9th Ward Neighborhood Empowerment Network Association

Janet, Jenn G, Selene and I (Moira) went to NENA (see above) on Wednesday and Thursday this week. We worked on a mapping project under the guidance of Quintus Jett from Dartmouth, who happened to be in NOLA with a group of students mapping Gentilly and the 9th ward.

To read about his project (and see a picture of us!) visit http://www.gentillyproject.blogspot.com

Wednesday March 14th (and Beyond)

"I've always been a leader in the community," Ms. Audrey Browder of Central City Partnerships said, "this time I decided to follow." Ms. Browder met with us at 9am Wednesday morning to discuss the work we would be doing during the day. We began our day with her Katrina story. She followed that day in Mississippi as she turned left out of the hotel where she and a church friend has spent the evening. Katrina had passed right through the town where they had found lodging after driving out of New Orleans. She followed a line of cars to a Red Cross Shelter in Monroe where she stayed for two months and worked until December 2005.

I have visions of that day--what it meant to drive without knowing where one was going, having no clue whether family and friends were alive or dead, whether a house was standing or collapsed or full of 10 feet (or more) of water. Since we've been here, folks have talked about exile, about diaspora, about end times. Nehemiah 2:20 has become a rallying point…"Let Us Arise and Rebuild." Rev. Tyrone in Plaquemines has adopted the verse as his motto, but I find myself thinking it all over the place. I am amazed at how folks are trying--how folks are living, returning, rebuilding and trying to make HOME again. And folks all over the city have told me, "I know it will never be as it was, but I love this city. No where else I'd rather be."

We walked through Central City for hours Wednesday gathering signatures for a petition asking Home Depot to enter into a Community Benefits Agreement (CBA) with the community as they plan to build. The Central City coalition hopes to propose the CBA model as a way to rebuild this city. We attended the New Orleans city council meeting on Thursday where they presented their work. I have to admit that I see no plan in the council, and not enough attention to the work of community organizations racking their brains, spending all their collective energy and hours and hours of person-power attempting to imagine how to arise, how to rebuild, and how to bring EVERYONE (not just the rich) home.

We gathered over 200 signatures, and we talked to folks for hours who didn't even sign the petition. It felt just as important to hear the stories, to bear witness to tragedy, survival, and to the deep faith that keeps folks coming back to this city in ruins. It is going to take more than faith, though, to rebuild in an honorable way. There is crime in New Orleans right now--only a small bit of it is happening with guns in the streets. Most of it is happening in government, contracting, sub-contracting, rent-hikes, state and federal squandering of monies…Rebuilding is one thing. Justice is another.

Thursday at NEMA

Wednesday and today four of us (Selene, Janet, Moira and myself) went to volunteer at NEMA (Lower Ninth Ward Empowerment Association). This experience was very unique in that we worked on the beginning of what will soon be policy on redeveloping the Lower 9th Ward.
We started out by understanding Community Land Trusts, simply stated a community puts all their resources or as much as needed into buying their lands and being responsible to each other for the upkeep of their properties; all monies from renting out goes to the community. This is a fight against pushing out low-income housing and the government having say in what to do with homes after a disaster. Once we gained efficient knowledge on the topic we were going to write a letter to be sent to the community explaining NENA's attempts to regain property rights. This did not get completed since we only had two days:-/ But it is a project we can do from home since we vowed to remain in contact!:)

Our second project, which took up most of the two days was preparing and putting data into the computer that will eventually create a digital map of the Lower Ninth Ward and will depict every home that has been gutted, untouched, rebuilt, and if people have moved into the home or not. This information was party done by past volunteers who surveyed the desolate area. But Our work took the project even further, we put all of the data in which was an amazing accomplishment! But, we also learned how to put houses into census tracks and census blocks which are smaller areas. To understand how to do this Selene and I took a ride around the lower ninth ward to see which houses would fit into a census block depending on street address. I had the chance to walk around with a developer also who guided us through the project.

At the end of the second day we were upset to leave our work, but we left the agency and developer with a letter describing the work we did and a map of the census tracks and blocks for the next volunteers.

For me it was an amazing experience in urban planning and organizing principles.

Tuesday- St. Bernard's Project

Today, I and four others went to St. Bernard's Parish and volunteered at St. Bernard's Project. We were told that we would be helping an 87 year old woman named Aunt Sally (no last name given) to repaint the inside walls of her house. We arrived to find Aunt Sally already vigorously at work with a roller brush, applying primer to her once and future living room. Aunt Sally did not seem or act 87 years old; she not only looked 65, but stood by our sides for nearly the entire morning and afternoon, lugging paint buckets, fetching sodas and cookies for us, and amusing us with her stories of slot machine magic, running after the recent Mardi Gras floats, throwing cabbages at passersby, and catching wooden nickels to turn in for pickled pork at the only supermarket for miles around. After a coat of primer, we took a break on the steps with Aunt Sally and she told us about her family's history in the parish. Her nephew, Gary, also stopped by and filled in many of the following details.

Aunt Sally's once and future home is flanked by Victor Street, Jackson Street and Lloyd's Avenue. Her daddy's name was Victor, her uncle's name was Lloyd, and her family name is Jackson. She grew up in that exact location when the land her once and future home stands on was farmland owned by her kin. They sold part of the land to the parish to be developed, but her entire family occupied homes in the neighborhood. Sally's family and their homes withstood Hurricane Betsy in 1965, when St. Bernard's Parish did not sustain significant flooding. However, when Katrina and Rita hit in 2005, the region was inundated by water, reaching up to twenty feet in spots, including the local Home Depot, where all that was visible above water was the roof of the massive warehouses.

Aunt Sally and all of her relatives were able to escape unscathed from their homes, but watched the TV in agony as their homes were destroyed by flood damage. There was no question in the minds of this family that they would return to live here once again, as their family had in that very spot for five to six generations. Gary was able to sneak back to the area past the parish police to begin the rebuilding of his home on September 15, 2005; he has not rested a single day since, except for when he occasionally throws out his back and is laid up for weeks at a time.

As we lay the second coat of primer, Aunt Sally followed behind us, occasionally retracing our paint strokes. I realized how meaningful this experience was for her, as she lived two blocks away in a FEMA trailer and saw in the course of a day, her living room, kitchen, bathroom, and bedroom walls progress from a sheet rock shell to something that resembled its former state. During our lunch break, she described the beautiful rose bushes that had surrounded her house and were washed away by the flood; we secretly conspired to go to the formerly submarine Home Depot to replace two of her bushes, and give her a token to remember us by.

When we presented them to her, she responded with what seemed like anger: "You shouldn't have!! Really you shouldn't have!" She gave us all big bear hugs, inviting us to return whenever we come back. As we drove away, she began to cry, and so did we. Aunt Sally... welcome home.

Rebuilding Biloxi

Biloxi, Mississippi is a small coastal city an hour and a half east of New Orleans. The area sustained tremendous damage in Hurricane Katrina. Entire blocks of homes were washed away, and thousands of families were displaced. Much of the ongoing devastation has been overshadowed by media attention to the larger scale of damage in New Orleans, and communities are fighting for resources. While some residents are scrounging for money, supplies, and an increasing need for skilled labor (rather than general volunteer labor), others have been displaced and may never be able to return. The stories we heard in our two days here indicate that, while well-intentioned, many of the non-profit organizations that have responded to the disaster have done so on their own terms rather than being guided by residents in meeting their needs. Coastal Women for Change is a grassroots organization whose mission is to put local residents back at the center of the conversation about the rebuilding of Biloxi.

On Tuesday, one of the women of CWC took us to meet her brother, John, whose home was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina. We went to see him at his home, which he decided to rebuild from the ground up rather than try to repair the damage. “I knew it would be forever if I waited for the government money, so I just decided to do it myself. I’ll probably finish before I get anything from them.” He started in November 2005, before anyone else in town had started rebuilding, and spent the first two months digging the foundation. Since then he has been putting aside a chunk of his paycheck each month to buy supplies and working on the house for two hours every day, on top of his job at the navy shipyard. Sometimes he works alone, other times friends or neighbors or volunteers passing through help him. This being his first attempt at home construction, he bought a blueprint from Loew’s and modified it to provide the house with even better wind and rain resistance. Today the house has a solid frame, plumbing, and electrical wiring, which have passed code inspections, and John expects to finish by August this year.

As he proudly walked us through each room of the house, John shared with us that a part of his motivation to take on such a massive project himself was the desire to be a role model for his community and to show the kids in the neighborhood what can be accomplished with determination. We found ourselves in awe of his perseverance and patience – it took him four attempts to get the first wall straight, and even on the hottest summer days he said he puts up at least two wooden boards. We were deeply moved by John sharing his vision with us as well as the healing that it has provided him. “After I was done crying and I couldn’t cry anymore, I just had to do something, and this was it.”

In addition to the immense personal resilience we saw in John, we were also struck by the support that he has gotten from friends, family, and colleagues. We were inspired by his story and the many differing stories of rebuilding lives that we heard from the women of CWC and the other people we met.

-Megan C-R & Selene

Sunday in New Orleans

Moira here, sorry for the delay in writing about Sunday. After a quick visit to the French Quarter for coffee at Cafe Du Monde, a group of us went to an amazing Mass at St. Augustine, a historically Black Catholic church where slaves and free people worshipped together. The service was amazing. As a Catholic, I was deeply moved by the similarities in this service and my usual service in New York. I was also struck by the cultural differences in this New Orleans church--the call and response style, the deep history of this place. During the Sign of Peace, the entire church came over to us. I felt so welcomed. The homily was about the tree as a metaphor for resilience, and the priest was definitely speaking to the New Orleans community. "Don't cut the tree down. Give it another chance to bloom."

The message was in stark contrast with what I saw in the 9th ward later in the day. The storm could've happened yesterday. Rows and rows of destroyed and abandoned houses, dangling power lines--a ghost town really. I had to force myself to remember the resilience in the face of such trauma and desolation. This community has a long way to go, but it's moving forward.

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?