Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto

Always Learning

New Orleans after Katrina

Three busses left Our Lady of Guadalupe in the French Quarter early Friday morning loaded with clergy from around the country and organizers from PICO (the national organization of which our own Peninsula Interfaith Action is a part). Our caravan rode away from the habitable part of the city where visitors can once again enjoy a Beniet or listen to live music. They call this the “Isle of Denial.” We drove a winding way through Lakewood, Gentilly and finally the 9th ward.

The streets have been cleared now, and in many places the piles of rubble are no longer where the flood left them, but where families or volunteers have carried them to the curb for eventual removal by the garbage company. Every mile or so we would see a team of people with masks over their mouths, and sometimes blue and white protective gear covering their whole bodies. We heard “if you see someone working on a house, that’s Acorn or Habitat… Not one federal dollar has been spent to rebuild a home… All that money appropriated by our federal government has been spent on relief… It’s time to move from relief to rebuilding.”

It was humbling to meet these crews of high school or college students out on their spring break, traveling from around the country to help gut these homes. Many houses are still as they were left on August 29. Jungle Gyms, toys, furniture, books, pictures on the walls, all are consumed by mold and mildew. Everyone wonders what will happen when the wet heat comes in June. Everyone worries about disease. But a gutted house may help keep disease at bay, and it feels like a fresh start, ready for the future. You could think and plan in this empty torn-up space. Now you could get in the front door and walk around.

We walked first through Pastor Joe’s gutted house, stripped to the studs, and through the back yard where the wooden pieces of train track, and little wooden train cars (just like my son’s) lay abandoned and swollen with water. Next door was a house still littered with abandoned chairs and books. The smell, the feeling of the air inside was so markedly different than the smell in the gutted house.

Back on the bus, the Senator’s Aide pointed out a FEMA trailer. The first one we had seen. Seven thousand have been given out; 150,000 family homes were destroyed. The pastor in front of me said he had received a call from FEMA telling him he qualified for a trailer, and asking would he like one. That was in December and he hasn’t heard from them since. The Senator’s Aide said their office was flooded with calls about FEMA — questions and frustration. The right hand didn’t seem to know what the left hand was doing.

What I hadn’t realized before the trip was the magnitude of the situation. I hadn’t understood that you could stand in one spot and see uninhabitable houses in all directions, and that if you drove and drove the images would persist. I didn’t understand the days and weeks and months and years it would take until all those families lived in their own homes again. I didn’t understand that right now, seven months after the hurricane, people don’t even know if they should bother gutting their homes lest the city would later develop a plan to bulldoze their house. I didn’t understand that rents have doubled and tripled, and that schools in the city are now full. I did not understand that this destruction is so vast, that even our emergency response organizations are overwhelmed. There are simply not enough people left in New Orleans to do the rebuilding on their own. One preacher called this “the long season of our despair.” Our brothers and sisters need help from the whole country. Our brothers and sisters need us.

I think what PICO-LIFT has accomplished in New Orleans is nothing short of a miracle: getting families together in neighborhood clusters to declare “we are coming back” and to craft together a cogent articulation of priorities. It gave me a whole new understanding of what “faith” means, to witness the faith of pastors of flooded parishes. I went to New Orleans as a religious witness, and saw with my own eyes, not only devastation and despair, but also the faith, love and courage of the people of New Orleans.

What can we do to help? Call your senators and ask them to expedite Federal Appropriation for rebuilding Louisiana. Read more about this Clergy Summit and the desires of Louisiana residents in the rebuilding process.