St. Bernard Project Volunteer

The St. Bernard Project rebuilds houses in St. Bernard Parish, Louisiana, that were damaged by Hurricane Katrina. Going on four years after the storm, there are still many satisfying opportunities for skilled volunteers. In this video, volunteer Colin Slade from Cobourg, Ontario, shares his experiences working for the St. Bernard Project. Colin has returned to St. Bernard Parish each year for three years. He is interviewed by Gretchen Wieland, Development Coordinator for St. Bernard Project.

Quick tour of the Lower 9th Ward

Start the video so that you can watch it out of the corner of your eye as you read this. The Lower 9th Ward in New Orleans was the area hardest hit by Katrina. It's a low, flat area next to the major canal that breached its levy. What you are seeing as of February 2009, 3-1/2 years after Katrina, is mainly overgrown vacant lots with empty cement slabs and driveways leading to houses that no longer exist. Sometimes you see cement steps sticking up out of the weeds, but the front doors are long gone. Occasionally you see a house still standing, and sometimes there's evidence that people are even working on it. Rarely, you can see really nice houses that people have painstakingly rebuilt.



Yet is seems unlikely that the neighborhood ever will come back. People lived here because it was cheap, priced as old, somewhat run down housing. If it were rebuilt, it would need to be priced as new housing, and it would be unaffordable. There's a proposal floating around to make the whole area a park, and that seems to me to make sense.

What do you think? Should this area somehow be repopulated, or is a park a good idea? Post your opinion here.

Waveland after Katrina

I have had my nose to the grindstone for the last several days, helping sort out Katrina Relief's web site and working on the blog. The web site needs more work, but you can admire it at http://www.reliefvolunteers.com/. The blog has yet to go live. When it does, it should look like it always has, but it should be much, much easier to maintain.

Today I took a break to attend a conference in Biloxi, Katrina Relief Summit II. In one section of the conference, case workers presented stories illustrating problems their clients face. Kathleen Johnson of Katrina Relief presented a particularly poignant case. The lighting and audio were difficult, but if you stick with the video, you will be touched.

Lower Ninth, Mardi Gras Parade

On Saturday, I stopped at Common Ground in the Lower Ninth Ward on my way to New Orleans. Where once there were houses in the Lower Ninth, there is mainly emptiness now. I stuck the video camera out the car window and drove around the neighborhood to capture the desolation. I'll include it in a future posting.

Saturday night I enjoyed a pre-Mardi Gras parade, the Krewe de Vieux. It was XXX rated and very anti-establishmentarian. The picture shows one of the floats, which laments the sinking economy.

On Sunday I continued to Waveland, Mississippi, where I am helping NGO Katrina Volunteers with its web site, http://www.reliefvolunteers.com/, and it's blog, www.reliefvolunteers.com/hancockdailyblog.html . Check out the blog for my photo on a crabbing expedition.

I expect to be frantically busy this week.

The St. Bernard Project

The St. Bernard Project restores homes for displaced families. I spent most of the day with a volunteer crew working on a house in nearby Mereaux. Some members of the crew are very skilled, and the restoration is progressing well. The owner, Davie Thompson, came by in the afternoon. Here's a short conversation with him,and a look at the volunteers in action.

Food & Clothing Distribution at Community Center

On a busy day, the Community Center of St. Bernard provides free food to 150 families.

The inundation

The social devastation in St. Bernard Parish is much less conspicuous than the physical destruction, but no less real. In lieu of an entry today, which I spent chasing around unproductively, here's a video about St. Bernard Parish made a couple of years ago for Camp Hope:

Around the Parish

St. Bernard Parish is the only county in the U.S. ever to have been completely submerged by a flood.

Spent some time this morning trying to photograph what I’m seeing. The problem is that a photo is, well, a snapshot, taken at a single point in time looking in just one direction. Being here means being continuously surrounded by (notice that I didn’t say “immersed in”) an alien landscape. You can take a picture of one house or vacant lot, or a dozen, or a hundred. But how do you take pictures of thousands?

I arrived at the Community Center of St. Bernard this morning in time to help unload potatoes, hundreds of pounds of them. I inventoried arriving food contributions and stocked shelves. During a lull, I went for a walk around the neighborhood in which the Community Center is located. Off the main street it’s residential, with modest detached homes on ample lots. I stopped to chat with a couple waiting in a nearby playground for the Community Center to serve lunch, and then stopped again to chat with a man fixing up his house. Everyone has a story, and some of them are pretty hair-raising.

I’m hearing stories about people who did just enough work on their houses to suggest that they were staying, and then used a $160,000 restoration grant from the state to start over elsewhere. This really hurts the neighbors, because it takes a long time to foreclose on the property and raze the house. Meanwhile it’s a liability to the neighborhood. In the photo, the houses to the left and right have been lovingly restored and reoccupied by their owners. The house in the middle was gutted and a new roof was put on. Then the owners claimed a restoration grant and took the money and ran. The house has been a gutted shell for months.



I went for a bike ride on the gravel path on top of the levee. The river doesn’t need to rise much at all to top it.

The Community Center of St. Bernard

Today, I worked at the Community Center of St. Bernard. People started signing in for free food at 10, and the distribution began at 11. Food is distributed five or six days a week to between 70 and 150 families. Each family is allowed to come only once a week, so that's quite a few people. The daily distribution averages 2,000 lbs, a ton. Most of it is 15 ounce cans of fruit, vegetables, and soups, so that's a lot of cans.

At noon there is a free meal, and most people stay for that. There is also a daily clothing distribution, although the scale seems modest. In addition to free food and clothing, the Community Center makes available all kinds of other services.
I encourage you to visit ccstb.org to learn more about the Community Center.

The center was started by Iray Nabatoff, a guy about my age from New Hampshire who came down to help out soon after Katrina and never really left. The center is a real achievement.

Most of the food comes from Second Harvest, a nation-wide food bank. There are many individual donations, though, and people sometimes drop off boxes of cans, no two cans the same. Inventory control is very tight. My job today was to log in the incoming food, carry it from the warehouse to the distribution point, and stock the shelves. Clients then browse the shelves and select what they want, subject to limits like "3 per family". Then they check out exactly as at a grocery store with every item scanned with a bar code reader.

I'm becoming acquainted with other volunteers staying at Camp Hope. There is a college-age contingent from Americorps, but there are also quite a few old codgers like myself. We sit together at an old farts table at dinner. Some people have been coming every year; the Baltimorian in the next bunk is on his sixth trip.

The heavens opened this morning and it rained furiously for several hours. The sun returned in the afternoon and it was a beautiful 50 degree day. I managed another bike ride before dinner.

Check the blog from time to time. I'll be trying to post pictures.

First impressions

Arrived in New Orleans at about 1 pm, so I went straight to the St. Bernard Community Center. The GPS took me through several miles of neighborhood streets instead of the main road. The extent of the devastation here is mind-boggling. The only thing I've seen that compares is Bosnia a couple of years after the fighting stopped. One of the things that's hard to get one's mind around is that some houses and businesses have been restored and they're up and running. Then next door will be a shell that looks like a bomb hit. Some people are still living in FEMA trailers, although I would say relatively few.

One of the disconcerting things is that commercial signs pretty much survived. You're driving along looking with one eye for a hardware store or a place to buy boots while watching traffic with the other. You spot a sign that looks like just the ticket. It isn't until you pull in that you realize that the building is gutted or that the ground floor is completely gone.

I realize that New Orleans has only about a third as many people as before Katrina, so it needs only a third as many shopping centers and houses and so on. But I somehow imagined New Orleans shrinking geographically, too, and of course that's not what's happened. It's more like New Orleans has been made into a paper doily, with two-third of what used to be there missing.

The community center was closed, so I proceeded to Camp Hope, kind of a barracks for volunteers that's managed by Habitat for Humanity. The school district has a lot of empty schools, so it's letting Habitat use a middle school until it's needed again for students. It's perfectly comfortable. More about Camp Hope in a future entry.

I went on a nice bike ride. It's about 55 fahrenheit, which seems like a heat wave.