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.
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.
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