January 23, 2006VOL. 44, NO. 2Oakland, CA

St. Mary’s College students
Shock, hard work, determination mark relief efforts in New Orleans

Twenty-four St. Mary’s College students are spending three weeks in New Orleans in what the school’s intersession course catalog describes as “artistic ethnographic approach to the hard labor of hurricane relief.”

Translated, that means becoming a self-sufficient recovery team that restores parks, helps rebuilds schools and assists Katrina survivors in reclaiming their homes, all the while recording their experiences and those of the people they help. The entire project, part of the Christian Brothers Bridges to the Bayou, is under the guidance of Shawny Anderson, associate dean of liberal arts, and Marcia Ong, ’02, a professional videographer.

The entire team is sleeping on bunks, three-deep in a bus and taking turns cooking on four camping stoves.

The students post a photo journal daily at www.stmarys-ca.edu/nola/journal. They will make a full presentation on Feb. 8 at 7 p.m. at the Soda Center on the St. Mary’s College campus. The public is invited

Below are excerpts from their journal:

Day One: Jan. 5
After a red-eye flight, we arrived in New Orleans. Our bus driver met us at the airport and drove us to our space on a lot in Algiers Point. Our portapots and shower trailer were already there. So were Chris and Justin Verrips (two team members) who had driven across the country in a truck with a very heavy trailer. Because they did this, we have almost all the tools, safety equipment, and food we will need.

As planes fly into New Orleans, the predominant color to be seen is blue. Blue roofs indicate that there is extreme damage underneath, but they also serve as a sign of hope: a blue roof means the home is one that will probably be saved.

Day Two: Jan. 6
We headed out to a community garden that was full of debris. There was a dead tree to remove, and lots of ground to clear. Once it is ready to plant, someone will use it as a “market garden.”

We got to work and were thrilled when neighbors stopped by expressing their gratitude. They said that everyone is dealing with such important issues that “no one has time to bring back the beauty.”

We were struggling without a chainsaw to bring down the tree when a tree service down the street noticed what we were doing. Danny, one of the tree workers, appeared and reduced our work quite a bit. But four of our guys spent most of the day finishing the job with only a hatchet.

A couple of our crews lunched on MREs. We liked the cans of chicken salad better than yesterday’s chili. It’s a good experience for us to see what kind of food evacuees and other rescue workers encountered.

Day Three: Jan. 7
Today was a day of shocks to the system. Our bodies struggled in many ways, our minds raced as we tried to process all that we were seeing and experiencing, and tears flowed as we faced the magnitude of the devastating effects of Katrina (and the flood that followed) on individual and family lives.

We met 73-year-old Rosie, who owns three houses in the Ninth Ward. All were completely ruined inside. Our job was to strip them down to the floor boards. Though intellectually this is an easy task, there is not way to ignore the fact that you are throwing away virtually all of the accumulated possessions of an entire family.

It is quite traumatic, even if necessary, to take a flat-headed shovel, scrape it across the floor of someone’s bedroom, scoop up a range of contents, drop everything into a wheelbarrow, and dump it into a pile at the edge of the street.

We worked hard to save any items that we could, but we found that almost nothing was salvageable.

Day Four: Jan. 8
Now that we have seen the insides of several flood-damaged houses, we keep wondering what will happen to them. The battles between preservationists and developers are already starting. Many houses have “for sale” signs.

We were surprised to learn that subcontractors who remove debris were appreciative of us. They kept thanking us for putting them back to work. They reiterated what most of the residents said to us: “You are the first group of volunteers that we’ve seen in this area. No one is helping these people.”

Day Five: Jan. 9
We undertook our first massive laundry run: 233 pounds of drop-off laundry should be waiting for us first thing tomorrow morning.

Today’s main project, restoration of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial, turned out to be a restful and heartwarming job, but one that did not need 27 workers so we split our group for the first time. The second portion of our group went to a smaller MLK memorial. They did lots of weeding, raking, digging and mulching, but found that all of those tasks seemed really easy and relaxing compared to scooping wet debris and dealing with ‘fridge tea” [the decaying and putrid contents of abandoned refrigerators].

In general, the absence of totally disgusting smells was a welcome break from our intense but rewarding experiences over the weekend in the Ninth Ward.

Day Six: Jan. 10
Our job for the day was to do whatever we could at Mount Carmel Academy, an all-girls school that is the closest school to the 17th St. levee break. It was already gutted and substantially refurbished, but because it is opening next Tuesday, it needed quite a bit of cleaning and organizational work.

We moved computers, then matched up towers, monitors, keyboards and mice and cleaned the workstations on which the computers rest. We cleaned classrooms and moved already-bagged debris.

We found it really odd that the non-flooded classrooms seemed to be in a state of suspended animation, with August 26 marked on all of the whiteboards, and a general sense that everyone had been gone only for a long weekend.

After we left MCA, we visited the site of the levee break. To see a huge section of wall that has just been blown across the landscape by a blast of water is quite amazing. The homes right at the breach are pretty well hollowed out. Some houses have washed off of their foundations and are just sitting in the middle of the road.

Oddly enough, we found that we took few pictures, as for us these things just don’t look all that strikingly odd anymore. Our tears are drying up. Should we be worried?

Day Seven: Jan. 11
We hit the powdered egg supply again this morning, then headed off to Parkway Partners where we joined Mario. He led us to a community garden on the property of Xavier University. Along with doing our work, we got to watch tearful reunions of returning Xavier students and we got to hear the cheers and applause of lots of people driving by.

Like the one we worked last Friday, this garden will serve as a source of income for Macon, a market farmer. A long-time neighbor to the garden returned and was, at first, incensed that we were taking action without consulting her. She wanted to be assured that she would get back the plot she had always gardened. We work with Mario to be sure that she will.

Though it was odd to face someone’s anger, it was a great confirmation that these gardens are very important. We again were reminded that no one is able to face any more loss.

Day Eight: Jan. 12
We headed back to the garden on the Xavier campus. We took every shovel in sight and hand-tilled the entire thing. Today’s job was somewhat tedious, but it got almost meditative as we knelt in the dirt next to each other and had different kinds of conversations than our normal ones.

We learned from Macon that he intends to plant as quickly as he can so he can bring fresh produce back to his neighborhood. He and Mario have been doing soil tests through the city’s community gardens and have found no contamination from the aftereffects of the storm. Still, people continue to think there is reason for concern so the men will keep testing.

Day Nine: Jan. 13
Our Friday the 13th started in fine form with a blistering thunderstom. The lightning strikes and thunder claps were very close together and the rain was pounding on the bus. We got up to find out where all of the biggest leaks are in our dining tent, luggage tent and in the windows of bus, which were open and covered in mosquito netting.

We spent the morning drying out and cleaning up. We took the afternoon off. Some people stayed around camp and got organized. Some went into the French Quarter and went shopping. That night we celebrated Shane’s 21st birthday dinner at Bubba Gump’s because they could handle our crowd.

Day Ten: Jan. 14
We headed back to the Ninth Ward, where we joined Sarah Mercadel at her house. She had approached us last weekend for help. When we told her we could come on Saturday, she cried and cried.

She still had all her large appliances, including an upright freezer that had toppled forward onto its doors. As we all have learned, the most urgent need of all is to keep the refrigerators tightly closed because the smell is so disgusting (not to mention the bacteria and the maggots.)

Our team figured out a way to hold the whole thing together as they taped it closed. They were thrilled. Then they tipped it up and the dreaded “fridge tea” started running out the back. Ugh. We all groaned and ran out the door and decided to focus on the broken down car that Sarah hoped we would remove from her garage.

She hoped we would find a purse that she kept in her trunk and the title to the car that she hoped was in her glovebox. We didn’t find it, but we found a document from the Dept. of Motor Vehicles that might help her prove to FEMA that she owns the car.

Our next host led us to what seemed like a very remote rural area that actually is still part of New Orleans, called Old Gentilly. The house that needed help was a childhood home, one that the family had built board by board.

The house was an unfortunate “shovel job,” as everything was tossed far from where it belonged and the floors were virtually impassable. The entire front room had a floor like an accordion.

Though the house had seemed like an impossible mess, we were able to conquer it quickly, bringing a great deal of relief to the family. We expressed our sorrow that this was the extent of the relief that we could provide to them. They tried to pay us, and we refused.

St. Mary’s College students finish clearing debris from this home on Desire Street. It included one of the crew’s most dreaded items – a full refrigerator that leaked ‘fridge tea’ so putrid that the students had to put Icy Hot ointment under their noses to continue working.

Students work throughout the day to clear a community garden on Music Street so a market gardener can plant vegetables and return fresh produce to the neighborhood.

Several crew members guide a large freezer off the porch and on to the street where it will eventually be picked up and discarded. As the students removed rotten wooden furniture, it would crumble into pieces, making clean-up even more time consuming.

Where the homes are still standing, contents are piled high on the sidewalks. The students also cut down trees and in some cases lifted cars out of the way. Owners marveled that the St. Mary’s students were providing this recovery work for free.

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