A week in New Orleans

Earlier this evening I returned from the final mission trip of the summer. The destination was New Orleans, specifically the Upper Ninth Ward. Going in I was excited to help rebuild a city still devastated from Hurricane Katrina. When I rolled into The Big Easy and found out the majority of the week would be devoted to “street cleaning” — essentially mowing lawns, picking up trash, and talking to people — I was a little disappointed. How can mowing a lawn make any difference when an entire city was underwater for weeks? Aren’t there things that need to be built?

After a few minutes in Central City I realized that the devastation of the Lower Ninth made popular on CNN isn’t the whole story. Sure, thousands of houses were destroyed and now created a modern American ghost town, but there is devastation much bigger that the news media didn’t cover. The area we were working didn’t see the famous water damage, in fact, there was little damage on the whole in the Upper Ninth. The devastation that Katrina left in this area is with the people who live there.

We spent two days at a woman’s house who had worked hard her whole life to provide for her and her family. She worked two jobs to put her kids through private school and college and had even attained 90 college credit hours herself. She had worked her way up from a temp to $40,000 a year salary job. Then Katrina came rolling through. Her company relocated her to Arkansas where she knew no one, had no transportation, and wasn’t at home. Because of this she lost her job and went back to her home in New Orleans where she tried to start over. She hired three different contractors to fix the little damage she had (FEMA deemed she didn’t have enough damage to merit any aid and her insurance company determined she had $3,800 worth of damage and cut her a check for that amount) and all three contractors essentially screwed her. All in all she spent nearly $25,000 on repairs with jobs that weren’t done right or not even at all. What all this did to her, as she put it, sapped her of all her energy. She was back to working part time, depending on her sister to help support them both. She owns a nice piece of property (a duplex with an apartment above where she lives) but no longer has the means or desire to fix it up so that she can rent them out. Her story is the same one you will hear talking to everyone in Central City, a devastation the media will never cover.

Our group did an essentially simple project for this woman: we tore out a broken concrete path from the from of her house to the rear and replaced it with circular pavers and red “lava rocks.” The project cost roughly $100 and a days work for two adults and five teenagers. The result, however was priceless. The homeowner gained back a bit of her energy, her “pep” as she called it. She wanted to continue the project (we miss-estimated and didn’t buy enough rocks to fill in around the pavers) and seemed to be truly thankful for the difference we helped make in her life.

There are a lot of incredible things happening in New Orleans. The media likes to talk about the various celebrities building houses in the Lower Ninth Ward and about the constant work being done to strengthen the levees so something like Katrina can never happen again. All of this is important and needed, but there are other incredible things happening that the general public will never know about. Things like restoring hope by laying a few pavers and mowing a few lawns. It’s going to take years to fully restore New Orleans, to fully restore the people there but after spending a week there I am encouraged to know that someday it will happen.