Today Katrina Corps is adding a daily blogging feature to our website. While we will continue to update and improve our website, we will use this blog to help keep you updated. We have a full-time employee in New Orleans since mid-January who will be there at least through the end of the college Spring Break weeks — April 6th. I say “at least” because our vision for Katrina Corps extends well beyond Spring Break 07. The rebuilding process in New Orleans will take anywhere from 5-10 years.
I am a member of the management group for Katrina Corps and a vice-president of the board of the sponsoring organization, Pangaea Quest. I have been to New Orleans three times last year to gut homes. Each week I worked with the outreach program of the St. Charles Ave. Presbyterian Church called RHINO (Rebuilding Hope in New Orleans). I’ve participated in the gutting of eight homes and also worked several days with Habitat New Orleans. My first trip was in late January. After each trip I wrote a column for my hometown Indiana newspaper. (I’ve lived in Southern California since 1970.) Here are some snippets of that first column last February.
“I just returned from a week in a third world country. Which one? New Orleans.”
And this experience with my first house – -
“Inside, mold, unknown fluids and fumes assaulted the senses. Growing up in that old farmhouse in Indiana, I probably slept with mold. Regardless, my mask went on instantly. We opened as many warped windows as we could jimmy, breaking a few on purpose. Air circulation was essential. Next we removed everything, bolted down or otherwise, including toilets. Any kind of glass, metal or plastic container still sat with stagnated floodwater. ‘Yuk’, was a common exclamation.”
And –
“Our second house, framed by brick, had an adjoining street ironically named, “Camelot.” The 40-year old owner had cleared out the furniture and most of the dry wall, then suffered a heart attack and lay incapacitated in one of only two open hospitals.”
And this closing – -
“Each evening I sat on my host home’s expansive porch, watching life crawl back to normal, at least in the ’sliver by the river’. The St. Charles Church bell tolled hourly. With apologies to Papa Hemingway, I thought of his classic, ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’. It tolls for these upscale neighborhood, and it tolls for New Orleans. Meanwhile, around the country the tolls grow fainter and fainter.”
On my second trip in late April, some friends I recruited joined me in gutting homes for two days and working with Habitat for two days at the Musician’s Village. On Thursday we were surprised by a visit from President Bush, and on Friday by the Dave Matthews Band, in town for Jazz Fest. Dave was very approachable and open to quick pics.
During the third gutting trip in November, a photo journalist from the Dallas News followed us around and created a two-minute photo essay on the Dallas News website for their Thanksgiving website feature about volunteering.
I’ve fallen in love with New Orleans. During my last visit there in early January to help launch Katrina Corps and orient our full-time person, Ray Thomas, Ray and I enjoyed an adult beverage in the French Quarter one night while watching a traditional New Orleans jazz combo. In the middle of one of their sets I turned to him while pointing to the combo and said, “That is why I’m here. We have to save that. It is part of our culture.”
As to the task at hand, this week’s most important objectives are to make the website work better for those interested in volunteering, and secure blocks of hotel rooms at least for the first week of Spring Break.
This blog is also meant to help us be more transparent to you. We’ll tell you as much as we know or think we know at any given time, recognizing that we are scrambling, only launching this dream in late December.
Join us, or minimally support us. We don’t have a sugar daddy.
“Impossible is Nothing”
Keith