A Message From New Orleans

Greetings from New Orleans where they are experiencing the coldest January weather in more than twelve years. I am down here with a group of Wheelock College students engaged in a service learning project. Twenty-five young women from Wheelock traveled from Boston to New Orleans to spend a week helping to rebuild homes devastated in Hurricane Katrina four years ago. The President of Wheelock has made a ten-year commitment, on the part of the school, to help in the rebuilding of New Orleans. This week’s trip is the seventh trip sponsored by the College.

Now you may be asking yourself, New Orleans, Hurricane Katrina? That was years ago, hasn't that been taken care of? So many of the young people on this trip have gotten that very same reaction. So the simple answer to that question is that not very much has been done in the past four years to rebuild this City devastated by Katrina. Yes there is a lot of rebuilding going on but barely enough to make a dent in the devastation that resulted.

We are working on four houses in St. Bernard and Orleans Parishes, under the guidance of the St. Bernard Project. This organization is dedicated to helping to rebuild St Bernard parish, home to 67,000 people before Katrina left its mark. As a result of the Hurricane all 27,000 homes in the Parish were rendered uninhabitable, when the entire Parish was inundated with up to twenty feet of water for four weeks. Since Katrina, only one-third of the residents have returned, most of whom are living in FEMA trailers or in their attics that were above the high water level.

What were once vibrant communities with schools, stores, playgrounds and modest homes, are now vast tracts of empty land, abandoned or empty homes, gutted shells interspersed with renovated or newly built homes. Driving through these communities, one sees block after block of seemingly vacant lots. However, upon closer inspection you begin to notice that these are not vacant lots, they still contain the remnants of thousands of homes. Slabs of concrete, driveways, stoops, patios – all reveal the sad fact that these were once places where people lived, laughed, loved and raised their families. Now they resemble ghost towns that are ever so slowly being reclaimed.

Progress is slow but steady. Utilizing all volunteer labor, the St. Bernard Project is able to renovate a home and make it habitable for a mere $15,000. Utilizing thousands of volunteers from all over the country, they have completed the renovation of 257 homes. An incredible feat, but a mere drop in the bucket compared to the enormity of the devastation. This volunteer labor is necessary because most residents cannot afford to rebuild their homes because they did not have flood insurance. A couple of years before Katrina, the federal government inspected the levees and decided that they were sufficient o protect this area from flooding and rezoned the Parish out of the flood zone. No longer in a flood zone, it was reasonable to drop flood insurance and save a significant amount of money each year. Having made the decision to redraw the flood zone, the federal government takes no responsibility to help these people rebuild their homes and their lives.

Next door in the Lower Ninth Ward, where we watched people on TV huddling on their roofs waiting to be rescued, the rebuilding is as slow as the rescue efforts were four years ago. Brad Pitt, through his Make It Right Foundation, has been utilizing international teams of architects to design new homes that are green and designed to withstand flooding. Many of these homes are ultramodern and somewhat phantasmagorical, but they do make a statement. However, even with his celebrity and access to resources, the Make It Right Foundation, has a goal of building only 150 new homes.

It is shameful that in the Untied States, we cannot even provide the funds needed to rebuild a city after a natural disaster. A small portion of the annual budgets to wage the wasteful wars in Iraq and Afghanistan could be used to fund the rebuilding of New Orleans. With a little foresight, we could have rebuilt New Orleans as the first “green city” in the United States. Instead as time goes on and the government amasses large tracts of land that once supported thousands of modest homes, this land will be turned over to developers to build homes that do not serve the needs of the residents that lived here prior to Katrina.

More to come from New Orleans in the next few days. There is more to the story than the devastation of homes, the real impact is in the devastation of communities and the impact on families. And the real story is how the United States has turned its back on its fellow citizens in need. Our brief collective memories must be expanded to stay with a problem until it is finished. Why hasn’t President Obama made the same commitment to the people of New Orleans that the has made to the people of Afghanistan – t stay with the job until it is completed successfully?