Day Eleven: Sunday, January 15
Sit back, prepare to stay for awhile, and get ready for some stories. Sunday was a big, big day. We got to start the day with King cakes provided by Courtney's local cousins. We had tasted them on Kings' Day (January 6), which is a local celebration of the legendary arrival of the three kings after Jesus' birth. They are sweet and wonderful coffeecakes, and each one has a small baby Jesus cooked inside. We got to sleep a little bit late, eat without cooking, and still head off to work earlier than usual.
Our first job for the day was to help Donald Feliciana, whose home is in the lower Ninth Ward. To get to Donald's house, we had to cross the Industrial Canal, the site of one of the major levee breaks. The images at the bottom of that drawbridge are among the worst in the city: there is a barge that broke through the levee and came to rest on dry ground resting on top of part of the neighborhood, there are flattened houses that can only be addressed with a bulldozer, and there are houses that are pushed together, corner to corner, edging into the street. Rooftops have holes in them, probably because people broke through and waited there to be airlifted out. The water was so high in this neighborhood that rescue boats passed over the rooftops in many areas to try to reach the roofs that actually still stood higher than the flood.
Donald's house was clearly one of the ones that had been totally submerged. When we walked in, our ability to be shocked re-emerged; because the house had been completely underwater, the general effect was as if a blender had been run in the house, and, as the water subsided, everything sank to the floor. Perhaps right away or perhaps later, the entire ceiling, along with all of the insulation for the house, landed on top of the pile, making it look like a lava field or like the soot and ash that might follow a major forest fire. Thus, our first job was to go in with shovels and rakes (yes, RAKES, INSIDE the house) to remove that crud layer that used to be the ceiling of Donald's home. After the rakes, we used shovels to remove wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow of debris.
Every single piece of furniture was rotted and ruined. Any one of us could have crushed a standing dresser still full of clothes with our bare hands; even when we tried not to do so, it happened anyway. Thus, we would walk into the bedroom, take hold of a bedpost, and just rip it away like it was made of paper. Same with every segment of every piece of furniture in the whole house: pull off the front of the dresser drawer, pull out the drawer if it would hold, wrap your hands around all sides of the decaying drawer, and run for the pile out front. We are learning quite a bit about how furniture is made, as we can clearly see each of the component parts of every piece we touch. We are learning about the differences between veneered furniture and solid wood, between solid wood and particle board (all of which has turned to sawdust in the houses that were flooded), and between solid and hollow-core doors. We can intuit how plywood is made, as we can pick it apart layer by layer. We now understand how little there really is to a kitchen cabinet. Aside from the furniture, we are also learning all about plumbing (mostly as we try to disassemble sinks in kitchens and bathrooms), and about how to turn off the main when taking apart a water heater connection. Though most utilities are disconnected, we are careful to behave as if they are not, so that we don't produce any new problems for the people/neighborhoods that we are trying to help.
When we got to the bottom of things at Donald's house, we found that almost every square inch of the place was carpeted. Though that, of course, meant that there was an awful stink in the house, it also meant that by getting under that carpet and removing it, we would actually get down to the subfloor and really leave the hollowed-out shell that Donald needs if he is going to salvage any portion of his house. Our fabulous team, as usual, figured out how to remove the debris-laden carpet so that we could minimize the mess that would be left when we were finished.
The future of Donald's house is uncertain, however. Residents were only allowed back in two weeks ago, and they are not yet permitted to move forward on rebuilding. The two primary rumors that are flying among the neighbors are: 1) Donald Trump wants to buy the entire Lower Ninth and develop it, and 2) the city intends to build a golf course on the area occupied by the Lower Ninth (we asked Donald if he thought they would let him golf there; he thought not). Donald (Feliciana, that is, not Trump) repeatedly said, "I think that they want to kick us out of here" and "I think that they want to take all of this from us." We asked him who "they" are, but he just said "the rich people."
As Donald watched his wife's motorized wheelchair being dragged out of the house and cast onto the pile, his eyes welled with tears. We asked if his wife was still living, and he said that she was. We asked if she had another wheelchair, and he said that she had a manual one, but not one like the one that we were throwing away. We asked if she had seen the house; he said that he had kept her from seeing it, afraid that the sight might actually kill her ("She loves this house so much... she really loves this house... I don't know how she could take seeing it this way... she already can't walk; she might not be able to move at all if she saw this...").
Our team moved quickly to empty the entire house. We have gotten VERY skilled at systematizing the job(s) and working in close collaboration to move things along as fast as possible. With only the occasional shout of "WATER!" (meaning that something big is full of water, and that a foul smell is coming), we pretty quietly and efficiently do the job. Donald and the two companions with him could not believe how different it was to look at the emptied-out house as compared to the one that we had entered. We agreed. Donald and his friends had bought us Cokes (without even knowing that those cans are among the most precious items that we can encounter at the moment), so we sat by the enormous pile and enjoyed them as some of the crew pressure-washed each piece of equipment that we had used, along with most of our boots. (This pressure-washing ritual marks the end of every job; we want to be sure to remove every hint of mold and bacteria that we can, so we are not transferring it into our vehicles or into different areas of the city).
We moved on to the next house, back in the Upper Ninth, owned by William Dezarra (one of Donald's friends who was with him). Will's house was a double on one of our favorite streets: Desire. It runs either parallel or perpendicular to many of our other favorite streets, including Piety and Abundance. Leroy Palmer from last weekend lives on Desire as well. When we arrived at Will's house, we were approached by a family that asked if they could join us in our work. They were from Chicago, and had come in to meet some fellow church members further up the coast to assist in relief work there; they decided to drive around the Ninth Ward and see if there was a way to learn the ropes. Whether fortunately or unfortunately for them, they immediately came across our bus. We gave them filter masks and advised them on their clothing; they had their own work gloves and we provided latex liners. We started into our system, and found that the house was cleared and the floors taken up in a matter of minutes. Things went so fast that Will asked us to take on another house, this one on Metropolitan near Abundance.
As we approached, a few of us were standing in the stairwell of the bus, trying to avoid wrapping ourselves in plastic to protect the seats. We were therefore all lined up along the front window, and as we moved down Metropolitan, we literally heard ourselves say, "Where ARE we?" Even though we had driven less than a mile, the houses there seemed particularly shattered, and Will's was no exception. It, too, had been completely submerged, and the items within it were swirled everywhere. We started to tackle it in our usual fashion, but because we were worried about the clearly-warped floors, many of us stayed outside and cleared roof shingles and other debris from the yard. As we began to set up a bucket brigade out of the bedroom, we heard a loud thump from the kitchen that turned out to be the sound of Emily falling through one of the floor boards, all the way to her hip. (She is okay, but she has a VERY impressive bruise as a souvenir.) We spread the word that everyone should get out, and we discussed among ourselves what to do next. Many wanted to finish the job, many wanted to abandon it, and we found ourselves really trying to understand which decision was the most noble one. We flip-flopped repeatedly about what to do, and then finally approached Will.
This was the first time that we had the responsibility of being the ones to tell the homeowner that the situation was hopeless. It was particularly difficult because Will is a construction worker, and he held a very sincere hope that he could personally salvage the house in which he had been living. Instead of supporting his sense of hope, we found ourselves convincing him to surrender. It was terrible. He was willing to accept our assessment, though, and we all stood in the frontyard and looked back at the house. Will declared his intention to start from scratch (now) and to build himself a dream home. We agreed that this was a great idea.
We gathered up the last of our MREs and sat in the driveway of a house two doors down from Will. We didn't have enough to go around, so we spent some time negotiating the distribution of our available meals. (We had intended to have lunch at the Hippie Camp, but we had stretched our work past the lunch hours there.) As we were discussing things, we lost track of Will and his friend Wardell (Donald's nephew); it turned out that they had made a run to the only local restaurant that had reopened to buy us all fried chicken. The chicken was coated in corn meal and other things and was really fresh and hot. We were embarrassed to learn that we were almost all incapable of identifying the various parts that were in the pan; we're Californians, after all. Even though we weren't sure what we were eating, we gathered around the big foil pan and talked and laughed with our hosts about what things they missed the most. When we finished, we headed off to the next house: Wardell's.
To get to Wardell's house, we drove into a section of town that we had driven past many times: the Seventh Ward. For lack of a better word, Wardell lives directly across from "the projects." We have eyed that area repeatedly, and wondered about the conditions of the neighborhood. At Wardell's house, we discovered that most of these homes no doubt have quite a bit of work to do. His house was perhaps the biggest one of the day, and it probably contained more possessions than any other. Further, when we opened what appeared to be a shed in the back of the house, it turned out that practically another whole house was back there too. (In California, this unit would be called a "mother-in-law"; this "mother-in-law" was more devoted to lifting weights than anything else). Both the house and the extra unit contained lots of soggy, ruined furniture, along with piles of magazines and other things that are actually quite difficult to peel off the floor. (Oddly, some of these paper items are among the toughest to deal with; they turn to bricks that adhere to the floor when they have been thoroughly soaked and then dried. Another surprisingly tough item is the common everyday appliance cord; an entire piece of furniture can be jerked out of our strongest teammates' hands if a cord gets caught in a doorway. The other strangely challenging obstacle is a loose spool of thread; several times we found that many of us were entangled in thread, but because it was hard to see, it was hard to remove).
In the back unit, there were solid walls with virtually no windows; because there is no electricity in that area at all, there was very little light. As we worked around the corners of the four rooms, we were surprised to learn that there were appliances and other large items in there (no refrigerator, thankfully). It was unclear how all of this furniture and everything else fit into this unit before the storm, but after, it was almost impossible to open the doors or make our way through the clutter of the rooms. We discovered that there was a bathroom in the center of the space, but it was so dark that we couldn't even tell what was in there. We came up with a practical solution: we knocked out the adjoining wall with our bare hands so that we could use outside light to see. As with many houses, the last stage of our process was removal of the kitchen sink. Chris went at the plumbing with his wrench, and - after shooting a stream of nasty water off the ceiling that ricocheted all over all of us - declared the fixtures to be "janky." He overcame the jankiness somehow, and we managed to finish the house (everything INCLUDING the kitchen sink).
We gathered for the ritual pressure-washing of the tools in the street at dusk. Donald, William, and Wardell were all there with us, having tracked us all day. As usual, our team was dancing in the streets (except for Alli, who was convinced that she had broken her hand while messing around after the job; she hadn't). We clicked pictures and fled the off-spray of the pressure-washer. Donald, Will, and Wardell joined in too. We expect that they will find a way to check this website to follow our progress. If they do, we say, "Hey, guys! Thanks for the cokes, the chicken, the laughs, the conversation, and the chance to work beside you. Lucky us!"
As we followed the guys back out to the highway, a groundswell went up in the bus: "Let's go to the Hippie Camp for dinner!" We decided that was a good idea, so we called the guys in the truck behind us and changed course. The Hippie Camp was in fine form. (By the way, we now know that the sponsoring agency is more properly known as "Emergency Communities" -- http://www.emergencycommunities.org/index.php.) We all went through the line and were enjoying our dinner (barbecued chicken and other stuff) when someone came up and asked us if we were in the charter bus that was parked out front. We said that we were, and they asked to meet our driver. We sent them to Leo. They then confronted Leo, asking him if he was driving tours of the disaster zone and then feeding his tourists free meals at their facility. Leo turned the conversation over to some of us, and mere minutes later, we were the best of friends with the head hippie himself, "Papa Hoot." He offered us food and supplies, along with a tour of the facility. The tour was taken over by another guy named Cory, who had built the 30-foot dome in which we eat at the camp. Cory told us that he was living in a tree house out in the woods, so we went with him to see it. It was remarkable. He had lashed limbs between three trees, and slung hammocks as high as 15 feet off the ground. We went up in small groups to experience the incredible view from the top. When we heard a loud crack at one point, though, we all came scrambling back down. (It turned out that the rope had slipped on one of the limbs, but the sound appeared to be something much more scary than that).
All in all, this was quite a day: from the Lower Ninth, to the Upper Ninth, to the projects, to a tree house at the Hippie Camp. Uh... wow.
Tomorrow should be easier, as we head back to Parkway Partners to help Mario with another community garden...
Donald's house was completely filled when we arrived to help. This room, the bedroom, was not the worst of them all. Note Donald's wife's motorized wheelchair. They will be hard-pressed to replace it.
Shawny and Marcia listen to Donald Feliciana's story about his experience with Hurricane Katrina. Like many New Orleanians who were around in 1965, Donald repeatedly referred to the storm as Betsy, the last storm that wiped out huge swaths of the city.
Fernando prepares to dump a load from the wheelbarrow . Dust in the air distorts the image.
The guys attempt to get the fridge and its tea out of Will's house. When a family from Chicago joined our team for work today, they asked us if we had any advice for them as they started their relief work. We said: "DON'T OPEN THE REFRIGERATOR!"
The famous "bucket brigade" method of debris removal.
This house was turned to the side after an intense hit from the collapsed levee. Try to locate the position of the doors.
Wardell, Will, a friend of theirs from the neighborhood, and Donald pose for the camera after their houses are cleared by our team.
Sal's wrist was dramatically swollen from a series of mosquito bites (he's allergic). Nursing student Elvia and her worthy assistant Kayla check on him in his Benadryl-induced state of zombification in the bus.
The floodwater carried this necklace from a nearby dresser to the chandelier. It is strangely bright compared to its sooty and moldy surroundings.
When we finish a house, we leave behind only mold-covered walls. The sight has become so familiar to us, that this picture actually looks like a room that is "clean."
We dumped this sign on the pile from a shed in the back of the house. Its "welcome" could be taken as an ironic invitation into the debris pile (many scavengers have arrived while we are clearing) or it can be seen as a "welcome" to a new phase for this house.
Stephanie clearing the floors with the system that she, Courtney, and Rachel developed today.
Shawny plays "mom" at the end of the day as we all clean up to head home. Our filter masks leave little black marks around the edges of our noses; we take care of wiping each other's faces when we finish.
We finished our fourth and final house of the day just as the sun was setting. Note that some of us are wrapped in plastic (having already pressure-washed and removed our boots) in preparation for our ride to the Hippie Camp.
Leo, our infamous bus driver, posing for a glamor shot. We love Leo.
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