Day Seventeen: Saturday, January 21
We've got guts. Or, at least today, we had gutting. And we got to start our day with brand new safety equipment, including the best form of N-95 filter masks and our favorite gloves with rubber-coated palms. Our friends at Galeton Gloves (www.galeton.com) made special efforts to ship them to us overnight at a reduced rate so that we would not have to resort to the cheaper models of masks and gloves that we had stockpiled "just in case." We've been throwing away gloves a lot faster than we probably should; they are just so nasty at the end of the day that it seems reasonable to let them go. Thanks to the kind folks at Galeton, though (Donna specifically), we had all new stuff for today.
We got up early so that we could meet our first "client" at 9:00 a.m. Our breakfast routine was changed a bit by the arrival of a California TV crew from Channel 5 in San Francisco. Sydnie Kohara and her camera operator Zack came to check out our camp as part of an in-depth series on the aftermath of Katrina. We went about our business and hurried off just a little bit late to get to our first gutting gig. The client was Pastor Robert Davis of the Greater Bethlehem Baptist Church, located in the shadow of the Superdome. We drive by the Superdome almost every day. At first, it carried great symbolic weight as an icon of the storm and its aftermath; now it is more of a landmark as we try to get our bearings on the highway ("Have we passed the Superdome yet?" "No, go toward it. That's where we're headed." To Leo: "See the Superdome up there? Head that way.") Despite our familiarity with the dome, we rarely approach it. Today, we came close.
Even though the dome was on high enough ground to be an evacuation center, the area around it flooded. Robert's church was no exception. Because his parishioners are spread far and wide, though, he couldn't imagine how he would tackle the problem. Then he heard about us from Don and his wife Troylyn (they are Rosie's neighbors; we helped them finish gutting their house on our first Saturday here). Troylyn told them that we not only had helped them to empty their house more quickly than they might ever have managed to do so, but also we helped them to honor the loss of their puppy. Robert and his wife Deborah said that they wanted a crew that would go so far as to hold a puppy funeral.
The church had a ring of thick mold from the choir loft on down. The pews were spotted and speckled, as were the Bibles that were stored within them. We just started at the back, and turned the place into one big open room. It was no big deal to pull up the carpet, and even to remove the paneling from the entire sanctuary. There were some floor tiles underneath the carpet, and when we began to address those, we had our first encounter with a real cockroach infestation; many cockroaches (smaller than usual around here, thankfully) had taken up residence under the linoleum tiles, so that as we peeled a tile up, we were often stomping down on a big fat roach immediately. Today was another country music day, which made for a fine soundtrack. We would yank a tile and stomp a bug, and things fell into such a smooth cadence that we could easily start a new line dance fad.
The kitchen of the church was equipped to serve meals for the church members as well as to serve as a soup kitchen in this blighted neighborhood. Thus, there were multiple appliances back there, in a drop down room past a narrow flight of stairs. As our crew worked to remove those pieces, we encountered some of the worst fridge smells of all time -- enough to send the entire appliance team running out the door with a case of dry heaves. (Actually, we later decided that the humidity was SO high today that even "dry heaves" were impossible; our heaves were kind of "moist" or "damp" ones.)
Robert doesn't know when his church will reopen. He doesn't know when or whether his parishioners will return. But he is sure that there is a need for the church to reestablish itself, if for no other reason than to feed the needy people who are returning to the neighborhood. He now has to learn about mold abatement in the frame of the building, then reconstruction strategies. We know we helped a lot, but we also know that enormous amounts of work still lie ahead.
We walked to our next destination: the home of Evelyn Williams, whose daughter Shelita we met in the street outside Rosie's home two weeks ago. She asked us to try to work her mother's house into our schedule, and once we knew that we would be in that area anyway, we were happy to do so. Neither Shelita nor Evelyn could meet us, so we just went on in the house and cleared it out. We called Shelita in Baton Rouge once we arrived, and got some instructions over the phone about what to look for in the debris. Evelyn had many beautiful pieces of furniture, and many collectibles, including glassware and some china from her grandmother. Almost everything was ruined. To make matters worse than they might have been, her kitchen faucet was running constantly, and probably had been doing so for four months. The drain was not able to accommodate the flow, so everything around that area was even more soaked than other places we have been. We found a key for the water main, so we turned it off after all of these months.
Evelyn had hoped to save her bed, but it crumbled in our hands. She had hoped to save a couple of antique pieces, but they were warped and rotting. Her china, on the other hand, was high enough up in the cabinet that it weathered the storm better than everything else. We gathered it up and placed it on the mantelpiece, meaning that Evelyn will eventually return to find something remaining of her long-time home.
We learned at Evelyn's house that we are a great wrecking crew, but that no one should ever hire us as a moving crew. If something doesn't fit through a door, we don't strategize; we just break it. Every one of us can karate-kick the leg off of a dining room table or snap the handles off of a refrigerator (without opening the door) as it is passing through a doorway. Of course, most of them were soaked in water for weeks on end, so these might not count as great accomplishments.
After finishing Evelyn's house, we then hurried over to Leroy Johnson's house, back in the Upper Ninth Ward. Leroy is a friend of our friend Will, whose houses we gutted last week. He and a relative, Dominique, had already gotten started, and when we arrived, we thought: "Oh good, he's already got a lot of it done." Not quite true. There were still loads and loads of debris to remove. Will happened by right while we were there and he saw us getting ready for our pasta salad lunch. He thought that pasta salad was not good enough, so he talked Leroy into running out and buying us fried chicken. We tried to talk both of them out of the chicken run, but -admittedly - we didn't try very hard. We worked on Leroy's house until we realized we were about to run out of daylight. We knew that Jack Watson was waiting for us over on Desire St., so we hurried over there.
Jack saw us coming down the street (we walked) and says that he immediately thought: "The angels are coming!" When the first wave of workers arrived, he burst into tears. By the time Shawny arrived, he was a sobbing wreck. He talked about the fact that his friends were so overwhelmed by their own houses that they couldn't figure out how to get organized and help each other dig out. He had done quite a bit of his own double house by himself, but there was still a lot of work to do. When we arrived, it looked like nothing to us. Some big piles of debris, some big appliances, carpet and other flooring to remove, and that was it.
With the exception of the refrigerator, it was a painless job. (The fridge burst open as it flew down the ramp, releasing the usual foul smell. The TV crew had rejoined us by then, and they were thoroughly grossed out. We offered them Tiger Balm to put inside their masks to fight the smell, but they elected to cut a wide arc around the carcass of the fridge instead.) In less than an hour, we were done. Jack had been struggling with the burdens of the flood for months, and in forty minutes or so, an entire phase of the process was over.
We asked Jack if the state or local government had been useful to him; he talked about the insurance company instead. He had been haggling over a settlement for almost five months; instead of any form of payment, though, all he had received so far was a bill for his next premium. He was stunned. We felt for him. And we hugged him, thanked him, cleaned our tools, and headed for the Hippie Camp. Jack stayed at the house, and continued to mess around with whatever was left to do. We, on the other hand, got to laugh, share a meal, taste hushpuppies for the first time, and try not to smell our own dirty clothes as we ate. We made popcorn when we got home, and went to sleep early. Strangely, this counts as a rather pleasant day.
Tomorrow: More houses!
The church and its moldy pews before we cleared it.
The general atmosphere in the church was pretty bleak; this picture captures pretty well the conditions under which we work. Though this might look like we are stomping cockroaches, we have not yet discovered that they are living under the carpet.
Feke carefully carried the U.S. flag out of the church so that it wouldn't touch the ground.
The church after.
Part of the group walks from the church to Evelyn's house to save themselves from wrapping in plastic to get on the bus.
Jed, David, Alli, and Shawny hitch a ride in the back of the truck to the next house in the Ninth Ward.
When we take a break, we plop all over the abandoned neighborhoods where we work. Rarely are there neighbors around.
Dominique in Leroy Johnson's kitchen. When we entered Leroy's house, we actually thought it didn't look too bad. When we looked at this picture later, though, we realized that it was a huge job after all.
Art enjoys the lunch provided to us by Leroy Johnson and his relative, Dominique.
Chris manages one of the wheelbarrows down the ramp at Leroy's house. It was so misty and humid that we had to manage the mud at the doorway to keep from slipping and falling.
Shawny gets interviewed by Sydnie Kohara of Channel 5 News in San Francisco.
Channel 5 with Jack: Channel 5 reporter Sydnie Kohara interviews Jack Watson, whose house we cleared at the end of the day on Saturday.
The most common type of house we've seen is called a "shotgun house." Each room lines up behind the others (you could shoot a shotgun through and hit every room). This is Jack's shotgun house, the last one we did on Saturday.
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