An Inside Perspective: Our Trip to New Orleans

This past December, College Excel students and coaches embarked on a weeklong service-learning trip into the heart of New Orleans. The purpose of this trip was to contribute to the re-building efforts in response to the Hurricane Katrina destruction.

We thought the best way to learn about this adventure was from the words of one of the coaches on the trip. Here are some of the journal entries written during the course of the week. Click here to see pictures from the trip.

Journal Entries

Sunday, December 10, 2006

It is 3 a.m. and the students are awake, yet giddy and delirious. At 3:45 a.m. I realize that the cab is late - I had re-confirmed our reservation the day before. I call again and am dumfounded to hear that our names are not even on the reservation board. Someone has erased our call in order to snag the lucrative fare of getting a large group to the airport. Of course, the trip cannot begin without chaos - they send two cabs immediately and we make our plane by mere minutes.

We stumble through the airports zombesque-like but finally make it to New Orleans at sunset, 5:30 p.m. The volunteer coordinator is greets us at the airport with a boat-of-a-van and we jam our bags into the back, eager to reach our destination. Our "classic Victorian house" is shot-gun housing, called such because all of the rooms are in a row, with no hallway; you have to walk through every room in order to get to the next. We choose our bunks - old military beds with the numbers still spray-painted on the side and mattresses that are older than most of us. The humidity is thick and dampness lingers on the bedding.

Monday, December 11, 2006

After a short night's sleep we quickly awake and rush to the diner on the corner to inhale a cup of coffee and then we're at the demolition site. It smells rancid, like everything is rotting and the walls have been soaked in some kind of festering brine. We put on masks, the good ones with filters and suction but it's hard to breathe and we sound like a bunch of Darth Vaders. Using crowbars and hammers we smash away at this house - someone's house - chipping the plaster off the fireplace and ripping down moldy sheetrock. It is hot and humid - we're all covered with the dust in no time. Win, one of the volunteers, brings us lunch at 12:30 - burritos and fried bananas. We continue into the afternoon and have created a massive pile of debris in front of the house, complete with antique bathtub and lots of cockroaches. There are five other volunteers working on the house - members of Pnola, the non-profit we're helping. Their attitude is inspiring but cynical - they tell us that without the volunteers, nothing would be getting done in New Orleans and that the situation with FEMA is a joke. People have lost their homes and histories, everything, and our government isn't helping.

A few of us go to grab a bite in the French quarter - we are surprised at the high priced menus and wonder if the only people who eat in that area are tourists. We return at about 10:00 pm and debrief the day.

Tuesday, December 12, 2006

It's pouring outside - the students are covered in mud, dripping wet, and mostly smiling. They've worked hard and are sore.

We go out for dinner with the rest of the volunteers and our students, walking around a good part of New Orleans. The fog is thick - we can't see a block in front of us. We return to the house at 9:45 p.m. We need to pick up a student and leave for the airport, sloshing though pea-soup fog so thick that we cannot read the road signs. We miss our airport exit and have to drive literally 20 miles to the next town before we can turn around. The highway slices the bayou, and the lanes run one way for miles without intersecting. Finally, we reach the airport at 11:00.

Wednesday, December 13, 2006

The students go to work emptying out a storage unit for a community garage sale to raise money for the Pnola. They return - it's been an interesting day for them. They are cleaning out storage units that were bought at an auction - people couldn't pay their bills or were displaced by the hurricane and lost everything. Some of them bring back photos or books - most of them have picked up some sort of treasure: stale cigars, a silver fish decoration, old movies, miscellaneous crap.

I have become very sick with a stomach bug and go to the ER for treatment. It is another eye opening and sad experience. We are not treated like people. I check in through the bullet-proof glass guarding the receptionist from all who enter. The triage nurse is militant and does not look at me during the intake. I realize that the hospital is completely overrun by homeless people and there aren't enough doctors or nurses. I get yelled at by a cop just for lying down. We hear stories of how the hospitals have been robbed repeatedly by drug dealers - doctors and nurses forced with guns to their heads to give up all of the available medication. I finally leave the dirty waiting room knowing I won't be seen for another 15 + hours - I am feeling more helpless than I have ever been. My colleague asks the medic in front of his ambulance outside the hospital if he will check me out. He replies that we have to call 911 in order to be seen. There are simply no beds.

Thursday, December 14, 2006

I begin to recover and by the afternoon the students are tired after another day of work, but one of the student's families lives here and owns the second oldest restaurant in New Orleans, Tujaques (pronounced 'two-jacks') and they have sponsored a dinner for us all, which has been scheduled for over a month for that evening. This is a big deal and we're all feeling that if we miss out on this opportunity, we'll regret it and offend our hosts. All of us but two pull ourselves together and go to dinner. Clearly, this is the culinary highlight of the trip. It is fascinating to talk with this student's grandmother, who has lived in New Orleans for over forty years. She tells us of the political turpitude, over a century of crooked leadership. It is invaluable to hear her take on it all - the way that people were treated here after Katrina is incomprehensible, and everyone there knows it.

Friday, December 15, 2006

Today, we rest and try to recuperate enough to go on a tour of the city in the afternoon, given by Wally, the seventy-plus-year-old man who lives two houses down in the same place where he was born. This, for me, is the most powerful part of the trip. He escorts us through the city and shows us where the levee broke in the lower ninth ward, a neighborhood that was over 90 percent African American and below the poverty level before Katrina - now it barely exists. We stand in the middle of an open field which had been a neighborhood merely16 months prior, gazing at the occasional porch stoop which seems foreign without its house. We take pictures of a house, flattened by the 200-foot barge which had been pushed through the levee by the wind and waves, smashing it and all it protected. Wally drives us up and down the streets, their names denoted with spray-paint on telephone poles, and tells us the history of the people who had lived there for generations. Maybe the most poignant image of all, in my mind, is that of the slanted and broken rooftop which had once protected the people who wrote "help" in red paint on it from where they sat, for days, waiting for rescue with no food or water. It is still there, exactly as the storm left it. Underneath it - through, really - are the remnants of a family's life in their home: children's books and chorus programs sit at the foot of the bed, still made but rotting and covered with a layer of filth. Whoever had been here left everything behind as they sat rooftop and waited. They most likely spent the following (time) at the Superdome and were subsequently carted off to begin a new life in a new city, with nothing. We are taken aback and ask how this could have ever been allowed to happen. Wally tells us that the levee board had approved rebuilding it back in the '70s but that corruption quickly depleted the allocated funds, leaving those who depended on it to the whims of the waves.

The craziest part about this disaster zone is that there are still people living in it. Really. A few of the houses have clothes lines strung up - clearly, there are some families who had no where to go and are here, living in their decaying houses with piles of festering garbage all around them. Can this really be America?

After the ninth ward we drive across the city to see the marina, full of boats just piled on top of each other. They sit where the storm put them, rotting away and teeming with mold and critters. On the way, we pass an enormous skeleton of a building, once a Sam's Club. Whole parts of the city are vacant. There are parking lots filled with cars which sat under water for weeks, and even more cars just sitting in lonely driveways in front of empty houses, all abandoned. We have had the rare privilege of getting this tour from a true local, and hearing the narrative in his N'orlins drawl is unforgettable.

The day has been overwhelming for all of us, and seeing the degree of loss and true tragedy puts our lives perspective. We take a few hours and try to digest what we've seen. I am learning more than I had bargained for.

Saturday, December 16, 2006

We tote our stinky clothes to a laundromat and sit outside in the sun as they turn. It must be 75 degrees today. We drive through the garden district a little bit and explore the city. This is a unique collaboration of old Spanish and French architecture, beautiful and unlike anything I've ever seen. Some of the houses are three or four stories high with gated gardens and towers. The division between the very rich and the very poor is delineated beyond explanation. Regardless of class, most of the city boasts its water line - the dingy ring around the outside of the buildings is between four and eight feet high in most places. Many streets are spotted with piles of trash and debris all over the place. The little kids sprinting against each other in their back yards don't seem to notice it.

It's our last night in New Orleans and a few of us go out with the other volunteers to see a blues musician, Chaz, who plays the washboard at the Spotted Cat Café. He is awesome, truly the flavor which the city is known for, and we all feel lucky to have gotten a taste of what New Orleans used to be all about. The soul is still there, but saddened after having been drenched in the sewage of corruption. It had been a city where people stayed one generation after the next. Once the home of 600 thousand people, there are now less than a third of that, and many of them aren't the locals who built and cherished the city. There are some who have returned to their homes to try again, but many of the people currently with a New Orleans address are volunteers or contractors or immigrant workers - people there because of the storm. It is a completely jumbled demographic from what it always was.

Sunday, December 17, 2006

Packing and cleaning - we aim to leave the house much cleaner than when we arrived. We say goodbye to the other volunteers and board the boat-van for the last time, just in time to dive right into heavy traffic heading our way from the Saint's game. I drive like mad to get to the airport and we make our flight. Will sits next to a fascinating woman who knows the ins and outs of Louisiana politics and fills us in on the history of the Creoles and Cajuns and all the chaos in between. She is the period at the end of our long sentence, tying it all up for us. We're fortunate to get her insight - she explains that New Orleans is an anomaly even in crooked Louisiana. We've got a layover in Colorado and then to Portland for a night in the airport. We're all so tired, yet humbled by our experience that there is barely any whining as we find our spots on the carpet and prop our heads on backpacks.

Monday, December 18, 2006

Then back to Redmond and home. The flight into the Cascades is so beautiful - I am so glad to be back in Oregon. I feel very lucky and a little guilty as I walk into the house I rent, clean and new and nice. All I know is that I have yet to realize the magnitude of what I've just experienced.

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