The FEMA trucks were gone. The reporters were gone. With a few exceptions, even the residents were gone. But in the Ninth Ward of New Orleans, over 70 Wesleyan students joined thousands of others to begin to repair the community most devastated by Hurricane Katrina last September.
The students worked as part of Common Ground, a grassroots organization founded after the hurricane to respond specifically to the needs of New Orleans. Common Ground is headquartered in the Upper Ninth Ward and focuses on rebuilding the communities of the Ninth Ward, from repairing damaged homes to reopening schools and providing health care to returning residents.
Returning to Wesleyan from New Orleans, some students have felt outrage. Some have felt frustration. Some have pledged to return, and others have redirected their immediate plans to include similar volunteer work. All share the experience of visiting a place that much of America has forgotten, and many feel compelled to share their stories and remind people that, seven months later, Katrina is not over.
Organization for the Common Ground trip began with Hunter King ’08, a New Orleans native familiar with the relief efforts already underway.
“I was excited about the idea because it’s my home,” said King, whose family has returned to live in uptown New Orleans. “I knew that they’d been doing a lot of work since the hurricane. They’re pretty well-known around the area.”
King and others helped organize the trip as part of the Wesleyan Disaster Relief Coalition, which had been working on hurricane relief efforts throughout the school year. For many participants, however, the spring break trip was their first chance to help out.
“I had originally planned to stay to study for exams,” said Andrea Silenzi ’07, who drove to Louisiana in the second week with Evan Simko-Bednarski ’07. “It’s hard to say ‘No, I’m going to stay here and not experience something new.’ I almost felt a historical obligation to see what happened.”
For Acacia Stevens ’07, who had worked with the Disaster Relief Coalition, her desire to help was spurred by the television images of flood survivors chanting for help in the Superdome.
“It was extraordinary to me that you could have people in America that stranded,” Stevens said. “The slowness of the response was so mind boggling to me that I felt it was really important to do something. Those people needed to know that other people cared about them.”
As students prepared to leave for New Orleans, a full seven months after the hurricane hit, news coverage of the area had recently been focused on the Mardi Gras parades and other indications of the city’s survival. The truth, as the volunteers would soon see for themselves, was that some parts of the city looked exactly as they had in September—desolate, flattened, and abandoned.
“I felt like it was important because it had fallen off the public radar screen and I knew that things weren’t O.K. yet,” said Brian Brotman ’07. “I felt like I couldn’t really let what had happened fade from my own memory.”
Most volunteers arrived in New Orleans with only media images and other secondhand impressions to prepare them for what the city would look like. Though the students may have been better informed on the state of New Orleans than most Americans, some still weren’t prepared for what they found in the Ninth Ward.
“I don’t think I expected the damage that I saw to be so disastrous,” said Sarah Faeth ’07. “I didn’t expect there to be so little presence of people and police and government help in the area that we were in. I didn’t expect it to be so desolate.”
Though the students spent most of their time working in the Ninth Ward, trips to other parts of the city revealed a different kind of lasting damage.
“As you move farther away from the airport you start to see this water line on everything,” Stevens said. “Brick buildings, structures that were more sound, they all had this mark. It’s interesting how the city is still marked by that flood.”
In the Lower Ninth Ward, where the levees burst and surges of water flattened houses, some entire blocks remain nothing but rubble. Cars remain overturned in the streets, trees uprooted and foundations laid bare. Simko-Bednarski described a fire hydrant left spouting since the hurricane; though much of the Ninth Ward still lacks running water, no one has come to shut off the hydrant.
“I was appalled at how certain areas pretty much hadn’t been touched for seven months,” Simko-Bednarski said. “There were houses on top of houses, houses on top of cars, cars on top of houses.”
At night, with the Ninth Ward still operating under a midnight curfew and most areas lacking electricity, the neighborhood was pitch black and silent. Though the area is largely abandoned, the residents returning to their homes are facing more difficulties than sorting through belongings from the flood.
“In the French Quarter they’re planting flowers,” Silenzi said. “In the Ninth Ward people are sleeping in sleeping bags in contaminated houses.”
“These people coming in are incredibly brave because there’s no support for them,” King said.
With other college students spending their spring breaks in New Orleans for the nightlife, trips to the largely-intact French Quarter and Bourbon Street provided sharp contrast for the Wesleyan volunteers.
“You’re used to being surrounded by people who are specifically there with the intent of helping the relief effort,” said Dana Raviv ’06. “You realize that to some extent you are a tourist yourself. I’ve been wanting to go New Orleans for years to see the jazz scene, but I didn’t know how appropriate it was to be partying.”
“I had a really difficult time just buying a toothbrush in the more commercial area rather than in the Lower Ninth Ward,” Silenzi said.
Volunteer work with Common Ground can include providing First Aid to other workers, handing out supplies like water to returning residents, cleaning the Common Ground headquarters, or physically gutting houses. Each job required varying levels of physical labor and sweat, but every volunteer met Ninth Ward residents and learned of the community that had existed before the flood.
“I talked to residents pretty much every day,” Brotman said. “There were a lot of residents […] who have come to work with Common Ground because they’ve lost everything and they want to be part of rebuilding their community.”
The resident of the house Stevens was gutting took her on a tour of the Lower Ninth. The resident pointed out the remains of the house where she was born and other family members’ homes, all in the same neighborhood, all nothing but rubble.
“Families lived really close to each other,” Stevens said. “Now they’re all displaced and they’re all in places far apart from each other. One of the most devastating things about it is that families were totally separated.”
Simko-Bednarski described working on a house and speaking to neighbors who didn’t know the whereabouts of the homeowner
“What’s really been decimated here is the community,” he said. “Even if your house wasn’t touched, there’s nobody living around you for five blocks. You can walk down the streets and there’s nobody.”
The various Common Ground work crews came together for one day to attempt to re-enter the Martin Luther King, Jr. Elementary School, which the City had not approved for gutting. Common Ground and community members organized an act of civil disobedience on March 16, in which volunteers illegally entered the school and began to repair it. Some volunteers, including Wesleyan students, were prepared to be arrested if police took action against them.
“I think education was a huge reason why things were before the storm as bad as they were in that area,” said King, who entered the school. “I think that’s one of the things that they should focus on in rebuilding the area. Anything that I could do to make education better I thought was worth it.”
The police did not impede the effort and all of the volunteers entered safely; a week later the city approved the school for renovation.
“Even though there were 500+ people with Common Ground helping out, it was still the community that was guiding this effort,” Raviv said. “It was for the community and guided by them.”
Even the most mainstream coverage of Hurricane Katrina could not ignore the racial divides brought to the surface by the storm. With most Ninth Ward residents being black, and the history of racism in New Orleans, Common Ground makes an effort to include anti-racism workshops as part of its volunteer training. With much of the Wesleyan group consisting of white volunteers, issues of race could not be ignored.
“What it meant to me to be a college spring breaker taking time off from my private institution in order to ‘help’ people, that was something I had to think about,” Raviv said. “You see how you yourself are implicated in [issues of racism].”
Though New Orleans was known as a severely segregated city before and after the storm, volunteers reported feeling welcomed by the primarily-black Ninth Ward residents.
“I was worried that the residents would be less welcoming than they were,” Silenzi said. “They were so appreciative to have us there.”
“Help is help down there,” King said.
Common Ground founder Malik Rahim, a former Black Panther, has ensured that volunteers with the organization are forced to acknowledge the racial issues involved in their work.
“What I personally got from Common Ground and that part of Common Ground’s mission to talk about the racial problems was very important to me,” Raviv said. “I don’t think I would have wanted to be with a group that had any other focus.”
For Ninth Ward residents, too, race played a large role in their interpretation of the federal government’s failures in immediate relief efforts.
“When I got there what struck me was how obviously racist it was,” Faeth said. “Everyone who I talked to attributed their situation to the fact that the government was racist. Before I went there I had assumed. Going there it was even more glaringly obvious.”
Faeth, who worked in the Common Ground distribution center, said she found herself stepping out of some conversations with black residents because of her race.
“I was conscious of myself as a white person, and I had instances where I found myself stepping back and listening,” she said.
“I felt like I was in a really weird position a lot of the time,” Stevens said. “I am black but I’ve never lived in a poor neighborhood. There were different things that I could identify with and other things that were new to me. Sometimes I had this really weird feeling of displacement. Where am I in this situation?”
Common Ground volunteers were mostly housed in the St. Mary’s of the Angels School in the Ninth Ward, where some 200 people were rescued from the rooftop during the flood. In a classroom on the top floor remains a note from the survivors, written on Sept. 2:
“…we had to bring over 200 people here with no help from any Coast Guard boats. People died and are still in there [sic] house, we had to leave them. We asked the C.G. [Coast Guard] for help and got NONE… THEY LEFT US Here To Die.”
Working in the distribution center, Faeth said she saw over 500 people each day, many of whom shared their flood survival stories with her. She told of one family who sought refuge in the second story of their house for days, as they watched their neighbors drown in the street. When they were rescued, their boat passed bloated bodies of people they knew.
“[The father of the family] didn’t seem angry at the government or what had happened, he was just grateful that he was alive,” Faeth said. “I think that was probably the most hopeful person I met.”
Leaving New Orleans after a week’s work was, for some students, like culture shock all over again.
“Even when the plane was pulling into the airport in New York, it was just weird to see so many buildings with roofs,” Brotman said. “When someone who wasn’t there asks how it was, it’s a difficult question to answer. There are so many things that can’t be explained verbally.”
When Stevens was working in New Orleans she said she focused on not becoming too wrapped up in the gravity of what she saw, and took positivity where she could find it.
“I think that it’s also very important to approach the storm the way the people there are approaching the storm,” Stevens said. “What’s amazing to me is they’re still finding ways to enjoy life.”
Having met and connected with Ninth Ward homeowners and other New Orleans residents, Stevens said, leaving the city was difficult.
“When the plane took off I started to cry,” she said. “Now there are human faces on destruction. I felt more connected to it once I got to know people who were being affected by it.”
Thrust back into the Wesleyan world of term papers and weekend parties, some students have found themselves disconnected or apathetic.
“I’m failing to see the point in handing in my logic homework,” Simko-Bednarski said. “To come back here and resume what’s supposed to be my ‘normal’ life is kind of like being a tourist in the real world.”
Even for lefty Wesleyan students already frustrated with the government’s response to Katrina, some political views have been changed and beliefs shattered.
“My faith in the New York Times has been killed,” Silenzi said. “I’m not seeing news about this area.”
A number of Ninth Ward residents, according to Brotman and others, believe that the government intentionally bombed the levees in order to save the French Quarter and other affluent areas from flooding.
“Whether or not the government actually blew up the levee intentionally is a lot less relevant than the fact that the way the government treated the people in the Ninth Ward was such that they could reach that conclusion,” Brotman said. “They were so neglected and abused that, in their frame of possibility, that the government would have intentionally tried to kill them.”
“The tragedy is old news,” said King, who does not plan to re-elect Mayor Ray Nagin in the New Orleans mayoral elections taking place later this month. “Now a lot of it is just plain old anger. I’m angry at the lack of change that’s going on. Angrier than before.”
Simko-Bednarski, Faeth, Silenzi and others plan to return to New Orleans as early as this summer to continue working with Common Ground.
“I was actually doing something that was making people feel better,” Faeth said. “That’s why I would go back. I know that I’m being helpful. I know that I’m changing something for the better.”
Raviv said that, while her experience in New Orleans has changed her ideas for post-graduation plans, she may not return to work there.
“I’m not sure if I would go back to New Orleans, because I’m not sure if that’s where my efforts are best guided,” Raviv said. “What’s been most on my mind is greater than New Orleans. Thinking about New Orleans, but thinking more about some of the problems that it made more apparent to me. I’ll take New Orleans with me.”
Silenzi and Simko-Bednarski plan to produce a radio documentary for WESU about their experiences in New Orleans, and Silenzi hopes to use her radio experience to return to New Orleans and do more work.
“I’m feeling a really strong need to be doing things that I didn’t know I was capable of,” Silenzi said. “For a week I did the greatest good I could have possibly done with my hands.”
In the remaining semester at Wesleyan, however, many students see it as their responsibility to share their experiences and knowledge with others who, like much of America, have managed to forget Katrina.
“It’s so important for everyone who is able to share this information and to tell the story of New Orleans to do it,” Brotman said. “This has to get out.”
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