(From the Janesville Messenger, 7-20-08)
In the spring of 2006, nine months after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, I went with a group of other volunteers from our church to do clean-up work in Chalmette, Louisiana.
Chalmette is in St. Bernard Parish, a county that was almost completely wiped out by Katrina.
Out of 27,000 homes located in the parish, all but two were declared uninhabitable after the hurricane and flood. Though New Orleans’ poor Lower Ninth Ward got most of the media attention, St. Bernard Parish was as annihilated as any place.
At the time I was in Chalmette, I was amazed that even though it was nine months after the storm, it looked like it might have happened the week before. Debris was everywhere. Abandoned houses sat open, their fronts spray-painted with red X’s that stood out like scarlet letters announcing the sins Mother Nature had committed. Lawns were dead. Entire neighborhoods were dead. The number of FEMA trailers were relatively few, as residents who had fled had not returned.
But we were there to do our part, and that we did. We worked hard all week, reducing several homes to empty shells, the first step in making the structures habitable again. We did our job, felt good about it, and returned to the safety and comfort of our homes in Wisconsin.
Although the experience had a profound effect on me, some of those thoughts and lessons inevitably start to fade with time. And so I had not given a lot of thought to Chalmette until a recent newspaper article found its way into my hands.
It is now almost three years after Katrina, yet some of the photos accompanying the article looked no different than what I had witnessed 26 months ago. My heart sank. Though there has been progress since I was there, Chalmette has not returned to any type of normalcy.
Some people have moved back, but the parish still has less than half of its pre-storm population. Many abandoned houses with red X’s still stand. Empty, boarded-up strip malls still dot the landscape. Broken streets remain. In some cases, concrete slabs where houses once stood are the nicest part of the landscape.
The residents are poorer, the parish government is cash-strapped, and crime has gotten worse. While there are pockets of relatively normal life in the parish, much of the area is far from healed.
In retrospect, I don’t know why I thought it should be any different. I saw with my own eyes how bad things were, how far they would have to rebound. What kind of Pollyanna would think that one week of volunteering would magically result in the dramatic rebirth of an entire county?
It speaks to the magnitude of the destruction that even after thousands and thousands of volunteers have poured into Chalmette to help, the area is still a mess. Frankly, it boggles the mind.
After digesting all of this, I began to think about the specific houses my group worked on. Are they finished? Are they now inhabited? Had 80-year-old Benny moved back in to his house, or had he followed his family out of town? Have Cody and his mom been able to leave their trailer? What happened to Tom, the 76-year-old bicyclist shopping for salvageable items in the debris?
It was suggested to me that Samaritan’s Purse, the organization through which we volunteered, could tell me the status of the homes that our group worked on. I nearly made that call to find out. But then I thought, no, that’s selfish. It’s not about me or my group or a self-serving detective mission to verify that what we did made a difference. It’s about the people in St. Bernard Parish, and their continuing struggle.
While I am glad that I made the trip to help, reading about the current state of the area makes me feel like I could have and should have done more. It’s like the difference between having eggs or sausage for breakfast: the chicken is involved, but the pig is committed.
In the case of Chalmette, I was the chicken. But one thing is certain. Whether it’s Chalmette or some other situation, it’s time for me – and maybe for all of us - to be the pig.
No comments:
Post a Comment