Getting Things Done?

Camp Hope
New Orleans, LA

(A brief note before I get into weighty matters. Brett Favre retired the other day, ending a long and brilliant career. He owns just about every passing record in the books, but it is not simply his statistics that make him among the greatest to ever play football. The essence of Brett Favre's brilliance was in his sheer love for the game, his unparalleled toughness, and his ability to improvise. I remember a game in which he took a brutal sack that sent him to the sidelines. The announcers guessed that he would be out for the rest of the game. Two plays later, on fourth-and-fifteen, Favre went back into the game while the team doctor had his back turned. He waved the backup quarterback off, took the snap...and proceeded to throw a 35-yard touchdown pass. Farewell Brett, you will be missed.)

Now for the serious. Yesterday afternoon, after three days in the van, we arrived in New Orleans. We drove through the city on our way to Camp Hope (the volunteer camp where we are staying) and at first, it appears that the city was on its way to recovery. Downtown was certainly thriving, the Superdome showed none of the trauma that it and the people inside had endured, and the billboards and people were out in full force.

Then we headed out of the city. We soon found ourselves in the Upper Ninth Ward, where floodwaters from Hurricane Katrina had reached almost five feet. I was really surprised by how many houses showed no signs of recovery.

We crossed the bridge into the Lower Ninth Ward. This was the neighborhood that sat right next to the levees, and it was absolutely devastated when they failed. A storm surge of more than 18 feet wiped away houses, vehicles, and everything else in its way. As we drove through the Lower Ninth, our van was absolutely silent as we took in the destruction. There are blocks and blocks of the area that are just empty, nothing but overgrown lots where houses used to stand. Those houses that remain are, if possible, even more eerie; they are run-down, boarded up and abandoned, even after two and a half years. Some have massive piles of debris out front, from a recovery effort that just stopped. What really got me, however, was the paint markings. During the initial rescue and recovery effort after the storm, firefighters and other rescue workers used spray paint to mark houses as occupied, abandoned, uninhabitable, structurally dangerous, containing pets, or containing the bodies of humans and animals. In many of the lower-class neighborhoods like the Upper and Lower Ninth, those paint markings still remain on the houses as a silent reminder of the vast destruction of property and life that took place.

Listen to what you will; New Orleans has a long way to go before it recovers. In a rare moment of naiveté, I thought that between Americorps, Habitat for Humanity, and the other volunteer non-profits down here, the cleanup and rebuilding would take no more than a couple years. That was before I arrived. There is no way that some of these neighborhoods are going to recover anytime sooner than ten years.

If anybody wants to help out down here, let me know.