In the Bike Shop

Here at St. Mary's of the Angels we have a cooperative bike shop where members of the community can get bikes. The bikes are generally old and rusty. Some survived the flood, others were donated from far-away cities. You don't have to pay money to get a bike, but you do have to earn it through a work exchange. There are four steps:

1) Patch an inner tube from our mountain of flats
2) Overhaul a wheel by taking it apart and repacking the hub with grease
3) Choose a bike frame and build up your own bike
4) Create an art project to help beautify the space

I spent Saturday afternoon in the bike shop with Cece, a twelve year-old girl from the Eighth Ward. She just returned to NOLA from Texas with her mom last month and needed a new bike. We started by patching tubes with two younger girls, but they got distracted and soon I was working one-on-one with Cece. As we first started to disassemble the wheel she was a bit unsure of herself, holding the wrench awkwardly and twisting the wrong way. But once she picked a Huffy off the rack and realized she could ride it home that day, she was a woman on fire. Together we got the bike tuned nicely, and she learned how to do everything herself. I learned new things too, as it was the first time I had overhauled coaster brakes.

Cece rode home that day with a smile a mile wide. So did I.

Common Courage

It's Sunday morning and I have taken the day off from gutting to attend church and participate in a second line, which is a New Orleans-style jazz parade. Father Bart, the priest here at St. Mary's of the Angels, gave a moving sermon about faith and rebuilding. I am certain I was not the only one grateful to hear his words.

Sitting outside the house we were gutting yesterday eating lunch, I met Tina, a New Orleansian with ten kids who is living in her moldy house. She knows it's bad for her childrens' health, but she explained: "What else am I supposed to do? FEMA stopped rent assistance for us in Texas so we had to come back here. Then I tried to get a trailer for us to live in, but they won't give you a trailer if you already living in your house." She doesn't let her kids play outside because crack dealers have started squatting two doors down. In fact, in the middle of our conversation a confrontation erupted during a deal across the street. Tina rose and faced the men, screaming at them about shame and the blood of Jesus and various other things until they stopped shoving each other and apologized to her. It was a remarkable thing to see.

Tina is like so many people I have met down here: strong, kind, determined. As I sat talking with her I tried to imagine what it must be like to live her life, to cook for twelve people on a hot plate in a rotting house, to have her neighborhood flooded and ravaged by crack cocaine, to live with endless challenges and despair all around. We told Tina how much we admired her perseverance and kindness, but she shrugged it off. "What else am I supposed to do."

Thinking about it now as I am writing, I realize she said "what else am I supposed to do" to us many times in a twenty minute conversation. And here I am, working in New Orleans gutting houses, but I have the privilege to be doing damn near anything, anywhere. I have the choice, and I will leave, and they will still be here. There's something to ponder.

I don't feel guilty for having the privilege to come down here, I feel confident in my choice to come down and do some good deeds. And the gutting program is helping individuals and the community a great deal. But as I sit eating my lunch with Tina, feeling so inspired by her courage, love, and action, I wonder what more I could be doing...what more we all could be doing.

Love always, my friends...

Nowhere Else to Go

I am so overloaded with stories and experiences to share and have so little time to write that it is hard to choose what to tell. Every day I hear stories of the flood and the evacuation, what people went through. What they survived, or didn't. The houses still have body counts on the front doors, spray-painted by search squads 14 months ago. For me it is a disturbing symbol of lives lost, many of which could have been saved. But for the people who are from this neighborhood, who grew up here, went to school here, worked here and raised their families here, those marking are a painful reminder of a community shattered.

My friend Darrell returned to New Orleans after 13 months in exile in Arlington, Texas. He faced discrimination there as a Katrina evacuee (as did almost everyone else I have spoken to who had the misfortune of ending up in Texas), and had trouble finding steady housing and employment. Despite the fact that he is hard-working, sober, intelligent, and upstanding individual. He knew his city had been destroyed, but in the end he had to return. He told me he just didn't have anywhere else to go. But housing prices have doubled since the storm, and he is coping with post-traumatic stress issues. When Darrell sees a body count painted on a house here, more often than not he knows who those bodies were. When he sees a school that hasn't even been gutted yet, much less rebuilt and reopened, he sees the place where he helped win the championship game in high school. He is trying to talk to a mental health counselor about the insomnia and nightmares that have haunted him since the flood, but everyone has the same problems, and there are nowhere near enough services for all these folks. So he's wait-listed at half the clinics in town. Every day he tells me, 'Thank God for y'all, 'cause if Common Ground weren't here, I'd have nothing to fall back on'.

Which makes me feel good, to know that we as a volunteer community are supporting people, trying to help them rebuild their homes, their lives. But it also makes me wonder, why does it fall on us? FEMA has a list of resources disaster-affected people can seek out for relief. Charitable organizations are first on the list. (FEMA puts itself at #6). But even with massive house gutting operations run by multiple volunteer organizations, it is doubtful that %10 of the house guts needed in NOLA will be performed by charities. Meanwhile the $10 billion in federal money set aside for Louisiana is being sat on by the state (less than 50 homeowners have received payments statewide). Something tells me the problems here run a bit deeper than Michael Brown.

I must extend my deepest gratitude to all those that have contributed to care packages that have been sent to me here. After enjoying a little chocolate today, I filled a box with goodies and began distributing it throughout St. Mary's and in the neighborhood. I made it clear this was a gift from strangers across the nation. You've been 'God Bless'-ed many times over.

Peace y'all.