R2W Voices

Broken Levees Are Our Common Ground
Reflections from a CLI Sojourn: New Orleans, Louisiana
August 9-14, 2006

PSR trustee Rev. Kelvin Sauls conducted reportage sessions at PSR on pilgrimages by his congregants at Downs Memorial UMC of Oakland to New Orleans. He spoke of the need to keep the contradictions of the Katrina disaster and the lives of thousands of mostly poor and African American New Orleanians alive in the public consciousness. The church can be in the forefront of this witness.

When R2W contemplated a pilgrimage to New Orleans, Rev. Sauls was enthusiastic in encouraging this kind of witness. As Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, we felt that it was important for us to witness post-Katrina New Orleans for ourselves and be in solidarity with the people there. Going to New Orleans meant coming face-to-face with the generations-old racism and class disparities exposed by Hurricane Katrina. For some of us, going to the South meant going to a land where our ancestors had been slaves…

My mother and uncles grew up in a shotgun house the only Chinese in a Black working class neighborhood in Mississippi, so going to the South was a pilgrimage of sorts for me.

Driving into the city felt like entering a war zone. Houses, churches, schools, and businesses still lay vacant and six-foot piles of rotting wood, toilets, and teddy bears littered the streets. Spraypaint still marked the front of the houses indicating the condition of the house and the number of dead and animals found. Military police still patrolled the streets.

The Hands On Network, housed in First Street United Methodist Church, was our host organization in New Orleans. We shared ten toilets and three showers with ninety other volunteers and slept in bunk beds lined up in narrow rows in the parish hall. We imagined that this was just a small taste of what New Orleans residents had to go through in temporary shelters.

We were struck by the fact that almost all of the other volunteers were White and from the Midwest. Why were there so few people of color volunteering to help with disaster relief?

We woke up at 6:00AM and for eight hours, knocked down moldy walls with crowbars and shoveled the debris into trash cans. Despite the humid 90 degree weather, we wore Tyvek suits, hard hats, goggles, respirators, gloves, and work boots - safety equipment that many residents cannot afford when gutting their own homes.

As we gutted a duplex, an old woman came out of her trailer across the street and sat on the steps and watched us with her head in her hands. I realized that we had been loudly banging walls down all day and dumping plaster and wood debris on the sidewalk in from of the duplex. The mold and signs of loss and devastation that had been out of sight in the house were now sitting out of the sidewalk in a huge messy pile that she had to look at until the garbage removal truck came.

We returned to the church each day physically and emotionally exhausted. The lack of privacy and personal space made it hard to process the intense sadness and anger that many of us felt.

In the evenings, we met with local residents, pastors, and community leaders to learn about the issues different communities in New Orleans were dealing with. Something that gave us a real connection to New Orleans was that Christina Cummings, an R2W Summer Institute alumnus and a member of Downs Memorial UMC, was in New Orleans with her mother during our visit. Christina's grandmother, Dawn Jackson, is a New Orleans native whose home was damaged by the flood. She and her husband were living in a small FEMA-issued trailer in front of their house in the Upper Ninth Ward, but were determined to rebuild their home. We were able to help Mrs. Jackson move her belongings out of her house and into a temporary storage container as part of our volunteer work with the cooperation of Hands On. It was powerful to be assisting someone with whom we had a personal connection.

Mrs. Jackson took us on a tour of the Lower Ninth Ward. When our colleague Sophay Duch, asked tearfully, "Where is God in all of this?" Mrs. Jackson said, calmly and confidently, "God is here. God is here." Her faith, strength, and dignity were powerful testaments to us in the midst of all the destruction and devastation in New Orleans.

At Mary Queen of Vietnam Church in the Vietnamese Village, we joined young people organizing against the placement of a landfill in their neighborhood and the general lack of attention paid to the 50,000 Vietnamese in New Orleans by the local government.
When we asked Joe Givens, a long-time community organizer, what we could do to help, he encouraged us to support the rebuilding of the churches in New Orleans because oftentimes, they are the only institutions in the low-income communities. He also encouraged us to identify the "broken levees" in our own communities.

We returned from New Orleans feeling angry and compelled to action, yet with lots of questions: Why were there so few people of color volunteering to help with disaster relief? What are the broken levees in our communities? What is the role of faith in creating social change?

In our analysis, we determined that Hands On is a charity organization that is doing necessary disaster relief work, but does not address the structural injustices that are at the root of the problem. We traced the current situation in New Orleans back to the enslavement of Africans in the United States and the continued poverty and disenfranchisement of Black people today. We also discussed how government spending on prisons, war, and corporations as opposed to community development and improvement of our public education system disproportionately affects low-income people of color in this country.
We plan to create a film and hold a number of educational forums to create a public consciousness that connects New Orleans with the historic, political, economic, social, and spiritual problems that exist in our local communities.
- Lauren Q.

Before going, I was so excited, but scared at the same time. The trip was mentally and physically draining. There I was in the midst of a city that was once full stories and history... It all seemed to be gone… We drove through neighborhoods that were completely empty… But those who chose not to move to another state still have hope in rebuilding their homes and their lives and there are still those who are trying to keep the community together.
There's not much RELIEF going on at all. Where the heck is the rest of America? was the question constantly running through my mind. Each day I became more and more angry realizing how F*ED up this country is...I'm still pissed...The whole political system is corrupt...
Now that I'm back home, I have no idea what the heck to do besides TELL MY STORY about the trip… I really want to DO SOMETHING about it, RAISE AWARENESS about the issues that are happening out there - racism, social Injustice… the list goes on... This is only the beginning...
- Sina U.

How was my trip? It was rough.... physically, mentally, and spiritually draining... Instantly thrown into a different world, expected to gut a stranger's house without knowing who this person was, where they were, if they were coming back… We were put to work in the heat and humidity, tearing out the walls of a small home and throwing them out to the sidewalk on top of a pile of wood, plaster, glass, metal, and memories. Everything was damaged because the house was flooded. Everything had to go, even the jewelry box we found in the bedroom and the picture of the little boy, who must have been around 8 years old at the time the picture was taken. Seeing that picture made me realize that it wasn't just pieces of the house we were throwing away, there were memories being thrown away. It felt wrong, but it had to be done.

While gutting the second house, owned by a man named Lionel, I was glad that Lionel was so appreciative of us being there and the fact that he was working right alongside us.

Why were we the only people of color volunteering with Hands On to gut houses? Why were military police driving by houses that needed to be gutted? Its been almost a year and New Orleans still looks like a warzone. Why has the eye of the media turned away from the people of New Orleans? they still need our help.

For those of us who live in California: We live all the way over here. There's nothing we can do about it right?... How does this affect you?
- Mike E.

This is the first time we put our theory into action. We were to help scrub out the mold and gut the houses. As I hammered down what was once a beautiful home, I felt angry and frustrated at the corrupt structure of our government! Tears ran down my brown face when I saw the people misplaced, homes... gone. I thought to myself, Man, for some, their whole lives were here. Dreams and goals were built into these houses. Now, they're just empty, moldy houses that stink of injustice!

As I walked through the French Quarter, a neighborhood that caters to tourists, I noticed that the houses there were nicely restored. Walking through there, you could easily forget that a couple miles away, houses are still torn and entire neighborhoods are ghost towns. The people who were suffering were mostly the poor. Why does it always happen this way? For those who are immigrants, think back to where you came from and ask yourself why your parents left their home country - what was the problem?

There are people who viewed Hurricane Katrina as a blessing and say that God willed it to happen. I say that is BULLSHIT!!!!!! So many have used His name in vain! People willed it to happen, Government willed it to happen, INJUSTICE WILLED IT TO HAPPEN! GREED WILLED IT TO HAPPEN!!!!!!

Why do I bring up these factors? New Orleans, historically, just like all of the southern cities, was built on the backs of slaves. When slavery was abolished, many former slaves made their homes in the Ninth Ward. Pre-Katrina, the Ninth Ward was like California's Oakland, Crenshaw, South Central, Inglewood... The streets were run by violence and drugs. That's why some believe it was okay for such a tragedy to happen. But from a human perspective, IS THIS HUMANE?! There were innocent lives, old citizens, churches, children...

New Orleans has the second largest port in the U.S. Many overseas goods come through this port. Because of this they extended the levees. This was not safe.

We cannot forget that this happened. A community leader in New Orleans said that when we went back home, we have our own levees to protect. It is Katrina without the water - the health care and school programs that have been cut or are being cut, environmental racism, immigration rights...
- Sophay D.