Way back in a month ago, my son and I flew to Texas to join the group of people rallying around Cindy Sheehan in demanding accountability for the war with Iraq. Four of the Veterans for Peace, chapter #116 from California, loaded up a truck full of supplies and headed for Covington, LA to provide hurricane relief work after Camp Casey broke up. They put out the call for help, which was picked up and publicized further by Michael Moore. The response was overwhelmingly positive, leading to a slightly organized chaotic effort by hundreds of volunteers and donators. I was tired of yelling at the news and the administration, became a moderator on their forum to help organize the effort and joined them in Covington, Louisiana, north of Lake Pontchartrain, for a week. I became part of Healthcare for Peace (HFP), the slightly organized group of individuals providing health care in response to the call. This is my report on that week, with the promise to continue to help recover from the largest natural disaster in the history of our country in any way I can.
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I am tired. I wake suddenly from bad dreams, trying to figure out where I am and what I need to do next, where to go, how to get the job done. I am cold, fall has come suddenly here in WA, the contrast seems a bit much, but I do like the green trees and little birds hopping down the tree trunks outside my window. Someday I would like to visit Louisiana and Mississippi again as it seemed a beautiful place with many wonderful people. Someday when it is not a disaster zone.
Overwhelming.
95 degree heat. 90% humidity. Miles and miles and miles and miles and miles of various degrees of destruction. Trees down and snapped off like twigs all over. Power lines like black snakes winding over and around the debris. Transformers in the road. Houses with no walls, crushed roofs, no roofs, no skins, trees and boats on the roofs. Sludge coated cars and vans in the muck of the ditch, washed there by the 20-foot storm surge. A row of plastic bags and other trash making a line through the trees 15 feet overhead. The stench of dried raw sewage mixed with toxic chemicals, dead creatures and black mold. Big red X on door after door in New Orleans. Date written at the top, many with "NE", some with "0", one with "1 W/F" at the bottom. People with little more than what they can fit into their car quietly saying "thank you ma'am, I don't need anything" while pouring ice into coolers in their tent city next to their house debris. Quiet tears running down cheeks while unloading food and supplies in areas which have had no contact with the outside world for more than two weeks. Angry ranting and tears back at camp from exhausted volunteers frustrated with bureaucracy blocking the good they can do and the help they can provide. Frustration with the lack of decent communication since cell phones worked intermittently at best and a lot of time was spent hurrying up and waiting and doubling up on supply deliveries while missing other places. Guilt at not being able to do more, to not be able to save the world or even help more than a few. Hugs and support and thanks for what we were able to do, gratitude at knowing the world hadn't forgotten the people involved in this disaster, that we hadn't all moved on to newer news.
I got to go into New Orleans for my 51st birthday and was later taken out to dinner at a Japanese restaurant in Covington by several other volunteers happy to celebrate something positive. Our food was cooked at our table, though they were too busy to have much variety, being one of the few open restaurants. My friends kept refilling my cup with sake and telling everyone who passed that it was my birthday and singing to me. We were all rather silly and the lightly cooked carrots were very very good after the previous nights meals like burnt overcooked bland beans. Those overcooked bland burnt beans were also good since they were there and ready to eat when I returned from a tiring day, but good in a different way.
New Orleans was bizarre. Picture a large flat city, emptied of all but a few thousand people. All those other people left for a few days and have not been able to return for weeks. Their power has been off, the food in their refrigerators rotting, their pets unfed, their homes flooded with toxic muck. For weeks. In 90 degree heat and 90 % humidity. Much of the muck has dried and toxic black mold grows up and into the belongings and walls. I do not know how much of this city can avoid being bulldozed and burnt.
Most doors have big red Xs on them to signify their searched status. One of our volunteers had done this at another disaster so filled us in on what the numbers and letters meant. At the top was the date the X was made, the house originally marked/searched. The number at the bottom was the body count. To the left were letters signifying different things to different search groups, sometimes the type of residence, sometimes unknown things. To the right was a status report if the house were unsearched. "NE" meant not entered. Searchers try the door, if it is open they knock, then enter and search the entire house, bottom to attic. If there are no bodies, they write "0" under the X. If the door is locked, searchers look through all the windows and if they believe they can see absolutely everywhere they can again put a 0. The door is marked if a body is found, for instance "1 W/F" (white female), or if animals are found, live or dead. If the door is locked, or everything cannot be seen clearly enough from the outside, "NE" is written and another team will come later to break in and search. In theory.
We went through the 9/6 section, the 9/11 section and the 9/16 section on 9/17. This means that some of these houses had been X'd and NE'd either 10 days before or the day before we were there. I read on the news that the mayor of NO and FEMA have just agreed on how to make the searches work better. They will no longer break into houses with sludge lines less than 5 ½ feet unless they see signs of life. My brain has hurt often during the last couple weeks, trying to understand the logic. I do not see how they could search every house in a huge city. Resources are limited and need to be used on the living. Blackwater/Kenyon Enterprise are in charge of the body count, have Bush connections and have been in trouble other places for not reporting accurately. Full city search? Accurate body count? My head hurts.
On the street are National Guard, guns at ready, averaging about 3-4 to every block, but roaming in larger groups on foot and in Humvees. We see animal rescue workers every 10 blocks or so. There are more SCPA vehicles and staff than police. Police are mainly at checkpoints, accompanying the National Guard and letting us through for medical needs, up to a point. Civilians were seen once every five blocks or so. Scrawny cats and dogs show up every few blocks. They run and hide from us. Trash is everywhere, trees are down over power lines everywhere, dried sewage is everywhere. It is quiet except for the military, humvees and the black helicopters flying overhead. There has been no cleanup of the flooded areas and little of the non-flooded areas. We made it up to the 9th Ward, the deepest flooded and now reflooded thanks to hurricane Rita. The National Guard almost let us through, since we were accompanied by a federal congressional representative's assistant, but the Police stopped us. No one except military and police got in there. And body hunters. We left our shoes outside our tents at night, and took showers every evening to wash off the sweat and the contamination before bed.
Algiers is a community/area on the non-flooded side of the Mississippi that has been working very hard at rebuilding their community. They have sent teams out to clean up their streets and patch/tarp broken roofs to prevent further damage. Power lines still curl in the road, but overall the contrast to the other parts of the city is great. Malik Rahim, a former Black Panther has been rallying his community to act together, to reconstruct and rebuild under the name Common Ground Relief (
http://www.commongroundrelief.org/). They have a free clinic and are a food/supply distribution center for their community. HFP has been working with them on finding money to help with community rebuilding, health care, mental health, job training, reconstruction, parenting and education. We cannot save the world, but we can help one community in a major way pull itself back up and hopefully become more economically viable than before. Solidarity, not Charity is their motto and I am very happy to have been able to be part of this. They in turn are pleased that we have not just given empty promises, but are following through with what we say we will do. I am please to report that preliminary approval for a decent sized grant was given to help rebuild and strengthen their community.
I worked at some small clinics in the outlying rural areas of Bush, Sun, and Isabel, LA. Infections, diabetes problems and lack of prescription medicines were the biggest issues we encountered. We distributed a lot of triple antibiotic ointment and band-aids, and could have used more blood sugar testing kits and a variety of test strips to hand out. People were unable to get out to get their prescriptions refilled, and the hospital pharmacy and other pharmacies were just beginning to function again anyway. Things change on a daily if not hourly basis there. Things are improving, but there is a long ways to go.
I met a Red Cross nurse being sent home due to the Legionnaires disease she got from standing water at a RC shelter. People are beginning to get injured as debris cleanup and reconstruction begin. I hear of untreated wounds becoming gangrenous, but didn't experience this. Mosquitos weren't bad, but everyone got unexplainable red dots from some insect. They didn't itch, just appeared on arms and legs. Insecticide with 25% DEET was readily available. The most annoying bugs were the love bugs, soft beetles swarming, mating, crawling all over and turning the front of vehicles black. We were watchful of the health of others and ourselves, making sure the helpers stayed healthy.
I helped at an African-American Baptist church in Franklinton, sorting supplies and refilling their trash can cooler with bottled water and ice while my partner set up the clinic for next week. Again, many of these places had larger organizations come through with promises to return with medical help, but little actually happened. Our group gave the Baptist church food and supplies as the larger organizations had not. We held medical clinics where others had not.
Racism is overt. There are white shelters, white food banks, white suppliers. There are black shelters, black food banks, black suppliers. We helped everyone, especially those who had not gotten help so far. Our group had to move camp twice and was kicked out of a storage unit used as a supply depot because we helped the wrong color of people. People signed up for two hour shifts patrolling our camp at night. The worst I saw was the camp skunk, but there were unknown people wandering through at other times. One of our doctors was from Brazil. He was searching for a group of Hondurans that were somewhere in the area but had disappeared during the disaster. Two of them had been found, suicided, and the others were still missing. One group of Latino roofing contractors working for FEMA was concerned about going near New Orleans as rumor had it that another group of Latino roofers had been shot and killed in NO. Supposedly they were mistaken for a group of looters, shot and killed since we all know that people of color carrying tools MUST be looters.
I went to Slidell, LA, Gulfport and Pearlington, MS, towns that the hurricane and storm surge wiped out. Think of Port Townsend Bay in a storm, waves breaking over the sidewalk between the ferry and Bayview restaurant. Increase the wind from 50 mph to 130 mph. Now raise the tide 20 feet. For hours. Now make this happen from Port Townsend around the peninsula and down to the California/Oregon border. In 90 degree heat and 90 % humidity and no power for weeks. A PT friend's sister had a house there. I don't know if it was the one with the fishing boat on its roof, but it will need to be bulldozed.
I began to panic as I sat alone in an air-conditioned car in Slidell. No one knew where I was. If the person I was with, a wonderful older doctor, did not come back to the car, I didn't know how to get out of there. Mounds of house debris, belongings and the house, lined the road and the median strip like piles of snow-plowed snow in February in ND. I could easily become another refugee. I could die and no one would know. Deep breaths, relax Jean, take pictures, dissociate, where the hell did Doc go? He came back, we made sandwiches for lunch and I felt better.
The winds and storm surge wiped out the community of Pearlington. People are living in tent cities, family groupings in one person's yard while they decide what to do next. I met one group that consisted of several siblings and families, aunts/uncles/cousins, parents. They did not know what they were going to do, but had enough ice and water from the volunteer food bank set up at the destroyed school. A volunteer free clinic there was looking for a replacement so they could go home. Red Cross had come in once and told them to leave, that they would take over. As the volunteer medical team packed up the next day to leave, RC decided the community was too small to warrant their presence so left. The volunteer group unpacked and continued to contact people in the outside world, trying to line up replacements so the community would continue to have medical help. We called them two days later to check in and they have another group coming to take over so didn't need us then. Maybe in a couple weeks though.
Anything that anyone did to help was welcomed and wonderful. I met many church groups, aid groups and individuals who banded together to help provide relief. I worked with a Black Panther and a woman from The Farm, Michael Moore's staff and an assistant to a Federal congressional representative, doctors, nurses, young and old, black, white, rainbow colored, poor, rich, people who felt the need to actively do something there, people who donated their time, money and supplies elsewhere.
They will need assistance for months. They will need food donations on an ongoing basis as people eat what has been provided so far. Strong bodies are needed to help with debris removal from yards and to help patch roofs. People trained in mold abatement are needed to remove the insides of houses, belongings, sheetrock and insulation. Medical personnel are needed to provide clinics, medicines, first aid. People and supplies are needed to help displaced southerners get resettled wherever that might be.
Donate to the Salvation Army if you wish to donate to a large company. I have supported the Red Cross for years, and believe they do a really good job at CPR/First Aid training, but I would strongly recommend that you do not donate to them for disaster relief as they were incredibly inefficient in helping. I met some wonderful Red Cross workers, but as a whole, RC caused more harm than good. They opened and closed shelters seemingly randomly. They had power struggles among themselves and with other aid groups. They seemed more focused on the perception of control than the act of assistance. Individuals were helpful, as a whole it was not. The Salvation Army was providing assistance more directly to those in need and were very helpful and supportive of others also helping.
While the numbers you as an individual can help may not be great, the people are grateful. You cannot save the world, the best you can do is pick one thing, somewhere, and do it well. What is important is just that you do something.
Thank you to everyone who has provided support or assistance to me or others in our travels and work. Thank you to anyone who has given of their time or donated supplies and food and medical supplies. If you have further questions, comments, are thinking of heading south and would like advice before you go, wish to volunteer or donate, please contact me.
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