From New Orleans, Day 2

I'm writing now with my filthy workboots kicked up on the computer table. A welcome glass of water perches next to me and the floorboards lurk dustily in the gloom as 70 decibels of hiphop thuds in from our technology shed, which structure performs double duty as storage closet and sound garden.

I hadn't got the first idea what to expect when I came down here, and it's just as well – my northern city boy's imagination couldn't've prepared me for this. In the first place, LowerNine.org (yes, that's their actual name and yes, that's a sign of the times) is unlike anything I've ever experienced; if you've never spent time in a commune, you'll probably have to strain for analogues, too. The building we call home can't be more than a couple thousand square feet of shoddily-painted, crooked-floorboarded makeshift housing. It's a hodgepodge of modern computer equipment, canned soups, compost cans, ragged curtains cum room-separators, dinged-up kitchen utensils and homemade bunkbeds (think "unadorned yet firmly bolted 2x4s") outfitted with inflatable mattresses and secondhand sleeping bags. The bathrooms gleam, though, and there's a laundry machine and dryer for long-term volunteers (as opposed to "shorties", a category to which I've avoided condemnation only narrowly by dint of my three-week commitment). The volunteers – we're nearly all volunteers here, though some plan to be here for two years or more – are largely my own age, scruffily attired and desperately in need of baths. Idealism and technical know-how are rampant, and a good pun does not go unacknowledged.

In short, this place is perfect.

That couldn't be less true of the lower ninth ward, though, where military police patrol the streets, cabbies dare not drive and I'm told that only 1 in 20 houses are occupied. I'll see if I can snap some pictures of the contrasts (waterlogged vs. restored, e.g.) when I go to serve dinner at the community center this evening. In the meantime, let me begin by saying that two years, seven months and seventeen days since Mayor Nagin first ordered the evacuation of New Orleans in anticipation of coming storm, signs of continued reconstruction progress in the NOLA's hardest-hit ward are hard to see.

Which isn't to say that progress hasn't been made. The roads, while pocked and gouged by the storm, are almost completely free of debris and most of the larger wreckages have been carted off to the city's landfill. Most of the larger businesses have been rebuilt, beginning (of course) with Home Depot, at which hotbed of activity I spent most of my morning. All of the utilities work just fine, food is readily available, and when standing anywhere besides the residential neighborhoods it's almost possible to imagine seaside NOLA as a placid, sleepy well-run town.

Step onto those residential streets, though, and the story changes. I already mentioned that the habitation rate here is dismal; it's not hard to see why that's so. At least nine of every ten houses suffer from the contorted roofs, leprous paint jobs and empty windows symptomatic of a hurricane's passage. I haven't had a chance to go inside the untouched ruins yet; perhaps I've been warded off by the runes left from the emergency crews two years ago, who used a simple cross-and numbers system to indicate the date the house was surveyed for damage, what organization surveyed it, how many unclaimed pets were found inside and how many bodies would need to be carted away. I make instinctive connections to Passover's angel of death whenever I see more than two houses so marked in a row, though of course these symbols are more epitaph than prophylactic.

In this environment, it's easy to see how LowerNine.org keeps busy. Our volunteer corpus fluctuates in size from ten up to fifty or sixty around spring break ("the busy season"), with an average, I'm told, of around fifteen people. New Orleans residents submit applications for aid from Lower Nine. If we accept the application – it's not yet clear to me what our criteria are, or whether any applications are rejected – then we'll commit to rebuilding the homeowner's residence, asking only that they pay for the materials. Since labor is by far the most expensive factor in such work, we're very popular: as of this writing, we're actively working on somewhere around five homes and our waiting list is 100 homes long.

I've only gotten the barest taste thus far of how we do our work. When I arrived yesterday, I plonked my bags down under my bunk in the shorties' room, donned superhero-appropriate workboots and ratty jeans, and headed out to reinforce the floor at Ms. Sheila's house. (All of our community partners are Mr. or Ms. Firstname to us. And partners they are, too, since most of them work with us on their homes. Consequently, there's a lot of love here.) For five hours, I read the measurements passed to me from beneath the house on bits of plywood, used a chopsaw to cut 2x8 boards to those lengths, and then helped to hammer and then nail them into place as supports for loose floorboards. Others finished drywalling her closet and then gave me a tour of the nearly-complete house, including the metal flashing they'd applied to the bottoms of her windows so that water wouldn't soak through the poor materials chosen by her original contractors.

Last night was a gaily trip into New Orleans proper, replete with jazz and alcohol and embarrassing personal stories, about all of which more another time. This morning I awoke, ate eggs'n'spinach, canned fruit and fried potatoes before heading out to buy materials for Mr. Charles' house. Home Depot was excruciatingly slow, permitting me the luxury of a quick nap in a folding chair while we waited an hour for our gargantuan shipment of wood. It was glorious, with an impeccable follow-up act: lunch.

This afternoon marked my first ever trip to a municipal landfill. Darren, Marwe and I stood hip-deep in a metric ton of the sludgy, maggot-ridden wood, cardboard, linens, drywall, leaves, and other detritus of a successful construction operation and shoveled it all over the truck's side. Around us, sulfuric gases billowed and bulldozers outfitted with steel-studded wheels plodded their prehistoric way around the hive. I smell awful, I'm pretty sure I inhaled a full pound of asbestos and I'll never wear that pair of jeans again (…until I wash it tomorrow) – and boy, am I happy.

We came back and I sat down to write, but was pleased to be interrupted so that several of us could head over to serve dinner at the local community center. Beef stew, white rice, chicken cacciatore and delicious peas and carrots (all, I'm pretty sure, from a can) were served to a curious agglomeration of the neighborhood's ne'er-do-wells, a group comprising volunteers (some from as far away as England), ordinary residents looking for some company, and one actual ne'er-do-well (the medical clinic, I informed him, is Tuesday from 10 to 1). Pretty prosaic stuff, really, but there was abundant free food and I ain't complaining.

So here I am back at the ranch, happy and sunburned and (I'm sure) smelling like roadkill, and eager to do it all again tomorrow. More as events develop!