Au Revoir, NOLA

Looking back over my three weeks in New Orleans, I'm surprised (but pleased) to find that Jazz Fest was the least of my pleasures and privileges there. Certainly seeing Billy Joel and the Roots in the same venue was spectacular, but how could it compare with helping to turn this....


...into this...?



Or with the times that I learned to drywall:


...and what a subfloor looks like:



...and how and why to end it all:



I learned the difference between drywall drills and impact drivers, between legitimate contractors and exploitative frauds, between compassionate government and laissez-faire excusism, between disposable cities (myth) and indispensable cultural centers (reality),
between theoretical idealism and you-provide-the-materials-we'll-provide-the-labor world-changing effort. I learned about the ubiquity of good people and new friends, and the truth of Margaret Mead's most famous admonishment. I learned that jazz lives most fully in the streets.

And for all that a nice suit and a cubicle to work from lend forward momentum to movements, I learned that there's nothing like grueling work on the front lines to ease your soul and make measurable change in the world. Viva volunteerism.

So I'm back now, reflective and sun-tanned, and I cannot recommend too strongly that you volunteer yourself with lowernine.org. To my friends in the foundations of the rebuilding effort: thank you, and best of luck. I'll see you again soon.

The Little Things

Vultures of the Lower Ninth

In the fine tradition of the reading material at my old dentist's office, see if you can spot what's wrong with the following picture:


If you said, "The foundation columns for that house are unsteady piles of cinderblocks or poorly mortared bricks, all unattached to the house itself", you'd be both out of breath and quite correct.

If you said, "That 6x6 is neither attached to nor supported by anything on the near side", you'd be correct as well.

But if, based on the abundant evidence, you concluded that this New Orleans homeowner was defrauded by the contractors who skipped town with her money after doing only perfunctory work, you'd win the grand prize.

The standard deal in the Lower Ninth (as, I believe, in other places) is that the contractor negotiates with the homeowner a price for an agreed-upon list of projects. After that, the homeowner pays the contractor 40% of the total price for the first 40% of work. When that's complete, another 40% is paid, and then a final 20% payment is exchanged when the work is complete.

Of course, these deals are largely arrived at on a handshake basis. Worse, homeowners rarely know how to verify the bona fides of a contractor, and the government's done a phenomenally poor job of regulating the contracting market. As a result, the standard eventuality for work 'round these parts is that the homeowner pays 40% for the first set of work, lays out the second 40% and then finds that a) the contractor has skipped town without a forwarding address, and b) what work was done was of such poor quality as to require near-complete reconstruction.

Witness, then, the "beams to nowhere" (original phrase -- citations, please!) and disintegrating pillars above. Elsewhere in Miss Sheila's house, the uneven floors, sparse and improper screws and nails, cracked drywall and crooked doorways are salt in the still-fresh wounds left by Katrina. Mentioning contractors in any gathering of Katrina survivors is a surefire recipe for rolled eyes and strained, knowing smiles.

The work we do here isn't top-quality by any stretch of the imagination, but it is conscientious and it is honest and it is accountable, and damn if those floors aren't level when we're done with them.

Southern hospitality

A house down the street caught fire on Saturday. Walking home with Jake from our build site, we both saw barbecue-magnitude smoke over the rooftops. After we identified the smell as insulation rather than hot dogs, we about-faced and hurried down to the scene. Smoke billowed from under the eaves.

I'm proud to report that NOLAFD had three trucks there within five minutes of my call, and that as a result the house sustained little external damage beyond smudging. I'm crushed, though, for poor Roy, whose numerous concerned neighbors said that he'd just had his utilities hooked up and was getting ready to move back in. Sometimes you just can't win for losing.

Next to me, a kid of 15 or 16 calmly remarked that a house down the street had been intentionally set alight the week before.

"You know why?" I asked.

"Couldn't say," he squinted, and turned away.

In a neighborhood where only one in twenty houses is occupied, though, I have to say how struck I was by the turnout and evident concern. Residents crowded the streetcorners and inquired after the owner, all asking who had his cell number and whether he'd been there that day. Thinking back to my own neighborhood in Baltimore, I find myself wondering how many people beyond our immediate neighbors would know how to get in touch with my family if anything went wrong. Hell -- I try to remember my neighbors' names.

That evening, volunteer conversation was crowded with speculation along those lines. How far does southern hospitality extend? Are its qualities different from those of northern hospitality? Jess suggested that the height of fraternal consideration in her New Jersey town would be to dust off someone else's car after a snowstorm. Last night, we met a guy on the ferry across the river who invited us into his home, served us drinks, and then went round for round with us at the local pub. The northerners in our little group were stunned at his unabashed generosity, while the southerners rolled their eyes and suggested that all that snow had damaged our brains.

Back on Saturday, all of lowernine.org hied over to the local community center, run by a man named, simply, Mack. [see inset] At least once a month, he and his organization host a crawfish boil, that most N'w'O'linean of traditions:

Ingredients:
1 utterly poised and jovial host
10-20 neighborhood families
10 bushels of crawdads
1 bushel of shrimp
1 mind-boggling pot each of turkey necks and corn on the cob
8 tables
2 cases beer (Budweiser, obviously)
Volunteers to taste

...and, after an hour or three of salting, cleansing, spicing, and boiling, food is served for all at communal tables. It's glorious, not least because eating crawfish requires a level of dedication and fine digit coordination not practiced by the casual lobster diner.

I talked with locals about the Lower Ninth and how far it's come since they were perched on their roofs two and a half years ago. The two women at my table positively glowed as they simultaneously thanked the Lord for their recent good fortune and fine neighbors and ribbed one of the Peace Corps volunteers for not knowing what a crawfish was.

Again I submit to you that this simply doesn't happen in the north. Perhaps it's peculiar to communities under great stress, to groups of individuals who haven't the individual resources or accomplishments to celebrate en famille. Or perhaps la famille becomes a more inclusive term as you leave the Mason-Dixon farther behind.

Or perhaps it's just New Orleans, where the jazz musicians smoke cigarettes on the sidewalk between sets with anyone who's got a light.

Caption contest!

So: Is there a ban on prayer in schools, or is there a ban on organized prayer? [Hint: It's the latter.]

Also, how tempted are you to have this guy put in your air conditioner?

Now: Who's got a good caption?

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!