BU has a fantastic spring break program that sends twenty students to New Orleans, all expenses paid (except for food and beer!), to volunteer with different legal organizations providing aid for the ongoing Hurricane Katrina caused crises. I went this year. The most concise way to sum it up; the French Quarter of New Orleans is like visiting Club Med in Jamaica. You wouldn’t know there was ever anything wrong. It’s Disneyland-like, a glorious bubble for tourists to taste the local culture. Outside that bubble, though, lies third world type conditions.
There are so many problems on so many levels, still, two-and-a-half years later. It’s an intricate web of failing infrastructure and mismanagement curiously affecting a disproportionate amount of racial minorities. There are people who are still displaced throughout Mississippi, Texas and other surrounding states. Most can’t get home because they have no home to get back to. They can’t get money to rebuild their home because the government failed to follow through, insurance companies failed to follow through, contractors defrauded them, and/or because FEMA decided they wanted their aid money back, with interest. What remains standing of their home is in danger of being deemed abandoned and converted into green space. To avoid that, the homeowners (who can’t get home) have to gut their house, board their windows and keep the lawn mowed, to demonstrate to the city that it’s not abandoned. Those who are home are faced with having nowhere to work- most of the businesses didn’t rebuild, no way to get to work- the transit system is reduced about 75% from pre Hurricane levels, and no where to buy food- most of the groceries store are closed -unless you live in a predominantly white suburb- where there is likely no transit to get to. There are food banks, but most restrict residents from coming more than once every six weeks and further restrict them from bringing home food for people who are not physically present. Those without cars or access to transit are at a loss. Furthermore, there are hundreds of people living in FEMA trailers getting sick from formaldehyde used in the trailers’ epoxy. To address the health issue, FEMA is evicting these residents. Basically, they have a short time frame to find an apartment or become homeless. The rental market has skyrocketed, however, where a single bedroom apartment costs about quadruple what it did before Katrina. Most displaced residents are priced out of the market. In the meantime, the city has decided to demolish the public housing projects rather than fix them and provide low income housing to hundreds of families. Many schools are overcrowded and many displaced children returning to New Orleans are being turned down from public schools because they don’t have their records, which were lost in the flood. And the tangled web continues into deeper into the education system, the criminal justice system, and health care system not to mention it’s an environmental nightmare. I read a statistic that said Katrina caused more oil to spill in New Orleans than the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska.
As a student volunteer I worked with the Louisiana Justice Institute gathering photographs and interviews of community members. After final exams, I will be turning all that into a series of articles for LJI to use to get the word out. The most important thing we can do, they told us, is talk about New Orleans to our family and friends. People really should be outraged.
Other students interviewed clients in the jails for the Public Defender’s office, others worked on mapping out where exactly the FEMA trailer parks are while others documented a neighborhood house by house taking photos and notes recording the state of repair of each home in order to create a picture map of the community for the LJI attorney’s the show the city that these homes are in fact, not abandoned.
~Adrienne
