givingshelter

Here’s the full-version of one of my slides:

Bruce LeBel just told me that World Shelters will showing their new shelter design @ the SF Makers Faire!

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Some materials and equipment were left secure in a warehouse in the Gulfport, MS, anticipating more activity as plans move forward on the Neighborhood Clusters project. Government agencies, non-government organizations and individuals slowly move the process forward to discover ways to truly help people who suffered loss in the wake of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

We're very glad to have our team home. Each one of them find the need to continue to process and share their experiences. Many of the volunteers who assisted the World Shelters staff reside in the Seattle area, and have kept up a lively exchange of impressions. The Seattle contingent has also continued to actively fundraise to cover their own expenses incurred during their time in the Gulf area, as well as adding to the general fund of World Shelters.

Pakistan Relief
We now are moving forward with phone calls, e-mails and planning going back and forth between World Shelters representatives and people in both India and Pakistan, looking for ways that we can help give shelter to the people in Kashmir who have lost so much in their earthquakes.

Another two days spent down here, and my eyes and heart are two days wider. I'm afraid, though, that from my last post, I may have given too rosy an impression of the situation down here. There is a great deal of triumph and hope, but the challenges that World Shelters and the other relief organizations face, from the situation, from the government and from ourselves, are formidable.

Just as PODs, distributing food and supplies for free, are sprinkled throughout the towns, so too are parking lots piled high and wide with decaying boxes of clothing, donated by golden intentioned people from far away and then dumped to await the first rain, the mold and mildew that follow and the bulldozers and dumpsters that follow that. Many of the deployments we set out on turn out to be inappropriate to the shelters we offer, and breakdowns in communications between and within groups hobble our ability effectively deliver what the people here need.

Today, though, was a good, good day. We set out for Biloxi in two groups, with Sam, Dan and Brook in the "Shaggin' Wagon" and Chris, Mac and I in the Jeep (Thomas, Todd, Allegra and F'ing Jake stayed back at base in the hot sun cutting PVC and tarp, tying and locking in clips and wrapping kits for tomorrow's deployments).

Our first stop was at the Buddhist Temple in Biloxi, a POD run jointly by the monks, volunteers and several folks from the Burning Man core infrastructure crew. The temple compound is small, but immediately palpable as a center of calm and hope in a community battered and flattened by Katrina's assault. At the back stands a 40' geodesic dome covered with a red parachute (complements of the Burning Man crew) filled with tables of food, diapers, and soap. To the right of that are three long tents (built by World Shelters) housing supplies and acting as a command center for the POD. To the left of the dome sits the temple building and several tents housing volunteers and refugees.

Richard (aka "Big Stick", the crane operator from the Burning Man crew), greeted us warmly with a laugh and an energetic smile. After a quick tour of the POD, he handed us maps to the homes of three families that needed our help. Chris, Mac and I headed out to a house just a half dozen blocks away on Ester St.

The short drive to Ester, four days after my arrival here and almost six weeks after the storm, still just about brought tears to my eyes. You could clearly see the wake of the wind in the sweep of splinters and glass. We used my GPS to keep clear where we were, because the blocks where houses, yards, trees and gardens had recently stood were now virtually indistinguishable from the flat streets that once separated them. On some blockes, where the shoulder of the wind must have gusted to a peak, you could see clear through to the streets behind and again beyond that, undifferentiated rubble carpetting the ground. On other blocks, spared the brunt of the wind (but not the eight, ten and twelve foot flood waters), there were stil sloping hulks and sagging heaps of houses with the red spray-painted mark of FEMA's initial inspection. The number in the bottom quadrant indicates the number of dead found in the house. I feel blessed that we passed only zeroes, but I know that many, perhaps habituated to hurricane warnings or simply unable to conceive of the potential fury of nature fueled by a warming planet, tried to weather the storm here.

We pulled slowly past a sprinkling of tents posted between slumping porches and the street to Mrs. Smith's house, directly across from the railroad track. Her house was still standing and according to FEMA, repairable. The water line, clearly visible in the mold on the bare studs, reached almost to the ceiling of the first floor, but the second floor was virtually unscathed, "barely a picture tilted," she told us. She was able to live up there, but her friends were not as lucky and were still living in their cars. She ticked off the names and relations of the various people who would be moving into the shelters when they were built, then trailed off and sighed "I'll just round it off at 10."

She sat on the stoop and offered what help she could while watching her four shy but polite daughters and we started our business. It was Chris' first build since he had been on deployment two weeks previous, and a few things had changed in the construction technique since then. The three of us spent some time measuring and muttering about the yard, trying to figure the best placement for the tents to allow easy access, secure plumbing for the guy lines and protection from the elements. Finally, though, we decided to just raise the shelters in whatever configuration most convenient, then place them after they were constructed.

The three of us have the system down for erection of the structure pretty well learned, and operated as an occasionally sputtering but otherwise well-oiled machine, one man slipping a pole into the top feral and bending while the next slotted it into the bottom feral and the third slotting in the next pole in anticipation of the success of the first two. Once across for half the ceiling, round to the other side and again for the other half, back to the first side and across to raise the wall and then back around to the far wall to complete. Presto, done!

...with the easy part. The cover for the vented ceiling had changed design and required earlier steps than we anticipated, the door panels didn't quite fit, the guy lines, overtightened, pulled the structure out of kilter and we were mysteriously short poles for the inner arches.

We started at around 11:00 am and weren't finished until close to 3 pm, long after they had stopped serving lunch at the temple and LONG after we had eaten breakfast. Still, I took my time and enjoyed giving Mrs. Smith and her daughters a tour of their brand new shelters, how the doors tied up to allow easy entry and exit and how to keep the edges tucked to repel the rain. We piled our tools and supplies into the truck and headed back to the Buddhist temple to eat our bagged lunch, then off to Division Street to meet up with the others.

Sam's crew had erected three structures by the time we caught up with them and were assessing a house for a fourth. There was a family who had pitched a tent in a moldy building, supplies spread across the floor and bunkbeds in the corner. We sorely wanted to give them a safer place to live, but it was apparent that they wouldn't actually live in it, preferring to take their chances with the mold and use the shelter for other purposes, so we decided to head back to base and help the production crew meet quota (well, except for me, who started working on this blog :-))

I caught a quick point of ultimate frisbee with some firefighters out of Fairfax, Virginia and then headed over to Waveland to catch the tail end of dinner. It's funny the folks you meet here, all the different relief organizations, long hairs and crewcuts alike rubbing shoulders in the food lines in the tents at Waveland at night. Last night, I sat in a tent with a hodgepodge of relief workers and Rainbows as a gal from B.C. pushed and heaved away on a rickety accordian, belting out old folk tunes with a plain but plangent keening. Strange times.

The parallels and contrasts to Mississippi Summer in 1964, when waves of college students from the North came down to register black voters in the South, keep popping into my mind. The sense of social justice and purpose that resonates with us all connects me, but, of course, THIS TIME, we are welcomed almost universally. I'm also very aware of my religious identity here, seeing the Scientologists and the Seventh Day Adventists setting up year-long camps to help. I don't wear a Magen David, a chai or any other outward sign of my Judaism, but I want these people to know that many of us are here.

Now, though, dinner at Waveland is over and the others have gone over to listen to the local singer strum out John Prine, Dylan, Neil Young and Roger Miller. I'm going to join them. Sleep well.

I'm Jordan, a new volunteer from Seattle down here with World Shelters.  I arrived off a red-eye into the Biloxi yesterday morning, and, despite having read the news and talked to several of my friends who were on the previous deployments with World Shelters, I was taken off guard by the degree of devastation. I'll tell you about it, you'll see the pictures, but it's difficult to comprehend. Now that I've begun to digest it, I'm forgetting that their lives weren't always shattered.  There, but for the grace etc...

I had somehow thought the destruction was relegated to the shoreline, but it goes far inland.  Half of the houses in Waveland are splintered, nothing left except piles of rubble on slabs of foundation, beds in trees, debris in an undifferentiated mass everywhere you look.  Most houses within 20 or 30 miles of the coast are damaged and barely livable.  The impact of this is difficult to imagine: the economy is gone, there are no stores, no restaurants, businesses are plywooded storefronts with muddied fax and copy machines piled in front.

   
 
But in the face of it all, the people on the Gulf coast are determined to get to their feet.  Everywhere we go, there are PODs (Points of Distribution), sets of giant tents filled with shelves and boxes of food, diapers, soap, and other necessities. PODs are run by both locals and outside helpers.  Families come from all over and take what they need for free.  The PODs are both bottoms-up and top-down creations. For example, a bunch of people from the Rainbow Gathering (what, until this week, I would have called the most flaky, hippy-dippy group in the world) set up shop in a parking lot of a destroyed food store. (In an amazing demonstration of prescience, they packed up their busses and started down when Katrina was still just looming and were the first food distribution site in Hancock County. FEMA followed some days later.) 

They popped up some tents, set up a kitchen, painted a "New Waveland Cafe" sign (after the town of Waveland where they set down) and started handing out food, three hots a day (all organic, at the beginning). Locals started coming, and the Seventh Day Adventists plopped down next to them and started heading out basic supplies like peanut butter, cheese, meat, vegetables, soap and clothes.  Other relief agencies and FEMA, seeing a functioning relief center already in operation, started dropping off additional supplies for the kitchen and POD.

We had lunch and dinner there last night (both delicious, full meals including salad, meat, a vegetarian option, bread, dessert, and drinks).  During lunch, the Rainbow Family played albums over their PA system, leading to a slightly ironic, surreal moment of bunch of black and white, bayou-bred Mississippians gratefully eating meals provided by hippies while Neil Young's Southern Man played over the din of generators and buzz of flies: "I saw cotton and I saw black, tall white mansions and little shacks, Southern Man when will you pay them back?...Southern change gonna come at last..."  At dinner, they had a full band playing Van Morrisson, Rolling Stones and CCR tunes while dreadlocked Rainbows danced enthusiastically next to Mississippi senior citizens, suddenly homeless and momentarily carefree.

All the time, new supplies are flowing in to these centers from donors big and small across the country.  How does it know where to go? Best I can tell, it's a mix of peer networks of people from different relief agencies talking to each other about what's available and a top down effort of the Emergency Operation Center (EOC) of Hancock County, who hold twice daily coordination meetings of all the relief agencies operating in the area.
 
My first day, I worked with two deployments from World Shelters. On the first, the whole crew of us set up a a 50' long shelter for the medical center, set up by the Rainbow Family and staffed by volunteer medical students, next to the New Waveland Cafe (incredibly difficult, as we had to drill through the pavement to sink the rebar stakes). 

On the second, Mac, Todd and I set up a 25' shelter at a POD in a town called Pass Christian.  The people there were wonderful and grateful.  Operating the pod were a mix of locals and Scientologists.  Their plan was to keep the POD operating for at least a year. Guys in their early twenties were working shoulder to shoulder with women in their 60's, everybody with the same smiling determination I've encountered everywhere I've gone. 

This attitude has been really remarkable. I talked to a woman today, for example, who giggled and chuckled through her account of weathering the hurricane in her house, shouldering her two cats and carrying her poodle on her head as the water rose. 

"Whoo," she chuckled, "I had white caps in my living room! I had swim over to keep my refrigerator from floating out the front door. Twice! I got it though. I tell you, when my walls starting to shake from the wind, though, that's when I got scared." 

Then, she reached out and gave me a big hug and told me you've got nothing to do but go on. And that's what I hear everywhere we go. You got no choice, you can't give up, so you just gotta go on. I know it sounds corny coming from me, off of some soft focus poster of a kitten hanging from a rope, but coming from that woman and the people running the Pass Christian POD, it's something different. You'll just have to take my word for it.

Same day, Thomas, Sam, Jake and Mac set up a third shelter at the remains of a woman's house by the bayou.  The ground on her land was dried, caked and cracked mud, so they built a floor for her out of materials donated by the New Waveland folks while they were there.

Today, it was up with dawn, breakfast at FEMA-sponsored commissary here on the NASA base where we're camped out, and then off with Sam, Dan, and Todd to build a shelter for woman in Bayside Park. There were eight people living in a tarp strung over their back porch (their house itself had been declared unsafe due to water damage and mold).  Two of the men there had tried to weather the storm in the house itself, but when the water rose "to their necks", they swam down to the store at the end of their street and made it to the roof.  The next day, they said, they returned, opened the bobbing refrigerator, cracked open a bottle of wine that was there and got drunk.  The day after that, when the water receded to the point where they could walk, they started cleaning up.

We set up a 25' shelter in their backyard, that's a picture of Lennie and the crew next to it.  One of the women living there has a high-risk pregnancy, so I feel better knowing she's got room to lie down close to her family.

After lunch at the New Waveland (where I peeked in to see our shelter now fully stocked with medical supplies and patient exam tables, we headed over to the (remains of) a house belonging to a woman named Tamika.  She was living at her boyfriend's house with her kids and had begun the process of gutting her house in preparation for rebuilding it.  Throughout her neighborhood, men and women slowly but methodically carried debris out of their shells of houses, clearing the way for a rebirth.

We stopped to help the other deployment set up a shelter at a house in Bay St. Louis, but we decided it wasn't appropriate.  An older man was living in the house with his dogs and hadn't let FEMA in to inspect.  We could see pools of water still on his floor, and he was refusing to leave.  He needed more than we could offer, and the relatives who were looking after him thanked us but encouraged us to take the shelter to someone who would use it more appropriately.  We made sure they knew how to reach the appropriate service agencies and headed back to base, where we worked until dark cutting and clipping parts for the shelters we'll raise tomorrow.  A number of the existing shelter tarps needed to be retrofitted with mesh vents to allow for better airflow, and then the whole crew hunkered down for "clipping circle, gathered around a pile of tarps attaching the plastic fittings we use to tie the tarp to the PVC exoskeleton.

Showers in a truck, then to bed.