Monday was my (Jordan's) last full day in Mississippi, and Jake, Todd and I arranged to set up shelters in the morning, then head over to New Orleans to do a site survey in the afternoon and take a look around while we were there.

We set out early, packed up and were on the road by 9 am, arriving shortly thereafter at the house of a Mrs. Daniels. Her house, not far from the Waveland beach where Katrina had flattened houses and right across the street from the small Baptist church she attended every Sunday, had fared remarkably well, just a bit taken off the roof. Unfortunately, while there was virtually no flooding in her area, water has gotten into the walls and the mold was setting in, so it was becoming unsafe to live in for her and the four granddaughters she was raising for her sons.



She shuffled out on unsteady legs, sat on a bench in her yard, and made pleasant conversation as we built the shelter that would be her home while her house was torn apart and put back together over the winter months. She had been born only a few blocks over, had weathered Camille with barely a blink and didn’t intend to leave now, either. “I was born here and they’ll bury me here,” she declared. Passing an hour of the morning with her was pleasant, and I almost regretted how efficient the three of us had become at raising the shelters, completing it from start to finish in just under an hour.

Our next stop was only a few blocks away at the home of her brother, Herbert. He also had to move out of his house, though from looking at it, I confess I wonder how livable, by my standards anyway, it had been before the disaster. I expressed some concern with the spot he picked between two dilapidated cars and a fallen tree to set up his shelter, since the ground was low there and likely to collect standing water when the rains came again, but he offered that he planned to build a floor out of old pallets, so we popped it up, this time even faster than the last.

This time my pride at showing him how the doors operated was tempered with concern, as his arthritic hands didn’t seem to have the strength to pull the hooks up to the loops hanging from the canopy, but there was little we could do. Nonetheless, he was grateful and seemed undaunted by the challenges that lay in front of him, so we wished him luck and headed back towards Waveland for lunch.

We wolfed down a delicious plate of jambalaya, macaroni and cheese and beets, and got a quick report from the others about their deployments (pictures of which on Flickr, but my poor memory prevents me from reporting more). Then, we traded in the Jeep for the car I had rented for the week (mysteriously but affectionately named The Insect), and headed out for New Orleans.

I didn’t know quite what to expect of the Big Easy, having seen the pictures on the news of the flooding and the looting, but I knew I not to expect the jubilant and carefree city I had visited only a year ago.

Pulling off of I-10 onto Elysian Avenue into Orleans Parish, it was obvious that although the city may have come through Katrina’s wind better off than Waveland, Gulfport and Biloxi, the vicious flooding unleashed by the breached levees had cut the legs out from under the city all the same. As in the other cities and towns we’d visited, the street was piled high in front of every house with the decaying innards of waterlogged houses, drywall, insulation, mattresses, furniture and clothing in vomitous heaps.

Due to the particular topology of the city, though, as we neared Washington Square Park and the French Quarter nearby, things started to look better. In the park itself, we found a charming, nascent little POD being operated jointly by a group called the Barefoot Doctors Academy and an off-shoot of the Rainbow Family that was operating the New Waveland Café. It was still small, a single small tent serving three meals a day, a few tables set up open air for people to sit at as they ate, and a trailer and pop-up tent functioning as their medical center, but they had dreams of growing it larger.

The doctor in charge, Deanne, gave us a tour of what they had set up, and explained with remarkably good cheer the bureaucratic hoops and gymnastics that had been involved in securing sanctioned use of the park. People were just starting to return to the city, and were finding their homes unlivable, their jobs gone. More disturbing still, some who returned to find their apartments in good shape and their belongings unaffected, found their rents tripled, as the supplies of livable spaces drove the prices that the market would bear through the roof (pardon the pun).



After the tour, she introduced us to the others that ran the park with her, described the specialized prenatal and obstetric care they offered to expectant mothers from their little facility, and showed us the stacks of supplies they had managed to acquire that would be left in the rain without a good shelter.

“What’s that? A shelter you say you need? Why, what have we got here? Shelters!”

Of course, it wasn’t quite like that, the reason we had come to the park was Allegra’s contact with Deanne previously offering our wares. Nonetheless, it gave us all a warm feeling to be able to pass around photos of the shelters we built and say, “yes, yes, of course we can come build these here for you, how many do you need?”

We also discussed deploying some solar panels and composting toilets to them, but I will admit no small amount of disapproval on my part for this, as our group has little experience with and no field testing of these devices. The last thing these people need as they struggle to feed and clothe the displaced and desperate is malfunctioning or inappropriately applied technology, and we can offer no guarantees on this account.

Our work their done, we left to explore the city, to see for our own eyes what Katrina had wrought. With a bit of trepidation, we drove over towards the now infamous Ninth Ward, which had been hit twice, once when levees broke and submerged the entire neighborhood, then again when the levees were overtopped by Rita’s storm surge later in the month.

The whole area was still cordoned off, and I must admit I sweated a bit as we pulled our rental car up to the camouflaged soldiers, M-16’s on their shoulders, and rolled down our windows. However, our relief worker badges and a confidently issued, if not entirely candid got us through, and we rolled across Industrial Canal and into St. Bernard Parish.

The sights we saw there were similar to what we saw elsewhere in the city: cars with mud caked on the roofs, ruined innards of houses thrown onto the street, the ubiquitous FEMA crosses indicating numbers of dead (people, dogs, and cats) and living (including, oddly, fish) spraypainted on the walls.



What made it eerie and particularly unsettling, though, was the desolation. The streets were almost entirely empty of people, only the occasional police vehicle and press photographer roamed the back streets. I half expected to hear the clattering of a saloon door, loose on its hinges, rattling in the wind, or perhaps to come across the Statue of Liberty’s head and torch protruding from the post-apocalyptic rubble. I had a prickly feeling, like I was walking on someone’s grave, and we quickly finished our tour and headed over to the French Quarter to eat and digest.

The Quarter itself was relatively unscathed by Katrina, spared the brunt of the wind and the flooding. However, power was out across the city, so on the curb of every block stood several refrigerators, the foul and rotten contents of which rendered the entire appliance unsalvageable. In a uniquely New Orleans twist, every one of these we past, and I counted at least 50, had written on it some version of “Voodoo here today” and “Deliver to George W. Bush, White House, Washington, D.C., compliments of NOLA.” Two in particular, had been decorated in rich voodoo shrine fashion, with colorful wrapping, feathers and bows. Some residents, apparently, are not impressed with Mr. Bush’s initial indifference to the politically useless disaster.



Beyond that, had it not been for the sparse crowds and closed shops, one would hardly have known from walking the Quarter that there had been an incident. We stuck around until dark, when Bourbon St. shook itself off, stood up and declared that no little wind was going to avert it from its dedication to excessive drinking and gaudy t-shirts, then piled back into the rental car towards Mississippi.

After a quick shower, we met up with the crew at Waveland where we found an interesting meeting just dispersing. The Rainbow Family had gathered a broad collection of interested parties, including workers from other relief groups, locals, and freelancers, to discuss the future of what was growing out of the wreckage of the Gulf Coast. From Dan’s description, I’m sorry I missed it.

The discussion, open to anyone who wanted to join, began with each person describing their vision for what the joint efforts of the assembled ought to become. Some people described short-term goals, like providing showers to local residents, some talked about buying land and ensuring that the community that regrew was built on the kind of love and caring for each other and for the environment that was evident now.

Most disturbing was the news that a law had been passed since the storm that would allow the casinos, which had heretofore operated on barges, to build further inland. The concern was that a land grab was coming, with the casino operators positioned to scoop up thousands of acres of land that lifelong residents, all their possessions washed away by the storm, could no longer afford to pay taxes on. Apparently, rather than coming to the aid of their constituents, many counties were embracing this development, as a source of new “industry” and revenue.

Again, I wasn’t there for conversation, but I could easily relate to Dan’s righteous dismay at the situation. The situation echoes down the halls of history, events suddenly rendering resources available, powerful monied interests move in fast to grab what they can, and the poor and lawyerless are knocked on their backs.

To see it all unfold like this again would leave me completely despondent, I think, except for the presence of the group of people that were there last night, ready to dig in and fight. Good luck to them.

This morning saw an emotional departure of a good half the World Shelters team in Mississippi, Dan, Mac, Todd, Jake and I all flying out to Seattle. We traded barbs and jokes as we packed, and speculated grimly on the course of Tropical Storm Wilma, now heading across the Yucatan towards Florida.

The team that remains behind has reinforcements coming in, and it sounds like some interesting developments are in the offing, but I’ll just have to read about them on this blog, by another author. Thanks to all there who helped me be a part of this, thanks to those who remain behind still fighting and good luck to the good people of the Gulf Coast.

One last picture. This is from the plane, looking down on Biloxi. Lots of blue roofs. Lots of blue roofs.