The Politics of Katrina

While sorting books, we met the AmeriCorps team that is working in New Orleans (more on AmeriCorps below), so I am now a bit more qualified to talk about the politics of that area.

Hands On Gulf Coast -- formerly run by Hands On USA and now by Hands On Network -- has a core mission, which is to rebuild the community by rebuilding houses so that people can move back into them. You have doubtless heard of the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans, the poorest and most flooded area of the city. Hands On does not rebuild houses in the Lower Ninth Ward, because there is some probability that the whole area will be demolished in the end anyway, and my guess is that any other volunteer organizations in the city have the same policy. Thus, no one can move back into houses in the Lower Ninth Ward (unless they can pay for a contractor) and so there is no community there for people to return to, which is a bit of a self-propogating cycle (the government says the area might not be rebuilt, so the houses aren't rebuilt, so there's no community there, so there's no reason to rebuild the area, etc.).

The houses in New Orleans have much more mold than those in Biloxi, since the water stood for weeks. In Biloxi, there is usually a coating of various kids of mold on the surfaces. In New Orleans, the mold is three-dimensional, a thick carpet of mold on the walls and studs and everything else. Thus, people cannot "camp out" in or near their homes, as they can in Biloxi in FEMA trailers and the like.

Another issue is AmeriCorps itself. This is the 12th year of the AmeriCorps program, which sends several thousand 18-24-year-olds around the country in teams of 10 to work with nonprofit agencies. The government gives them uniforms (grey shirts and tan cargo pants), medical insurance, and $12 a day. In return, they spend 10 months sleeping on the floor and eating peanut butter sandwiches, doing community service all over the country. They tutor children in underprivileged schools, build houses, and do disaster relief.

According to the AmeriCorps teams I have talked to, there is a significant probability that AmeriCorps will "get the axe" next year, so that this will be its last year. (They told me it was to make room for tax cuts for companies, but that's another issue entirely.) Thus, 80% of the teams will spend the last few months on the Gulf Coast, doing hurricane relief. This is probably partly to do as much rebuilding as possible before the program is cut, but it is also to show the government how effective the program is and to try to convince the powers that be to keep AmeriCorps going.

In other news, it wasn't a million books sitting around waiting to be sorted; there were a million books all in boxes waiting to be sent out to schools and children who didn't have any. We shipped out about 150,000 books to schools and children's organizations in the Gulf Coast where either the books were destroyed by the hurricane, or just they didn't have many books to begin with. This organization that we were working with, First Book, gives books to children -- not for them to borrow, but for them to keep. We learned that 61% of low-income children don't have a single book in their house at their reading level. That's pretty sad, and that's what we were working to fix.

Actual surveys

Today I did surveying again, and this time we actually got to survey people, rather than just advertising a meeting! The survey is 52 questions with demographic information, and then questions on what the person liked about Biloxi before the hurricane, what they think the highest priorities should be after the hurricane, and what they think the most pressing issues for the city are. The idea of the surveys is that the Coordination and Relief Center will compile the information about what the citizens of East Biloxi want and give that information to the mayor and city planners, so that they will either have to take that information into account when they plan what will happen next, or they will have to knowingly go against what the city's people want.

We first went to two trailer parks, which are not trailer parks in the traditional sense, but just fields full of FEMA trailers that have sprung up after the hurricane. This was to survey people who had lived in East Biloxi before the hurricane, but who were living elsewhere after the storm. Most of the people were not home -- who would stay in a tiny trailer on a Saturday if they didn't have to -- but I surveyed one woman who was home. She was 20 and had two small children, both about two or three years old, and they were all home watching Saturday morning cartoons. She was African-American, and worked cleaning casinos before the hurricane. I realized later that I'm 20, too, so we were the same age, but living very different lives.

The population in Biloxi is about 15% Vietnamese, and one of the two open places for lunch in East Biloxi is this Vietnamese sandwich shop called Le Bakery. Everyone raves about their sandwiches, and indeed, they are very delicious; we had them for lunch. They have marinated meat and shredded carrots and onions and some sort of exotic leafy stuff, which is quite delicious, especially when you are ravenously hungry.

In the afternoon we did more surveying, this time on streets in East Biloxi. We interviewed a woman who was clearly very well-to-do, and another woman who was clearly less well off, and therefore much more interesting. She and her husband had nine children, the youngest of whom was 15, and she had gone to college on a basketball scholarship. The first floor of their house had been flooded up to the ceiling, and the roof had blown off and landed in front of the house, where they were using it as a shed for the tools that the husband was using to fix the house.

Although it's usually entirely obvious, we are always supposed to ask what the person would like us to put down for gender and race/ethnicity. So we asked this woman, who was a very dark-skinned African-American, what she would like us to put down for race/ethnicity. "White," she said. "No, Black, honey," she laughed. She was very interested in the survey, and labored over which of the 12 choices she should choose as the three most important.

I mention this only because you might think that a 20-minute, 52-question survey would not be people's favorite thing to do on a Saturday when there is clearly a lot of other work to be done. But these people are really invested in their community, and want to see it become a better place. Many people answered the questions very carefully, and really thought about what was most important for the city. When we told them about the meetings, they expressed genuine interest in going.

In contrast, the next woman agreed to do the survey, but really wasn't that interested in it. She just breezed right through it and didn't even bother to have me read off the 12 options; she just told me what she thought was most important and I checked it off. I am not sure if this is because she was not invested in the city, she had something she wanted to be doing instead, she thought the survey was useless, or she was in some sort of chemically-induced state.

I mention this last possibility because the street we were surveying was apparently the big street for drug dealing in East Biloxi. You wouldn't know by looking at it; it looked like a perfectly nice, though significantly storm-damaged, neighborhood. But everyone we surveyed said crime was the most pressing issue for the city to address, both before and after the hurricane, and some complained specifically about street-level drug dealing (primarily crack, apparently).

The last guy was very interesting. We had talked to him at the beginning of the afternoon, and he asked us to come back later since he was busy just then, but very interested. Then he saw that I was holding a detailed map of the area, with every house drawn on it, so he asked to make a photocopy.

Weird thing #1: He wanted to copy the map.
Weird thing #2: He had a photocopier in his FEMA trailer.

We let him copy it, and we went back later. It turned out that he had a Master's degree (there wasn't even a box to check for any education beyond completion of college) and was working on a plan to turn his property and the adjacent ones into affordable condominiums. His theory was very interesting:

In order to live in that area of Biloxi, it is essential that the house be built up off the ground, so that if it floods, it doesn't flood the house. If every single person has to build their house up that far, that's prohibitive; people don't have the resources to do that. But if you put in condos, then everyone above the first story (which I suppose could be a parking garage or something other than living space) is just fine. This is a great idea. He even showed us the preliminary plans, which he had printed out on those big blueprints-size sheets of paper.

So, that was that. It was a good day.

Tomorrow four Williams students of which I am one, five long-term volunteers, and five Berkeley students will go five hours away to do a different project, where we will be until Thursday. There is this organization that distributes books to low-income areas, and over the years it has distributed 40 million such books. After the hurricane, it received one million books to distribute to the Gulf Coast, but it had nowhere to put them since all the warehouses in the Gulf Coast were destroyed, so it put them all in this one big warehouse, and there they have sat for six months.

Anyway, Hands On agreed to send people to sort the books. So I am going to go and sort one million books. It is going to be totally awesome. We are going to sort books all day, and live in a cabin in the woods with hiking trails at night, and the town is going to give us meals, because that is just how awesome they think we are. So I won't be in Biloxi for the next few days, but I will be going to the area of greatest need, sorting books in an effort to expand literacy.

Clearly, it's unlikely that I'll have Internet access. Six Williams sophomores have agreed to take over the posting at EphBlog, so go there and comment and support their noble efforts at continuing the Katrina blogging tradition. I have every indication that it will be stellar.

The elementary school

Today a group of 10 Williams students went to the local elementary school to do "tutoring." Unfortunately for us, the most pressing need at the school today was sorting books, so we didn't get to talk to individual children or do any tutoring. However, I love sorting, and I love books, so it was all right. This school had a lot of its books destroyed in the hurricane, which was terrible, and then it got a huge number of donated books from everywhere in the country, which is also overwhelming.

We went through perhaps 20 boxes of books, sorting them by type (picture book or chapter book) and genre (part of a series, has "God" in the title, Disney or television character books) and boxing them up again. The good thing is that the books are very well sorted. The bad thing is that we didn't really accomplish anything tangible; we just moved books around.

My job, which I took upon myself, was to collect and sort books that were in a series. There were many series I had heard of and read myself (Babysitters' Club, Nancy Drew, Boxcar Children, Goosebumps), many I hadn't ever seen before, but that other people knew well (Alex Mack, Captain Underpants, Mary-Kate and Ashley), and many that someone had clearly started, thinking it would take off, that flopped (I don't even remember their titles). The others were unpacking boxes and separating picture books and chapter books, with several sub-genres within those. Every time they saw a series book, they would give it to me, and I would sort them. I even put the ones with numbers (Babysitters' Club, Boxcar Children, Goosebumps) in order. There were, for example, five copies of the book wherein Karen, the younger sister of Kristy in the Babysitters' club, wins the county spelling contest and gets second place in the state spelling contest. Apparently this is a book parents really like to buy, or perhaps one they really like to discard and send to hurricane victims.

We worked in the school library, and the librarian was quite possibly The Meanest Librarian Ever. Four classes came in to get books while we were there -- first, second, third, and fifth grades -- and if I were in any of those classes, I bet I would be well on my way to disliking books. Every time a child expressed any sort of interest in a book, the librarian yelled at the child. A boy picked up a book off of the table to look at it? "Did I give you permission to touch the books on that table? Get away from that table and be quiet." A first-grade girl tried to check out a chapter book. "This is not a first-grade book. Put it away and go stand in the corner. You won't be checking out any books today." I kid you not; this happened repeatedly, and there are other examples along the same lines.

When we got back, Caitlin and I went for a short run, and at the end we encountered the rest of the group, who were going to walk to the beach, so we joined them. "The beach" in Biloxi is certainly a beach, but you would not want to take your family there, as the beach is condemned and swimming is prohibited. The sand is in big piles in rows, like really long sand dunes, from the machines that scoop up the sand and filter out all the debris. On the ground and in the water there is also a lot of debris -- broken glass, pieces of insulation, and large identifyable objects. Today, for instance, we found:

- a bumper cars car -- seated two, still had the pole that touches the ceiling attached
- a Hooters nametag for someone named Brooke, who was a "trainer"
- the top half of a teddy bear, with a ribbon still tied around its neck

We walked back along highway 90, which is right next to the ocean and is where all the businesses, hotels, and stately homes were. As we were walking along the sidewalk, we came upon something that looked like a marble gravestone right there on the sidewalk next to the highway, which said essentially, "Jefferson Davis's House." We looked up, and indeed, there was the shell of a stately mansion there overlooking the ocean. There were the remnants of a nice entryway, with marble stairs and pieces of fluted pillars, and marble blocks that informed the viewer that this was the home of Jefferson Davis, the only president of the Confederacy. Interesting. His house is on some nice grounds, with nice trees and grass and such. The house, though, is not so nice anymore.

We walked back past the Biloxi Colosseum, a big round convention center where FEMA's headquarters is currently located, which is across a small road from Jefferson Davis's grounds. Outside there are literally thousands of chairs -- first stacks of thousands of folding chairs, then stacks of chairs that stack on top of each other -- which are just laying out there, discarded, because they are rusty. Assuredly they were stored inside and got wet, and now no one will use them again, at least not in the convention center, because they are rusty. I suppose many people have problems of this kind.

The things you find are really strange -- the nametag, the bumper car, the teddy bear -- but you have to remember how they got there. The water came through people's houses and tore the walls out, and then floated up all of the objects in the house. When the water receded, the objects either came to rest on the ground, or floated out to sea, where they will either remain or come in on an incoming tide and come to rest on the beach. Did I mention this already? This is my favorite fact, so I'm going to offset it by itself:

There is a major shipping lane for container ships that runs eight miles off the coast of Biloxi. When they dredged it after the storm, they found an eighteen-wheeler tractor trailer out there -- full of live grenades.

Now, I didn't get this from the guy who was running the dredger, so I'm not sure how exactly a ship managed to pull up an eighteen-wheeler, or why (and if) live grenades are actually shipped around in eighteen-wheelers in this country. However, it is probably true that a large truck was found in the shipping lanes eight miles off of Biloxi, and that, my friend, is pretty amazing.

Animal rescue

Today I did "animal rescue" with another volunteer and the long-term volunteer that does it every day. First, we organized the warehouse where they keep the cat and dog carriers and cages and everything that they can give out to people, including assembling a lot of cat and dog carriers. We really made the warehouse (which was the space under stadium bleachers) look much better.

Then the "animal rescue" began in earnest. We had a certain section of East Biloxi to cover, so we drove down every street, and every time we saw a dog or cat, we stopped. We asked the people nearby (because there were almost always people nearby) who owned the animal, to which the answer was usually "I do." We asked them if they would like food for the animal, to which the answer was usually "oh, that would be great, thanks," so we gave them cat or dog food -- and a lot of it -- from the supply in the warehouse. We also asked if the person wanted to keep the animal, and usually they did, but in a few cases they were just feeding it because it was a stray that hung out on their property, so we put them on a list to come get the animal next week. (At the end of March, they will drive a cargo van load of animals "up north" to be adopted.)

People were usually very happy to learn that they could get free food for their pets. It is really hard for people to feed their pets, since they often don't have work, so it costs a lot. One guy had seven dogs, including some big ones. We gave him two really big bags of dry dog food. He told us about his grandmother, who had "a lot of cats" and probably needed food for them, so we went to her house and even though she wasn't there, we left 12 small bags of dry cat food on her porch (with a business card so she'd know who left it).

For people who were keeping animals but had a significant need for food for them, they go on a list of people who will get weekly deliveries of food. So each week, someone from the organization will drop off one or two big bags of dog or cat food. That's pretty neat. I guess there are a lot of people there who really care about animals, and who have donated all of this food so that "Katrina dogs" and cats won't go hungry.

One guy had a dog that he was pretty sure had heart worms. Heart worm treatment is very expensive, but there is some new government grant where if the dog is a "Katrina dog" -- essentially any dog living in the Gulf Coast during the hurricane -- it can get heartworm treatment for free (so long as the treatment starts by the end of March). This guy really liked his dog, but he had no money, so he was really glad that this program existed, and the long-termer animal rescue guy we were with helped to set him up with an appointment at the vet, and make sure the treatment would be reimbursed.

This guy was living with his uncle, because although they lived on the same street, the nephew with the dog had lost everything, and the uncle's house was basically rebuilt by now, because he had flood insurance. The uncle invited us into his house, where we sat around the table and talked with him and the nephew about the dog and whatever else. He asked us, "can you believe the water in here was seven feet deep?" And you really can't. In most houses, seven feet is about the level of the ceiling, so basically the whole first floor was full of water, like a fishtank. Can you imagine that in your house? It's almost inconceivable, the ocean in your living room, in your kitchen, all of your stuff saturated and filled with water. But this guy had flood insurance, and the insurance company paid up, so he had, in the last seven months, put in a lot of work and gotten his house back to normal.

The nephew had stayed in his house during the hurricane, and when the water got to a certain level, he realized he had to get out of his house, because it was going to flood completely. So he put the dog under one arm and swam, swimming with one arm, across the street to his parents' house. The problem (one among many, obviously) was that the street was essentially a river with flowing debris, so he had to time it just right when he was going to cross the river/street, so he wouldn't get killed by the debris floating by at a high rate of speed. Luckily, he and the dog both got to his parents' house, and somehow they all survived.

Others were not so lucky. In Biloxi, since the tidal surge was about 25 feet, many people went up into their attics as the water was rising, and then when it rose into the attic, there was nowhere to go, so they drowned in their attics. (Those who survived by staying in attics that didn't flood say they'll always keep an axe in their attic from now on.) In New Orleans, people went up to their attics when the levees broke, and while the water didn't get up to the attic, it also didn't recede for two weeks, so they starved to death in their attics after two weeks up there. (The water receded in Biloxi within about 12 hours, if not fewer.)

Yesterday we talked to a Biloxi Public Works worker who had horrible stories to tell. He had been a first responder, so he walked along the streets immediately after the hurricane. He had personally found seven bodies. I cannot imagine how horrifying and scarring that would be. His friend was in a rescue boat, and his cat jumped out of it into the water. The friend dove in after his cat, and never came back to the surface. Down the road from where we were, a Vietnamese family of 13 all died in their house.

I thought that the people who stayed in their houses during the hurricane were pretty stupid. I mean, there was a manditory evacuation, and it was a Category 5 hurricane with the strongest part predicted to fall on southern Mississippi. How could people not leave? But today I heard a reason why.

People in Biloxi are very poor. I learned of one family that had $400 in the bank when the mayor ordered a manditory evacuation. If they left the city for however many days the hurricane would take, it would wipe out all of their savings to stay in a motel. So they couldn't afford to leave.

Of course, if they died in their house, the $400 wouldn't do them much good. Luckily for them, they survived.

In the afternoon, we were done at about 2:00 with the animal rescue, so we helped out a group that was doing mold. In the morning when the group entered the house, it was really moldy. A previous group had taken out all of the remaining furniture, bathroom fixtures, drywall (walls), actually everything but the studs (2x4s in the walls) and floorboards. Today's group's job was to scrape the mold off of everything that was left. Apparently this was one of the moldiest houses they had yet seen, with green, black, and white mold growing all over everything. But they scraped, brushed, and otherwise extracted all of the mold, and then vacuumed it up.

Our job in the afternoon was to wipe. We took a special mold-killing liquid, dipped our cloths in it, and rubbed every surface to get off the mold dust from the surfaces that they had scraped in the morning. The cloths got very dirty very quickly, so we changed them often, and we scrubbed down the whole house in about an hour. While we did this, we wore "respirators," which is essentially a gas mask, filtering out 99.97% of the particulate matter in the air. (They make you sound like Darth Vader, except harder to understand.) We wore gloves, but mine had holes, which I realized after a while (why are my hands getting wet?). Luckily it was mold dust mixed with mold-killing liquid.

It is interesting, this mold killing, because no one has ever studied how to do it before. FEMA and the EPA are going on this one study that was done on just three houses, which is kind of statistically ridiculous in terms of accuracy, but it's the only study to go on. The experts in mold came down and saw the Hands On process, though -- the scraping, wiping, and then painting over with mold-sealing-in paint -- and said it was way overkill and definitely enough, which apparently they knew. The question is what the happy medium is between, say, spraying Clorox on the mold (doesn't work) and the Hands On process (extremely effective) where it would kill a lot of mold without four days' labor on each house.

Apparently they are doing a study now with 106 identical houses in the same region, trying out the various methods of mold killing to see which one maximizes effectiveness with the least amount of labor. This seems like it could potentially be a statistically valid study, and probably will inform future mold killers.

In lighter news, we got prizes today for taking out the trash. I was sorting recyclables, and I got a prize for that, too: Bling. That's right, I said the word "bling." I got a Mardi Gras-like necklace with black plastic beads and a gold plastic medallion that says Cuervo on it. The Hands On folks found a big box of this kind of stuff when they were helping clean out one of the casinos after the hurricane, so they brought it home and hand the bling, if you will, out to the volunteers for noble reasons, such as sorting the recyclables. I think this necklace I am now wearing has some great significance, even if it is a cheap necklace sponsored by an alcohol company and looted from a casino.

I went running for half an hour today. It was great. I only got shouted at a few times, and I felt just great, since I haven't been doing much running at all. I wanted to run along the beach on Route 90, but wouldn't you know, Katrina had the nerve to tear up the whole sidewalk, so there is nowhere to run. So sad.

We are losing a few Williams kids, but we gained five new ones tonight, so we should have a good contingent here for the next week. The Williams group will be here until early Sunday morning, April 2. If you have nothing better to do (and really, what better do you honestly have to do than help the people who need your help the most?) you should really consider coming down sometime in the next two years. No, really, these organizations, and in particular Hands On, will be here for two years. The weather's great, the company is awesome, and the work and the people you meet will certainly be unforgettable. More on that later.