New Orleans- Alternative Spring Break 2010

I wrote this for my school newspaper about my experience in New Orleans...more to come later

On the last evening of the 2010 Alternative Spring Break trip to New Orleans, a group of students boarded the St. Charles Avenue street car to head back to their hostel. It was about 3 a.m. and when the car began rolling, a man decided to play some tunes on his acoustic guitar. He started playing the “Banana Boat Song,” first just the musical notes, then came the singing, then came the entire street joining him in unison. This diverse group of crooners included the old, young, drunk, tired, tourists, locals, white, black, and everything in between. As the old, rickety, wooden trolley made its way down the street, I couldn’t help but think of how incredibly resilient, heart warming, welcoming, beautiful, yet tragic this city is.


That last day began with a tour of the Ninth Ward and the Lower Ninth Ward, where much of the damage of Hurricane Katrina was sustained, and can still, five years later be seen, felt, smelled, and heard. In two cabs, we rode through the bumpy streets, looking at the vast destruction, listening to nothing but the movement of the car.

Many of us have seen the pictures and videos of what the city of New Orleans experienced during Katrina, but there is absolutely nothing that can prepare someone for viewing the damage up close.

There are people who still live in this area, but it is clear that progress has been excruciatingly slow. One house has what looks like new siding and looks sturdy, while the house right next door is crumbling, gutted out and boarded up, still bearing the mark of those who searched the house after the hurricane. As we drove further into the Ninth Ward, I could not help but wonder, where did all these people go? What happened to all of their belongings? Not the couches, chairs or lamps, but the family pictures, the homemade crafts, and the little details that used to make that deteriorating house, a home.

We made a couple of stops along the way. The first was the House of Dance and Feathers owned and directed by Ronald W. Lewis. From the outside, the house looked like a tiny shack, with a metal, slouching roof. The yard smelled like fresh cut grass in the summer. Lewis led us up the makeshift wooden ramp as he begins telling us his story. He began his collection before Katrina, but everything he had was lost. Yet, this doesn’t appear to have hindered this man’s spirit in the slightest. His small, but colorful and insightful museum is a cultural education center filled with costume items from Mardi Gras, small figurines of jazz singers, signs, masks, photographs, and front pages from area newspapers, which reported the devastation of Katrina. He was eager to explain to us what the items we were looking at, and it seemed to make his day that we visited and he was even more excited to take a group picture with all of us, asking us to e-mail it to him.

We continued on to the next stop of the day, which was what used to be part of the levee. We got out of the car and walked up to a rusted red wall of metal, surrounded by a pile rocks…this is what remains of that levee. On the other side is a swampy, flooded area, where houses and trees once stood. Stumps and branches of trees can still be seen jutting up through the water, but evidence of housing is impossible to see.

Our guide took us through the area where Brad Pitt’s organization, Make It Right is still in the process of building environmentally sound and hurricane safe houses. Some houses are already in use. Habitat for Humanity’s Musician’s Village was filled with colorfully lined streets of newly built homes. I spotted a group of people working on a house in the distance. This, combined with the ongoing construction by Make It Right is tangible evidence that the rebuilding of this lively, culturally rich city is still going on and can still use support.

As run down and abandoned as the Ninth Ward appeared, the Lower Ninth Ward looks like a vast, grassy and overgrown field. The occasional house is seen in disrepair. Mostly, though, what remains is little more than the staircase leading up to the missing front door, and some piles of bricks that used to serve as a foundation for someone’s home.

As we went over the bridge at the end of our tour, we rose over the levee, which looks spackled, and hardly larger than a retaining wall on a highway. We inquired of the driver, why organizations like Brad Pitt’s can’t help rebuild the levee system of the city, but it is under the care of the federal government.

Our driver though, said something that stuck with me. He explained that if private organizations like Habitat and Make It Right were allowed to fix the levee, “it would have been fixed a long time ago.”

This is a man saw the water rise up to the roofs of houses and showed us where people camped out on the bridge, with no where to go. As he continued to explain where the levee broke, where people camped out, how high the water rose, I couldn’t help but notice the frustration in his voice, to see the city he so loves and obviously cares greatly about, still being ignored, with people still suffering.