“My heart feels like a house and what’s inside needs to be gutted out – that’s what it feels like on the inside.” I heard these words from man named Thomas* who lived his whole life in New Orleans. A man who had been forced to leave his home in a public housing complex after Hurricane Katrina struck, a man with two young daughters and a family displaced all over the country, a man who tap danced with homemade tap shoes at the Common Ground Collective open mic night and who doodled with colored pencils during his security shift. Although I only had one conversation with him, and we lived under the same roof for only one week, these words have stuck with me and his story has replayed itself in my mind since my stay in New Orleans.
I’ve traveled to the Gulf Coast region several times since Hurricane Katrina to explore, rebuild, and hear the stories of Katrina’s victims. I’ve worked with Emergency Communities in St. Plaquemines Parish and St. Bernard’s Parish, and I worked with the Common Ground Collective in the Ninth Ward of New Orleans. I’ve gutted houses, ripped up floors, played with children and talked to the elderly, served and delivered food, facilitated bingo games, slept in tents and on cots and made dozens of friends from all over the world. While I have no plans to return to New Orleans in the near future, I dearly hope that when I do, even as a tourist, I will maintain a deep connection to the Crescent City.
Nowadays, walking or driving through the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans feels like a trek through a war zone. National Guard tanks patrol the residential streets lined with rust and splintering wood; dilapidated, crumbling houses stand one after the next, their roofs askew and plunging down toward the shingles strewn on the ground. Weeds grow wildly among crushed cars, tricycles, torn furniture. The word “Baghdad” is spray painted onto the sides of many houses. The only difference is that these streets belong to the United States of America, not Iraq. With the added troops, the US has spent over $400 billion in its relentless war on Iraq & Afghanistan1, which has been going on for four years. Meanwhile George Bush allegedly signed a check of $116 billion for relief to Katrina victims: an amount that would cover a little over one year of the Iraq war. However, this money has yet to be seen by the citizens of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. About 2/3 of this money has been used for debris removal and other short-term projects, with about 35$ billion set aside for long term projects, 42% of which has been spent. It’s true that there have been allocation problems within the local governments, but the federal government has not done much to oversee these federally backed programs. For example, the “Road Home Program”, which is managed locally but created by Congress, managed to distribute checks to only 630 citizens 18 months after Katrina2.
When I was working in Plaquemines Parish, I stayed at a community center in a coastal fishing town called Buras. Every day, a few other volunteers and I drove 40 minutes to neighboring Port Sulphur to play with children at the Diamond FEMA trailer park. Diamond is nicknamed “450”: a reference to the 450 identical FEMA trailers dispersed throughout a vast expanse of gravel and security guards.
Before I arrived on my first day, I had been warned by other volunteers at Emergency Communities that working at Diamond was a tough job: the kids were rowdy and sometimes disrespectful. While I found this description to be more or less true, I became friends with a lot of the children, and I tried to put the situation in perspective: these were young people of all ages, living in extremely close quarters with no place to play (until Home Depot donated a big, colorful playground in the middle of May). These children, the majority of whom were black, were also acutely aware of racial tensions. I remember one girl talking about the security guards, and mentioning as a side note, ‘Yeah, they don’t like the black kids’. Although they’re young, these children are conscious of their circumstances; they know who they are, they know what their lives used to be like, and they realize how their position - low-income children waiting in a trailer park for livable homes - fits into the greater scheme of racism and government neglect in the Gulf Coast post-Katrina.
While at Diamond, I took a special liking to an adorable five-year-old with pig-tails named Alicia*. I met her one day outside the community center trailer, when she approached me, sobbing. I asked her what was wrong, and she told me her mother and grandmother had gone out and left her alone. She was scared to walk back home herself, so I picked her up and carried her back to a cousin’s house, down the makeshift gravel street. On the way, she slowly stopped crying and bluntly told me she was scared of getting raped. I thought I had misheard her, so I asked her to repeat what she had just said. Now I regret doing so. Apparently, a small child had been raped at Diamond, and all the kids knew about it. Alicia, a little girl who has only been on this earth for five years, not only knew what rape was, but was frightened, rightfully so, that it could happen to her in her own neighborhood.
When I hear things like this, or see places like Diamond, I’m overcome with an immense sense of disbelief: this is the United States, we are not living in a Third World country. How could the United States, a country that prides itself on equal opportunities for all, allow so many of its own citizens to completely lack resources and mobility, and be forced to live in situations of such poverty? Most Americans have no sense of what Third World poverty is, but even more disturbingly, we don’t realize that places like Diamond and other areas in post-Katrina New Orleans and its outlying parishes undoubtedly are Third World America. When we think of the “Third World”, although this term is slowly becoming outdated, we generally think of the Global South: entire countries in Africa, Latin America, or Southeast Asia that are still developing and lack access to clean water and technology, among many other resources. The presence of such living conditions in the United States, the quintessence of the developed world, is astounding. It is also eerily telling of the reality of the US class system – it actually exists.
New Orleans is such a culturally-rich city, chock-full of art, jazz, spicy Cajun food, and loving people, but it’s also part of the American South: a region where one can still feel the impact of a long legacy of slavery and racism. And the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina unveiled and reinforced some terrifying truths of the United States’ inequalities.