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Flying home from New Orleans a couple weeks ago, the four of us kept asking each other, “So, do you have your sound byte ready for when everyone asks you how it went?” And none of us did. Not at all.
We went to Louisiana with Frank Fanto, local friend and building contractor, to participate in some small piece of the ongoing rebuilding effort still going on three years after Hurricane Katrina (and a year after storms Gustave and Ike did yet more damage.) This was, I believe, Frank’s fifth rebuilding trip. The whole situation down there has really moved him. He has taken local high school students, skilled craftspeople and folks like ourselves who just wanted to help however we could. This was intended to be an MCJC trip, and, I suppose, in the open-ended way that we are a community together, it kind of was.
Lucky me, I traveled with three of my closest friends: Donna Feiner, Cathie Mellon and Lyla Nathan (from Santa Rosa – Mickey’s dearest friend in the world, and one of mine as well.) Lucky for New Orleans, Donna is a plumber and electrician, and Cathie knows her way around these things as well. As to me, well, Cathie and Donna tease me, remembering a time that they were working together installing a skylight in Cathie’s roof, while I sat up there with the tin snips, making earrings out of flashing scraps… Lyla’s no carpenter either, but she’s a good, hard-working, sensible pal.
Frank warned us all before we went that we shouldn’t expect to be busy all the time, that things there are chaotic, that jobs he was hearing about before we left might not materialize when we were there, that we might not be able to find materials, that he wasn’t sure where we’d sleep or what we’d eat. Still, he said, he felt sure that we’d leave things at least a tiny bit better than they would have been if we didn’t come at all. And just showing up makes a difference to people there.
The first time (or two?) that Frank brought folks down to New Orleans to volunteer, they participated in a Habitat program. This didn’t work so well for a variety of reasons, and as he has stayed involved, Frank has connected with various people who are involved in smaller scenes. So he was passing e-mails on to us from various folks: someone someplace was going to need help with something or other, and someone else had offered us a place to sleep. Off we went. We really didn’t know what to expect, so why have any expectations?
Frank met us at the New Orleans airport. After a coffee and beignet in the French Quarter (the first time that any of us girls had been in New Orleans!) we crashed on the floor of someone’s beautifully-renovated, totally empty house in Arabi, next to the Ninth Ward. Just walking around the next morning we got a little of the lay of the land. A woman pulled up next to us and let down her car window. “Are you volunteers? My son-in-law needs help…” (We gave her Frank’s cell number.) Walking into the Arabi Store (great biscuits and grits!) the woman behind the counter said, “Are you volunteers?” We could see houses in all states of rubble and resurrection. In the famed Ninth Ward, once a teeming ghetto, half the lots were empty, grassy. It was an odd mix of slum and pasture. On every phone pole were flyers advertising demolition, mowing, haulage, construction of every kind. Three years after Katrina, the city was pouring sidewalks in front of the house where we stayed.
In the morning we set out to the bayou country, an hour and a half away. We were bound for Isle de Jean Charles, a tiny strip of land accessible by about a mile-long road. The roadbed was washing away and was just two skinny lanes with water lapping up on both sides. The island itself was like a little berm, rising just inches above the swamp water all around. It had a single street, maybe a mile long, houses or remains of houses on both sides. All the houses standing were on poles eight or ten feet in the air. And there was almost nothing growing – dead cypress trees, a bit of grass, and an oil refinery in the distance. It was a pretty grim and surreal scene.
The island is the home of an unofficial band of Houma Indians. We went to a small but intact elevated house, where we had been asked by the Chief to raise a water heater to the second floor and install it. To do so, a little deck needed to be built and a room framed around it. The house belonged to an elderly couple. We met the old man, who chatted with us a bit with what little English he knew. We worked there for two days, got the water heater put up and the room framed in. Lyla and I bent a million nails, and we started calling ourselves the Twisted Nails. It was warm and sunny. And the oddest thing was: the old couple whose house we were working on never offered us a glass of water. In the afternoons their neighbors (mostly relatives, I think) came over and drank coffee on their upstairs deck, and they never introduced us, much less invited us up for a cup. I sometimes think that our whole trip would have been different if they had.
I wasn’t offended or anything. Certainly none of us expected any big thanks. But we got to talking about it. It was weird. Maybe they didn’t have enough cups. Maybe they were embarrassed that they needed help. Maybe so many volunteers had floated through that they were just sick of being friendly. Maybe that’s just not how they do things. We just started to realize that we really didn’t understand the scene we were in. And that, as much as you think you don’t have any expectations, well, expectations crop up… At some point we learned that the old woman was Chief Albert’s sister. Hmmm, interesting…
We spent another day nailing up siding on another house, belonging to Chris, a young man who is paralyzed and raising a young niece and nephew. He was just as friendly and outgoing as the first couple was retiring. And he was a ferocious worker himself, moving plywood sheets and power-washing them from his wheelchair. An impressive guy. Still, it seemed like when local cars passed by and people saw us, they glared. Or maybe we were getting a little paranoid.
Back in New Orleans we showed up at the Arabi Community Center, a beehive of cooking, free clothing, legal aid, computer classes and more, all in a kind of hollowed-out warehouse. The whole thing was run by a speedy guy named Iray, who had apparently come down from the Northeast after Katrina and more or less single-handedly gotten this whole operation going. We heard that he himself was about to get evicted by the city from a FEMA trailer and might end up homeless.
It didn’t seem like there was much of a plan. In a neighboring building Iray and Co. wanted to set up some clothes washing facilities. Frank and another Coast guy had worked on it a year ago, and everything lay just where they had left it. Donna and Cathie dug in. Meanwhile Lyla and I tried to help out in the kitchen, where they were preparing a lunch to serve to the neighborhood. There were a million volunteers all over the place. At one point a visiting reporter (from Free Speech Radio News) came up to me and said, “Give me something to do, please!” I pointed to a cutting board of onions and peppers, already chopped. “Here,” I said, “chop these finer.” (Why was I giving orders at all? Just how I am, as you all know…)
The wash machines got kind of hooked up. Lyla and I taped and mudded the ceiling there. Stuff got done, sort of. Would another layer of mud ever be applied? Would the water be turned on? Hard to tell. We all got kind of dejected. Frank said at one point, speaking of the ongoing work of rebuilding New Orleans, “The era of the volunteer is over.”
And it probably is. They probably don’t need a bunch of smiley Twisted Sisters showing up from California. Or there needs to be some planning to make use of the likes of us. Or whatever. Not my area of expertise, by any means, how to rebuild a destroyed city (a destroyed city abandoned by its country, a destroyed city which keeps getting re-destroyed, even as the volunteers pour in, a destroyed city which itself is the poster child, while a whole region of even poorer places are completely forgotten…)
What I find myself thinking about is a little more personal. I think I’ve always imagined that there is some value to just showing up in a place of sorrow or destruction. But one morning I was eating my grits and biscuits at the Arabi Store, looking at the two styrofoam boxes they came in, the foam coffee cup and plastic fork and knife, the foil butter wrapper – and I thought, “I may actually be making more of a mess than I’m cleaning up here.” Or to put it differently, while there is no end to need in our world, it may be that in most of them there is nothing at all I can do to help, even with all good will and energy. I’ve always believed in living a life of service (to whatever degree I’ve actually lived out that belief.) In Louisiana I confronted the unpleasant underside of that belief – a kind of arrogance which says, “Of course they need me here.”
Back home, I feel humbled. I think of the various situations of need into which I’ve dropped myself over the years, including my beloved Cape Town. What do I actually have to offer in any of these places?
The answer isn’t nothing. In our week in Louisiana, we installed a water heater for an elderly couple, framed a room, put up siding on the house of a paralyzed man, plumbed a bunch of washers and dryers, taped and mudded a ceiling and put nicely minced onions and peppers into a cole slaw. Frank is probably right – things are probably a little better down there on account of our showing up. He’s probably right as well when he says that the whole city is being rebuilt by volunteers: if not us, then who?
Still, showing up in someone else’s trouble is a complicated business. Sometimes I hear Rabbi Tarfon in my head (Pirkei Avot 2:16): “Yours is not to complete the work, but neither are you free to desist from it.” Today I wonder… Maybe there are times when desisting is the work. Maybe the job is to find the places in the world where I really can offer something of use, and to live with my helplessness when I can’t. As promised, I have no sound byte to offer here, no punchy conclusion. I’m glad I went. It’s always great to be in a new place, always a happy thing to be with my friends. I learned a lot. But it wasn’t quite the Torah I expected. And I guess, like any good Torah study, I’m mostly left with more questions.
– Rabbi Margret Holub
© 2009 Rabbi Margaret Holub
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Updated 04/30/2009 (rge)