Rebuilding Hope in New Orleans

Rebuilding Hope in New Orleans
January 27, 2006

I never got to New Orleans before this service trip. Not even to the Lutheran Youth Gatherings, though they must have been amazing. This was one thought I had among many as we walked and drove around the streets of this devastated city.

During the first week of Christmas Break, Stephanie Friant, Joe Genau, Kathleen Owens (MTS) and I traveled to New Orleans to participate in cleanup and rebuilding, joining efforts coordinated by the St. Charles Area Presbyterian Church program known as RHINO—Rebuilding Hope in New Orleans. Our host congregation was in a less-damaged neighborhood with a former mansion-turned-education wing converted into housing for work groups.

We started by hauling relief and clean-up donations to Berean Presbyterian Church in the central city area, where people were just beginning to return to their homes. The congregation had not worshipped together from the time of the hurricane until the last Sunday in Advent. They were now also ready to resume their Head Start program and distribute donations out of their fellowship hall. In addition to floodwater, a recently-remodeled parsonage had to be partially gutted due to storm damage.

Most of the week, however, was devoted to hauling out damaged furniture and completely gutting two houses in the Gentilly neighborhood. This area experienced damage from the storm as well as 8-10 feet of water from levee breakage. Cars and even semi-trucks were completely damaged, and boats tilted against anything they happened to land on when the water subsided. After a month of being unable to enter the area, the combined effects of a muddy flash flood, high temperatures, and no electricity rapidly accelerated the mold growth and extent of damage to the houses. Food in refrigerators turned to toxic, leaking sludge.

The Brown family owns two houses next to each other in this area; the adult daughter and her children live next door to the parents and high-school aged son. The father recently had back surgery, and the whole family had little help to begin on their own. Of two houses’ worth of possessions, only a cupboard’s worth of glass keepsakes could be salvaged, and one photo album. A six-foot tall, thirty-foot long mountain of former belongings piled up in the street, waiting for the garbage truck. He told us the memories associated with each item as he watched us pulling them from the house. It was a life laid bare to strangers, and he was still a gracious host.

We learned from the Brown family that week what many people have struggled with: why would anyone want to return to these neighborhoods? It is the community, he said, built up over so many years, as much as it is having no other place to go. His house had been through seven floods and two fires and each time he rebuilt, just like his neighbors. They weren’t sure if they would even be allowed to rebuild this time, or if the city would condemn and bulldoze the area. Still, they chose to get started. Once torn out to the studs, the frame would be treated against mold and reconstructed. Just like before.

Later in the week we found ourselves in the now-famous Lower 9th Ward, which took the impact of the breaking levees hardest. The wreckage showed the force of the water: splintered house compressed against splintered house. Who could survive?

Elsewhere in town were relatively affluent patches of ‘normalcy.’ Here, it was a ghost town. In all the war-torn cities where I have worked before, no curfew-induced ghost town was ever like this. In Hebron, you hear children call to you from behind their shuttered windows. You see kites flying from ruins. Not here. Here there were no children.

In among the houses of this district were the churches. The impact of seeing so many destroyed churches on four seminary students is almost beyond words. How is it harder to witness these than even the thousands of houses destroyed? But there were dozens of them. These had been simple buildings, wood and brick; these had been the predominantly black and predominantly poor neighborhoods, the realities of structural racism surrounding us, made plain by the storms. These churches mostly did not say ‘ELCA’ or ‘PCUSA’ on the sides; they were names of Pentecostal, evangelical, or independent churches mostly. I wondered how they would be rebuilt. I wondered if our churches would be sharing our resources to help them rebuild. And I simply wondered where the churches’ people were, how many could have survived.

As we stood in the streets, I thought, the sky was fittingly dark for this. It felt like death.

Still, death is not forever for those of faith, and we were constantly reminded of this in the relationships we developed with people throughout the week. People were filtering in. Children would be coming back during Christmas break, volunteer groups were booked for weeks after our departure from RHINO, even a little night life was returning to the French Quarter. Berean would celebrate Christmas ‘at home,’ and our host church assembled its annual Christmas chorale, complete with orchestra.

None of us wanted to leave, but hope was bigger than us and would continue beyond us. I do not know what New Orleans will look like a few years in the future, just like I did not know it in the past. I have only known it for seven days in between. But I hope that I can know it, and heal it, more.