Summer 2006 Communtiy Service Trip to New Orleans

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Dear GDS people:

This is a message, sort of a report and debriefing if you will, intended for the parents of students who traveled to New Orleans as part of the GDS-Habitat for Humanity project last week. If you are a student, and your parents are not included in this email list, please forward the email to them. Thanks.

For those who don’t know me, I am one of the parent members of last week’s New Orleans expedition. I have an older son, Adrian, who graduated from the high school three years ago, and a 14-year old, Trevor, who just finished his freshman year. Although Trevor was too young to meet Habitat for Humanity’s age requirements, I went along on the trip anyway, figuring that it would be a worthwhile thing to do, and that GDS kids, parents, and teachers would be good company. I was not disappointed on either ground.

The trip was an amazing experience. Your youngsters worked hard, under difficult conditions. They gave of themselves to a desperate community far away with which they have no affiliation, and helped people, perhaps very different from themselves, who for the most part they will never meet. You should be proud of your kids. I know I am.

I hope you also appreciate the efforts of the staff members. With one exception, see below, I don’t want to single out any individuals, because I think it is more fitting with a project of this kind to focus on the group as a whole. It was a privilege to meet, and get to know, the GDS faculty who led this crew. Taking responsibility for several dozen teenagers traveling to another city to engage in potentially hazardous activity is no picnic; our teachers did it with grace, good humor, and firm control expertly disguised with a very soft touch. If the kids and teachers on this trip are in any respect representative of the school as a whole, it is safe to say that the GDS community is in good shape. And, leaving myself out of it, it must also be said that the parents who came long as full participants in this adventure are remarkable individuals who, among other things, appear to have relationships with their children that any one us would be envious of.

Before turning to a more detailed description of the week’s events, it is also important to note that we returned your kids to you without a single injury, at least as far as I am aware. We deserve no thanks for that; for the adults involved, bringing our students back home unharmed was our most basic responsibility. But given the activities in which we were engaged, and the conditions in which we worked, I for one am surprised that no one got hurt (I’m leaving out one of the parents who, despite impaling his foot with a nail, soldiered on for the rest of the week notwithstanding evident discomfort and pain). I am a firm believer in probability, and the odds of emerging without a single incident were, I think it is fair to say, quite low. Again, credit has to go to the staff supervisors, but I know they won’t be offended when I add that we appear, at least in this regard, to have been on the receiving end of a heavy dose of dumb luck.

* * * * *

Let me turn to a bit of a description of what transpired last week, starting at the beginning. I was on the Dulles flight to New Orleans, not the National flight. As might be expected from people this age, the kids were engaged in a lot of light-hearted banter and chit-chat on the airplane, which continued as we boarded the bus that was waiting for us on the New Orleans end. By the time we arrived about 30 or 40 minutes later at Camp Hope, the Habitat for Humanity facility (really just an abandoned school) that was to be our home, the bus was in a state of complete and utter silence. As we approached New Orleans, and entered St. Bernard Parish, we knew we were not in Kansas any more. I have never seen anything like it. Hundreds, thousands, of mangled cars piled on top of each other under freeway ramps. Huge shopping malls desolate with roofs missing. Boats and discarded fridges scattered all over the place. House after house, block after block, empty, with spray-painted Army and National Guard codes identifying the search unit and indicating whether and how many dead bodies had been found inside in the military’s initial post-Katrina sweep (e.g., “Georgia 3; 2 bodies in attic, dog dead”). And everywhere we looked, mountains and mountains of debris.

Camp Hope, which had opened only a few days before our arrival, is a elementary school that had been flooded, and totally gutted. When we arrived, there were no walls in the building, just “rooms” demarcated by blue tarps. We slept in cots, about a dozen or so per “room,” on concrete floors. By the time we left, one week later, numerous walls had been erected; along with other volunteers, some of our GDS kids and adults, after a full day of gutting houses, spent time putting up drywall.

(There is today only one operational school in St. Bernard Parish, an area the size of a county. Every kid in the Parish, of any age, goes there. Many teachers, who lost their homes, live in trailers in the schoolyard).

One of the ironies of the week is that while we spent our days in sweltering heat, one of the few things that functioned normally at Camp Hope was the AC in the dorms. At least in my room, we were all freezing at night.

The showers at Camp Hope were located in trailers in the parking lot. They actually worked pretty well. The toilets were few and far between, and left a lot to be desired. Personally, I preferred the portable units outside, but most of them disappeared about halfway through the week.

The food operation at Camp Hope was, like every other activity, run by volunteers, and it was in full swing much of the day, with down time from about 10pm to 3am. The first wave of alarms rang every morning at about 3:30am, as the breakfast crew got up to go to work and feed that day’s house-gutters and any St. Bernard residents who wanted to come by and get a free meal. Every day we were there, a team of GDS adults and kids was in the kitchen by 4:00am to help with the food operation. Everyone else woke up by 6:00am, to get dressed and have breakfast, grab a box-lunch, and board the buses for the work sites. There was no point to showering in the morning; by 9:00 or 9:30am you would be soaked with sweat.

Before boarding the buses, we all placed a set of clean clothes outside near the showers. Upon our return in the afternoon, we would have a shower and change before entering the dorm area. After a day of gutting, your clothes would be so disgusting that the unwritten rule was that no work clothes were allowed inside the building. Boots, goggles, gloves, and any other re-usable gear were left outside, at night under a tarp, to be reclaimed the next morning.

The house-gutting was the main activity, and the focus of our work. Before we began, we received some “training,” which consisted prominently of warning us that in almost every house we would run into at least one large, poisonous snake. When an intrepid volunteer asked what we should do upon encountering such a creature, we were told, “kill it.” As it turns out, we ran into no snakes the entire week. One useful piece of advice we received in training was that one of the first things we should do upon entering a house is to find the fridge (or fridges; some houses had two), and, if it was still closed, to duct-tape it shut so that it would not inadvertently open during our gutting (the fridge, being large and unwieldy, and potentially disgusting, was typically the last thing we removed from a house). At least in my work unit, we followed this advice, except for one fridge that, to our dismay, was lying open, face down, on the floor when we arrived.

Regarding the actual gutting, it is important to understand the context. St. Bernard Parish, or at least much if not most of it, was under about 12 feet of water (maybe more) for about 2 or 3 weeks, about 9 months ago. That means that the houses we were dealing with, the majority of which were quite modest and had only one story and maybe an attic, were more or less completely submerged by floodwaters. And those waters were, I’m told, a nasty mixture of fresh water from Katrina’s torrential rains, salt water from the broken levees, and oil and God knows what else, added into which was, presumably, a combination of human and animal corpses, and, I suppose, cars, trucks, etc., and whatever else was floating around.

The houses we entered were in more or less the same shape they were in when the waters receded back in September, and generally reflected the status of the house when its occupants fled to escape the storm. In one house, we found an entire, wrapped previously-frozen chicken, on the bathroom floor. It stank, to say the least. Presumably, the residents had it out to thaw for dinner when they were forced to evacuate. When water inundated the house over the next couple of weeks, the contents, even the heaviest things, floated and moved. So the chicken ended up on the bathroom floor. The living room couch might end up, say, standing vertically in the kitchen. Some of the washers and dryers had loads of clothes and water in them when we found them.

Upon entering a house, we first removed the doors (front, back, side ...), using an appropriate combination of crowbars, axes and/or sledgehammers. (After last week, I can attest to the veracity of the old saying that when you’re holding a hammer, the whole world looks like a nail. It’s even more true when you’re holding a sledgehammer). The most solid doors were used as ramps to get things out of the house. We also opened the windows to get air and light inside, so we could see and breathe. Windows that we were unable to open reasonably promptly were candidates for breaking; sometimes, a large window was the best avenue for moving large objects out of a house. Seeing and breathing were sometimes a bit tricky; many of us found that our goggles fogged up on occasion, and we all wore N95 dust masks at all times inside a house. The mandatory outfit of helmet, goggles, mask, long-sleeve shirt, long pants, work boots and gloves made things much hotter than they already were, and it was really, really hot. We consumed unbelievably large quantities of water.

Once doors and windows were taken care of, the next thing was to find the fridge or fridges and seal it or them with duct tape. Then the real work began. We systematically removed every object from the house. Every knife, fork, spoon, chair, table, bed, book, bureau, mattress, sofa, television, microwave, light fixture, washer, dryer, stove, oven, vacuum cleaner, kitchen counter, cabinet, wall picture, shirt, skirt, dress, pair of pants, tube of toothpaste, bottle of shampoo, bar of soap, pot, pan, plate, glass, mirror, shelf, gun (yes, we found guns), box of ammunition (if you have a gun, you’ll also have ammunition), syringe, oxygen tank (the neighborhood we were in was in significant part inhabited by elderly people who were not necessarily in the best of health), ... and, well, you get the picture. Keep in mind that every one of these items was, as noted, more or less under water for a couple of weeks or so almost a year ago. Some of the stuff just disintegrated in your hands when you tried to move it; all of it was pretty gross.

As you can imagine, some of this material required a bit of work to move. Gas stoves had to have the gas line severed with a hacksaw. Laundry machines needed hoses cut. Large pieces of furniture sometimes needed to be chopped into smaller chunks. All of it ended up on a mountain of garbage in front of the house. Managing that pile, keeping it growing vertically as opposed to horizontally, and maintaining an ever-shifting system of ramps to get stuff to the top of the pile presented a constant challenge.

But there were sometimes needles in the haystack. In a number of houses, we found a wedding album. Most of the photographs were unrecognizable, but some were not. We found potentially precious jewelry, and at least one wad of $20 bills. We found trophies and other memorabilia. Any item that we thought the owner might wish to preserve was placed, with considerable care, in a special pile apart from everything else. I think that every one of the four GDS work teams had some “bashers” who felt the thrill of the axe or sledgehammer, and some “sifters” who with great care tried to salvage what could be saved and might have some meaning for the homeowner.

Thank god for our sifters. At least for me, one of the most poignant moments of the entire week occurred when a homeowner showed up while we were gutting his house. He was an 86-year old man. His wife had died post-Katrina. This gentleman shows up at his home, and what does he see? A bunch of strangers basically tearing down the inside of his house, and treating his every possession like the trash that it had become. But he knew his house needed to be gutted if it was ever to be lived in again (that’s why he had signed up for the Habitat program), and although he was obviously distraught, he demonstrated extraordinary grace under the circumstances, warmly and affectionately thanking the kids for their volunteering. Observing this gentleman, several of the kids began to cry. A couple of kids in our group had lovingly saved a few things from the house, thinking that perhaps the owner would want them. It was an amazing experience to see this old man – who I gather had basically lost almost everything in the storm, and then lost his wife – go through these few remnants, and pick some out to keep and take away. A few of our kids (mostly girls) talked to him for a little while and treated him with such tenderness that I was deeply moved. There were some frustrating things about the week, but those few minutes when some of your kids comforted an old man they did not know and will never meet again is something I won’t easily forget.

(Just to give you a sense of some of the frustrations we encountered because of the high degree of disorganization in the reconstruction activity, one of our GDS teams had an exactly opposite homeowner experience. While gutting a house, they were accosted by the irate homeowner who claimed he did not want his house gutted and started screaming at the work team. Habitat personnel arrived with written forms signed by this person requesting that Habitat volunteers gut his house (for free, of course). The owner, as is his right, had apparently changed his mind, although amidst the ongoing chaos he had neglected to inform anyone of his decision. Needless to say, his wishes were respected – and the work group moved to another house – having wasted valuable time and effort. In a similar episode, my work team spent a significant chunk of one day gutting a house, only to be told later that this house was actually on the “demolition list,” not the “gutting list,” so our work too was wasted.)

Back to the gutting. Once everything was removed from the house, and formed into a humongous pile on the front yard, the task was not yet done. Interior walls (leaving behind the 2x4 studs), and ceilings, had to be removed as well. This entailed smashing down and/or pealing away layers of moldy drywall, and then often having also to remove soggy fiberglass insulation from behind the walls or above the ceiling. Even in the context of the taxing and unpleasant work we were doing, the latter chore was a special pain. Of course, every bit of wall, ceiling and fiberglass that we took down had to be loaded into wheelbarrows and rolled out of the house.

The idea, ultimately, was that a house that is totally gutted in this manner could eventually be treated for mold and then, perhaps, one day be livable again for the current owner or others. Who knows.

* * * * *

So, that’s the basic activity in which we were engaged. But let me also share with you some general observations, both about the situation we encountered, and, relatedly, about some of the things I think your kids saw and learned.

With perhaps one discrete exception (EPA contractors came by the houses regularly to pick up any of three kinds of items removed from the houses: fridges, air conditioning units, and fluorescent light bulbs – these all contain hazardous materials), there appears to be no federal government presence in St. Bernard Parish. This is an area containing on the order of 100,000 people pre-Katrina. The majority to date have not returned; many never will. The needs are huge. My own pet peeve, shared by many of the kids, is that the entire area is congested with massive piles of debris, along freeways, on side roads, in front of businesses, in front of homes, anywhere and everywhere (in fact, we added to the mess with our house-gutting). It is obvious that there is no ongoing effort to remove these piles, every one of which is a public health hazard and a monument to neglect. Perhaps I am missing something, and no doubt things are more complicated that meets the eye, but sending an army of trucks and people down there just to clean up the trash would help move things forward and would be a huge boost for morale.

A few of the people who once lived in the neighborhoods where we worked have returned, and are living in front of their at-least-for-now unlivable houses in tiny FEMA trailers. The trailers cost FEMA close to $100,000 each. They are not hurricane-proof. If another hurricane hits the area any time soon, it seems likely that many of the homeless people who returned and are now living in FEMA trailers will be rendered homeless again.

Most of the reconstruction activity that we saw is being done by volunteers. These organizations, e.g., Habitat, Americorps, and others are constrained by budget limits and appear to be run, on the ground, by very young people with huge hearts and great spirit, but little expertise. Katrina was a massive natural disaster, and almost one year later we saw kids telling kids what to do about it.

We took our young people to see the Lower Ninth Ward, where the levees broke. The entire neighborhood is destroyed. No reconstruction work is taking place because there is not a single salvageable structure in the whole area. Nine months after the fact, we saw houses on houses, houses on cars, cars on houses, and a least one truck up a tree. In my two drives through the lower 9th, I did not see a single human being, a single FEMA trailer, or a single sign of life.

Your kids also saw a lot of good things. New Orleans itself is bouncing back, albeit slowly and only in parts. We all went to the French Quarter at least once. Café Du Monde is exactly as it has always been; the coffee’s great, and the beignets are wonderful, still served with ridiculous amounts of powdered sugar that gets all over you as you try to eat the darn things. Bourbon Street is as tacky as ever, but clearly less crowded. All the T-shirt shops now boast shirts featuring an imaginative and mostly profane mix of slogans insulting FEMA, typically focusing on the letter “F.”

For me, and for many of the kids I spoke to, it was jarring to consider the gap – separated geographically by about 10 or 15 miles or so – between our primitive Habitat camp and the devastation in St. Bernard that we were trying, in our own small way, to help alleviate, and the outright hedonism (e.g., “Live Sex Acts”) that characterizes much of the French Quarter. But New Orleans is what it is, the French Quarter is essential to the city’s well-being, and if you want N.O., to come back to some reasonable (albeit smaller-scale) facsimile of what it once was, you have to want the French Quarter to prosper and thrive. So, swallow hard, and laisser les bon temps rouler.

Your kids also saw that, while even well-meaning institutions and governments can find themselves struggling, there are lots of good people around, and they come in all different kinds. Camp Hope was populated by a transient and slightly weird bunch of people. There were a lot of “hippie” types. It might have been tempting to write them off as freeloaders; if you come to the camp to volunteer, you are given a place to sleep and three meals a day. Except that from what we could tell, these young men and women from all over the country, not that much older than our GDS upperclassmen, worked about 24 hours a day, with a special emphasis on food and kitchen duty. While we were out gutting houses, a lot of these people were in the camp preparing dinner for hundreds (we were told that Habitat hopes to have an average population in the camp of about 1,000 volunteers for much of the next year or 18 months). As with breakfast duty, every day we were there, a contingent of GDS adults and students worked on the dinner shift, helping to prepare food, serve meals, and clean up the dining hall and kitchen areas.

There were also a number of organized church groups staying at Camp Hope while we were there. At night, they sung hymns, and the sound of their voices resonated throughout the dorms (not surprisingly, given the absence of walls). I’m not religious, and my background is not a Christian one, but it was hard not to admire the organization and dedication of these groups of adults and young people, and I thought their singing sounded quite beautiful.

I thought it was a great lesson for all of us to see these obviously diverse groups of people, who probably don’t see eye to eye on a whole lot, still being able to come and work together, selflessly and with great energy, with a common goal of helping others in need.

Our kids also saw at least one government entity that was more or less fully functional: the St. Bernard Parish Fire Department. We saw a lot of these guys for the simple reason that Camp Hope, a hastily thrown together home for an ever-shifting population of hundreds of volunteers, is, as you may have gathered from the little description above, in violation of every fire code known to man. There were electrical cables everywhere (including fat ones under some of our cots); lighting was inadequate; and I can’t imagine there were any alarms in the building, although, who knows, maybe there were some. Anyway, the fire code issue was resolved by stationing a bunch of firefighters, with equipment, on site at Camp Hope more or less around the clock. One night, these guys gave a little presentation about their Katrina experience, which of course is still very much ongoing. At least in the group of about ten men who spoke to us, I think all had lost their homes when the storm hit. They evacuated their families, and for a week or so, they did not know whether their families were safe, and their families did not know whether the firefighters were safe. These public servants, unlike the New Orleans cops you have heard about, who left town and “commandeered” cars along the way (one evening, a cab driver took me and a couple of the kids by the Cadillac dealership that played a central role in that debacle, one of many N.O. sites that is now destined to occupy a special place in Katrina lore), stuck around as their county became a lake, cut off, as far as they knew, from the rest of the world, and they did what they were supposed to do: they saved lives, plucking people off rooftops and into boats. They would have reached more people sooner, they explained to us, if they had been able to go out at night, but if you were out on a boat in the dark during Katrina, your head was at about the level of streetlights and electrical lines and you could get decapitated.

One of the moving things I experienced last week, and I think and hope the kids felt it too, was the sense of the gratitude of the local residents. The St. Bernard firefighters, genuine heroes, told your kids that they were the real heroes, and thanked them profusely for being there and showing that they cared. A couple of friends in N.O. had the same reaction when I called to let them know I was in town, care of Habitat, with a bunch of high schoolers from Washington, D.C. One friend insisted on buying dinner at a fancy N.O. restaurant; I brought along two GDS seniors who had worked tirelessly, and seeing their eyes light up as they enjoyed a delicious meal was a great treat.

In the end, what does this all add up to? I’m not sure I can answer that question. I know that your kids worked very hard, in difficult conditions, to help a beleaguered community. I know that they saw, with their own eyes, an area that has suffered greatly, and that this is fundamentally different than watching it on television. I also know that all of us who were there have a sense that both the national and state governments have, at least to date, not lived up to their obligations. Perhaps understandably, the overall volunteer effort of which we were a part is not terribly well-organized, and, at least for now, there does not appear to be an optimal use of human and other resources.

But as I indicated at the outset, I am nevertheless of the view that this was an overwhelmingly positive experience for all involved. We had an opportunity to help, and we acted on it. We did what we were asked to do, and more, and on the whole, I thought our GDS group – by which I mean your children – performed magnificently. For me, this was a doubly positive experience. I gained the benefit of my own volunteer efforts – an enriching experience in which one feels rewarded in helping others – and I also got to know and befriend some terrific young people, teachers and parents in the GDS community.

* * * * *

I mentioned a few paragraphs ago that there would be one exception to the name-no-names rule. The head of our group last week was Kathy Hudson, the school’s athletic director. Kathy’s extraordinary leadership was largely responsible for the overall success of this mission. I also had the good fortune of being in Kathy’s work unit. In the houses we were gutting, no one in the entire GDS group – no kid and no adult – worked harder than Kathy. This woman is an invaluable asset to the school, and for me, one of the many nice things about this trip is that I think I can now call her my friend.

Have a great summer; trust me, your kids have earned it.

Sincerely,

Thomas M. Bondy Father of Adrian Bondy, Class of ’03, and Trevor Gopnik, Class of ’09. June 23, 2006.

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