Katrina's victims still need help
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The Inquirer • June 28 2008
By Fran Devine
How do you celebrate your 60th
birthday? It’s a milestone, isn’t
it? Time to reflect on your working life and on what the shape
of your life will be as you ease
towards retirement....
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The Inquirer • June 28 2008
By Fran Devine
How do you celebrate your 60th
birthday? It’s a milestone, isn’t
it? Time to reflect on your working life and on what the shape
of your life will be as you ease
towards retirement.
I’d been
thinking of having a party, or
going on a weekend break with
my family.
But at the urging of a
friend in Pennsylvania who had
been down to the Gulf Coast,
I decided to spend a fortnight
working in New Orleans as a
volunteer, accompanied by another, younger English friend
in search of adventure.
My American friend is an active Unitarian, so she’d made our arrangements through the Unitarian
Universalist Association of Congregations and the Unitarian
Universalist Service Committee.
The UUSC (www.
uusc.
org)
is a human rights organisation that works in practical ways to
respond to humanitarian crises and injustices throughout the
world and within the USA.
Soon after Hurricane Katrina hit in
2005, the Unitarian Church of Baton Rouge, Louisiana set up
its Hurricane Relief and Social Justice Project, which became
the UUA-UUSC Gulf Coast Volunteer Programme in 2007.
The programme works throughout Louisiana and Mississippi
to rebuild homes and communities.
New Orleans is a unique place, unlike anywhere I’ve ever
been.
It’s a city with an amazing spirit, terrific music, and a
laid back attitude, with the friendliest people I’ve ever met.
When you arrive, the city centre looks unaffected by the storm.
But travel outside the French Quarter and the affluent Garden
District, and the devastation is unbelievable.
Eighty percent of the city was flooded when the levees
broke, with floodwaters reaching over 20 feet in some places.
Schools, hospitals, and shopping precincts as well as homes
stand abandoned and destroyed.
Many people are still living in
mobile homes, some of which have been proved to be carcinogenic.
Insurance companies have been reluctant to pay claims
to huge numbers of people, so claimants can’t afford to repair
their houses.
As you probably know, people without cars were
unable to escape the city when the storm hit, and, even now,
public transport is totally inadequate.
Two-and-a-half years
after Katrina, fewer than one third of schools have reopened
and half of the devastated homes have not been restored.
Although the storm affected everyone, African-Americans have
experienced far more homelessness and lack of support than
have white people.
The government, at local, state and federal levels, is proving inadequate to the task of rebuilding New Orleans.
Instead,
armies of volunteers of all ages and backgrounds are coming
to the city to give practical help.
The UUSC is one of many
organisations that are organising volunteers.
We stayed at the
First Unitarian Church, in a dormitory on the first floor.
Most
of the volunteers were working on building projects, but four
of us were assigned to a primary school that has reopened in
a set of prefab buildings while the original school is being rebuilt.
The school, in East New Orleans, sits in an impoverished neighbourhood, with almost no infrastructure; the shops,
health facilities, and library were standing but abandoned.
The
pupils have experienced enormous upheaval, most of them
having been evacuated to other cities after the storm and many
having missed a year or more of school.
So many children told
me of the violence that had affected their lives; some of them
had had family members shot dead.
Our work was to give pupils individual attention with their reading, writing and history projects.
I’m a librarian, so I also helped to organise the
school library and to show children how to use it.
The children
I worked with were in Year 5 and were 10 years old.
Many
were bright sparks with incredible resilience, but none was unaffected by what had happened during the past two and a half
years.
Working at the school was both mentally and physically exhausting and incredibly rewarding at the same time.
But in a
city like New Orleans, there’s no such thing as all work and no
play.
There’s a great variety of music, from Preservation Hall
jazz to the Rock and Bowl bowling alley with a dance floor and
a Zydeco band – accordion, washboard and all.
There’s coffee
and beignets at Café du Monde on the Mississippi waterfront,
trips on the bayou, where you can see alligators and herons,
beautiful architecture, rides on a streetcar and much more.
And
with plenty of other volunteers, you have great company.
If you have some time to spare, and the funds to get to America, I can’t recommend this experience too highly.
Once you
are there, it’s not expensive…$10 (£5) a day for your accommodation, and food, either cooking your own or even in restaurants, is cheap and plentiful.
Even the music venues rarely
charge more than $10, so you don’t break the bank when you
go out on the town.
It’s always said that a volunteer gets much more than s/he
gives, and in my case this is certainly true.
It’s given me a
radical rethink on how I’m going to spend the next few years,
whether I continue in paid work or whether I decide to concentrate on being a volunteer.
And it’s given me an insight into
a city and a community that I’d never have understood as a
tourist.
If you are interested in having an experience like that,
do contact Peggy Powell on uukatrina@uusc.
org and see for
yourself.
Any questions? Interested? Don’t hesitate to contact
me on frandevine@yahoo.
co.
uk.
Fran Devine lives in Stockport and works for Manchester
Libraries.
Some of the children Fran Devine worked with in New
Orleans.
Photo by Fran Devine
Katrina’s victims still need help
Fran Devine
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