URJ Mitzvah Corps to New Orleans-Getting Jazzed in the Big Easy

Dec 20-25 was dedicated to time in New Orleans with 15 or so 25-35 year olds from all over the US who spent Christmas trying to do SOMETHING three years later, post Katrina. It is still a mess down there, but life seems to have developed a new normal. The amount of work that must still be done to bring to the people there a level of 1) human dignity and 2) human rights is still extensive. I think it is easy at this point in the redevelopment of New Orleans for the world to turn away. It looks pretty enough. But this seems to be the most precious time to be present with the people who have hurt so much and have been left alone repeatedly in the last three years.

Infrastructure is still not in place. The government has not been remobilized and the possibilities for corruption abound.

A story. I was helping to paint Willie Jefferson's house. Willie is a 60 something who has lived in the Broadmoor neighborhood of New Orleans, I think, all his life. He lives in a three story, small house with several members of his family. He has been renting out the lowest level of his home as a complete apartment as a source of income. He has a wife (Mrs. Jefferson) and three sons. Two of his sons have children including Willie Junior whose son Willie the III (Trip) celebrated his 13th brithday with us while the group was there.

During Katrina, once the dams broke, the water level rose to a height which swallowed the lowest level of the Jefferson's home-one of many on their crowded, run-down, neighborhood street. The apartment was destroyed, along with it, the source of income which comes from it. The government subsidies for rebuilding from damage like this took a very long time to reach the family and have long since been spent on basic flood clean up. There is no money left to rebuild what was lost.

One of the many tasks of painting a house, particularly if you are an unskilled painter like we all were, includes scraping the paint off of the windows once you, especially as an unskilled painter, drip lots and lots of paint on them. I was tending to this task. Diligently scraping, my type A personality was just plagued that I could not get the windows clean. I scraped and scraped, but to no avail. Too much of the dirt was inside.

So I asked Willie Sr. if I could have the privilege of entering his home and cleaning his windows. He agreed. I entered the dark gutted basement. It is more dirt and detritis than cement floor. Wheel barrels, tools and other shed-frequenters litter the former entrance to someone's home. There are no walls down there, only their frames. Old, blackened two by fours stand along side some fleshy, new planed-pine. The most essential, structurally critical supports have been updated, but everything else remains untouched since the the mold and rot's removal. I methodically walked around the room scraping. Dirt, grime, mildew, mold, crumbled in piles off the planes of glass and mixed in to the various particles of sloughed off debris. In muffled silence, I heard other members of the group walk by the windows and mouth words of friendship, sympathy, and unquiry as I continued my task. This room was once a dining room, this was once a closet, this was once a bathroom, a bedroom, a kitchen. Now, what are they? What is this space other than wha it once was? They lack the hope of what these rooms might one day be. This space has been left to be alone. It silently rests under the Jefferson's home, waiting, just waiting, for someone to see it, to remember it and perhaps once again give it what it needs.