Getting Into the Swing of Things

Well.

Today was a good day. A very good day.

I'm finally settling in to this place a little bit. My body is adjusting to the daily schedule. I'm getting tired earlier, I'm used to waking up earlier. My skin is less sensitive to the cold of drying off after an evening outdoor shower. And I'm getting to become friends with more of the long term volunteers, whose cohesion I initially found a bit intimidating.

I'm learning new skills. I did some roofing for a few days, and today I hung drywall on a ceiling. Any opportunity to try a new trade I immediately jump on to.

The home owner whose house we were working on had many interesting stories to tell about his Katrina experience. He had to get out of his home because he saw how fast the water was rising, and decided the best thing to do was to swim to Elysian Fields Ave, where the nicer, bigger houses were, so he could climb on to a taller house, a two story house. The idea of navigating through your city by swimming 10 feet over the streets is almost impossible for me to imagine.
He was eventually shipped off to Little Rock, Arkansas, but disliked it so much that he returned back to New Orleans. He's not living where he used to, though. He's living in a tiny shotgun house his family left him. I imagine his family is staying wherever they were relocated to. It's essentially three rooms, with a kitchen, a bedroom/living room, and a bathroom which is connected to the bedroom. He has a stapled sheet in front of the doorway seperating the two sections of the house. I peaked past the sheet and saw a mattress on the floor, a tv on the floor, various forms of clutter on the floor, and an electric heater. Luckily he has electricity; he has light, a sports team to watch, a little bit of heat. But his house has no ceiling and a bad roof, so he's been completely exposed to the elements. His house drops to the outdoor temperature, and it's been an unusually cold winter, with night temperatures dipping into the twenties.

This is a level of bareness that I'm not used to experiencing on such an up front and personal level. So the work we're doing feels that much more important. The dry wall hanging was that much more satisfying because not only were we putting up a ceiling, we were doing it for someone who will literally go to sleep tonight with something over his head when before he had almost nothing.

There are lots of people experiencing similar situations to the one in my example, and most of them are not fortunate enough to be getting help. You really can't think about all of it, because it quite literally, and I am not exaggerating this point, will destroy you. I was talking for a long time with a girl volunteering short term with Kalamazoo College, who had been crying while writing her journal because she has been working with eight to ten year old school kids, and has witnessed first hand the awful teachers, the awful role models, the utter anger and frustration that these kids are experiencing, and are powerless to avoid. She has tapped into the social consequences of the Hurricane, things that are much more complex and in some ways much more devestating than the physical ones, because they don't have the clean cut answers "money and labor." She looked around the room in tears and asked me how it is that we all seem okay, that we don't feel completely weighed down by such an overwhelming amount of problems. I didn't really have an answer for her then, but thinking about it now I realize that we don't seem that way because we can't let ourselves think so much about the horrible effects of the hurricane. We've all had our moments of ontological shock--I certainly had mine back in March--and we've learned that to constanatly dwell on these issues is suicide. We learn that the best thing to do is to compartmentalize our emotions, and seperate the physical action of gutting a house from the emotional reactions of why we're gutting a house: what happened here, what the home-owners had to go through, what used to be in the house, what the house used to look like. Those things get pushed back, in a sense ignored, save for the fact that we know that what were are doing is something good and something value and something that is making a difference in someone's life. And we know that pushing these emotions back is not the same thing as being apathetic, because anybody who didn't care about the issues in New Orleans would not be volunteering. Apathy has been a crime here, an absolute plague in this city, resulting in what a friend called in conversation a subtle form of genocide. People are not caring about the people here, and it is destroying them.

It's all been a lot to think about, but the combination of extraordinary people I'm encountering and the truly positive work I'm doing has made me feel incredibly at peace with myself. I know I'm truly needed here, and thus I know i truly have a place here.

And so, today was a good day.