A Rainy Day Good For Any Blog

Lord.

It's been a while since I last wrote, but it feels good. It feels a bit like the first day of wearing shorts after a long winter.

A lot has been happening the past couple of weeks, so I suppose i'll just start chipping away at the moments.

Well, I've been on break for the past week and a half. Yes, even volunteer organizations have scheduled holiday breaks. They were apparently much needed for many of the long term volunteers, who were become a bit burned out from months of work without an extended time to recuperate. We got off the 21st, the day my parents came down and visited for a week. We celebrated Christmas in our hotel room with a faux christmas tree made of a long cardboard tube and pieces of cut wrapping paper. It was nice, if a little unconventional. Christmas treated me well, with my "big present" being the promise of a fancy little Canon Digital Rebel XTi. So eventually i'll start having more big, crisp, beautiful pictures to accompany this blog. I do have some for this post though...

of the ninth ward, something my parents wanted to see while they were down here. I'm apprehensive to start with any sort of opinion, so instead just look for yourself:

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These two are the entrance and kitchen of one house in the Lower Ninth. Believe it or not, this actually isn't that bad. The door lead right into the living and kitchen area. I took that from the door because it felt too strange to walk through the houses without a Tyvek suit on or a crow bar in hand. Without a job to do, being there felt too invasive

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Some Hurricane Automobiles
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January 4th, 2007

Right. Back to the posts.

I've found it interesting here to listen to people who have just returned from the ninth ward talk about their experience. They usually say something about how horrible it is, how it was worse than they imagined. How the entire car ride was silence. This was my second time visiting the ninth ward, and my reaction was the complete opposite. Things have gotten tremendously better there since March, although I suppose for someone who's never been there before it would be hard to think that from the photos. But I'd like to take this time to share something I wrote from my Biloxi journal waaaay back in March of 2006 from when I visited the 9th ward with Lawrenceville on a Spring Break trip:

March 8^th, 2006

Every house I walked by today, every piece of rubble on the ground, every piece of debris, is worth its own journal entry. I walked past houses that had been torn off of their foundations and thrown into the streets like play sets. I peered through a broken window of one of these houses, one that had caved in, and saw the ceiling of a house on its floor. The furniture was broken; walls had collapsed; rubble poured through every open space, and six months of dust and mold covered everything.

And I’d like to say that these were things unlike anything I’d ever seen before, but some of what I saw was so horrifying it almost bordered on the cliché. Today was cloudy, unusually cold. In the middle of the street was a child’s bicycle, this symbol of innocence, rusted, mangled, and broken, its bent wheel spinning and creaking in the wind.

It felt surreal. I saw children’s toys next to concrete slabs next to washing machines next to clothing, all scattered about on the same yard.

I saw sights that were strikingly bleak and poetic in their horror, sights that were absolutely chilling but, in a way, perversely beautiful, because I saw today a strange relationship between order and chaos.

You walk through these streets, past washing machines, refrigerators, bicycles, windowpanes, all with their 90 degree angles, glossy sheens, and perfect cylinders, but you see them in this reduced state, this destroyed state: dented, damaged, mangled, dirtied and thrown about…It’s an experience unlike anything else, and if this day has taught me one thing, it’s that man’s own power is microscopic when pitted against nature’s.

My experience of the ninth ward this past break was nothing like that is March. It's much cleaner now, with no houses in the middle of the streets, very few large piles of rubble, and very few collapsed houses. It looks very different now, and in many ways better, but that's the interesting thing about all the clean up down here. It requires a tremendous amount of energy to make something look genuinly nice again. You want to beautify a hit area so you remove all this ugly rubble, but now you just have a big empty hole where a big pile of rubble used to be.

Actually, and I'm finding it hard to explain this sentiment, part of me found my recent trip to the ninth ward a little more unsettling than the first time. The emptiness of the 9th this time was almost overwhelming. There are very few houses, very few cars, absolutely no people, but generally no signs life or community. Back in March, even though most of the houses were splintered piles of wood, there was still something there, filling those voids. It still felt something like a neighborhood, like something that somebody once lived in, instead of a deadzone between two trenches. I also feel that back in March the destruction was so bad, so unfamiliar that it seemed a bit unreal. I'd experienced emptiness before the 9th ward, but I hadn't experienced a house on top of a car. I hadn't experienced so many miles of destroyed houses that the senses overload and you lose touch.

So, I suppose I'm describing a bit of a contradiction. The progress in the 9th ward made me happy, but made me feel worse than the first time I went there. But I've rarely been internally consistant during my work in New Orleans. I'm constantly feeling a combination of emotions, and they're frequently at odds with one another. It's completely possible to be angry and happy and frustrated and satisfied all at the same time while gutting a house. What about this place isn't complicated? Very little.

I'll write more later. For now, ta ta.

Oh, and I also want to say that I recently published a post I had started a long time ago, back in the beginning of December, but never finished. So if you want to read something new, look back to early December. !