Charlie's trip to New Orleans begins

It's now Tuesday morning. I got here Sunday, and have had one day of work. Now it's time to share what I'm up to.




I'm here for the first time, and am learning a lot about the reality of the town. Imagine if there were different realities for every city in the USA... well, maybe Berkeley has its own rules, but not like New Orleans, LA, or NOLA to the locals.

New Orleans was always said to be 'different', though now the different is different!

The town looks rather like Indianapolis. Flat, lots of strip malls, a downtown with some tall buildings, big overpasses, lots of churches. Like Indy, folks seem to own their own homes, modest or fancy, on tiny plots of land. Seeing an apartment building is an exception.

But NOLA has canals, and streetcars (or at least the desire for streetcars-- most of the lines are not working these days). The canals were what flooded 90% of the land area, but they are also a big reason why the city exists, on the northern bank of the Mississippi. Oh yes, and most of the strip malls have no businesses in them, just boarded up storefronts. We passed what was obviously a Pizza Hut once, now with the name painted over, forgotten.

NOLA is also different because so many houses are just empty. The city is only up to 40% of population, and a good fraction of them are living in trailers or jammed in with relatives. Empty buildings are everywhere... except where the waters just wiped all the buildings away. I haven't been over to that area, but I hope to get a chance to go there sometime during the visit. Block after block of slabs.

I arrived yesterday, around 10 AM. I am staying in a Unitarian church... they have converted the classroom area into a dorm. Because it was Sunday, I went to church... though the church service was actually in the social hall of the Presbyterian church across the street. It's very nice that the Presbyterians let them do that, their church wasn't damaged as much as the Unitarian Universalist one... though even that seems to have been minor. The UU church had water in the first floor, so the flooring and pews are gone. Electric also had to be redone.

The sermon was, of course, on Martin Luther King, Jr. but also on the minister's experience of riots in Harlem in the 60's, and how she, as a 10 year old Latina, could not understand what what was going on. The sermon was about how MLK worked to explain different experiences to those who could not comprehend others. Not unlike understanding NOLA.

So after church there was an informal sing-along at the piano. One woman really liked my voice and made me sing "Oh What A Beautiful Morning" and a few other songs. After that we went to brunch with some church regulars... at a Lebanese place. Then I took a nap... having had only one hour's sleep on the plane in. After that I sat through the 'debrief' of a group from NYC, who had been in NOLA for 5 days, and would leave in the morning. They had just gotten back from a tour of the lower ninth ward... where there are just slabs or slabs and stuff...

Oh, here's a shot of the dorm room.


Then we set off for the French Quarter! The local businesses are kept going by volunteer money, so we feel it's our duty to go out to eat, to buy shirts, etc.

We had a so so dinner and some good strawberry daiquiris near Jackson Square, then walked to Frenchman street, where the combo shown above was playing jazz... mostly standards, but then they did "When The Saints (win the Superbowl)" and everybody got up to dance!

When I got back to my sleeping bag, I was wiped out, and slept the night.

This morning I had two possible work groups... the NYC folks were doing rip-out, but only for a half a day. The other was the Maine group (two people one a contractor and one a clerk, who had been down over Thanksgiving, and knew that they had to come back and do more.)


I decided to go with the Maine folks. We were fixing up a house that had been gutted, fumigated and was being rebuilt. The owner is a Native American, disabled, war veteran, who had carried babies on his shoulders to get them to high land. The house had a leaky roof, and was being rewallboarded, and new plumbing put in. It's in pretty good shape!

The resident lives in the trailer on the right, we are fixing the house on the left. There is a faint line, about where the upper window pane is divided... that's how deep the water was for 3 weeks. The top of the window frame was how deep it was during the storm surge.


My job was to patch and then coat the roof. Hey that's me up on the flat roof!

I did that, and then I worked to rewallboard a ceiling. We drove home, and I took a long shower. That was the end of Monday.

More coming-- I'm here for two weeks. I'm using free Internet that comes from Earthlink... so I should be posting most days... unless I am back to the French Quarter, drinking-- or the connection goes out!