Post-KATRINA New Orleans

Day 754

2009-03-30T17:05:00.010-06:00

Day 754
New Orleans, La.

Dear Family and Friends,

Daylight savings time provides an emotional boon across the City. People play later, leave work earlier and enjoy the everythings and want-to-bes of spring time life. The local parks are always full.

In a few more weeks, nearly everyone will be wearing linen.

When I first moved here 754 days ago, our newspapers and televisions led and ended with Katrina stories. Every day. I gauge the passage of time now by the amount of with "Katrina" in the newspaper. Now, there are coffee and paper mornings--I swear it--where the K-word can't be found.

I like these mornings.

When year two turned to three, our public figures and friendly tableside rhetoric shifted slightly: "Now three years later..."

And as the months progress, we are saying, "Now three and a half-years later..."

Soon it will be, "Now four years later..."

That moment in time, the day the New Orleans calendar reset, will be with this community for a long-long time. It guides the people here, provides a measuring stick of sorts. What's more than interesting for an outsider like me are the experiences that make New Orleans what it is, even if Hurricane Katrina had never happened.

Crawfish boils, annual festivals, irreverent dress-up days, and second lines come to mind.

The messy stuff is what people elsewhere see about New Orleans. I paraded from 6am to 3pm on Mardi Gras day with a blue sky and a slight breeze the whole way. When we finished, my friends and I played football in our street.

But my friend outside the City texted, "Were you near the shootings?"

Six people were shot along parade routes on Mardi Gras day. There were a few others earlier in the week as well.

New Orleans according to everyone else is a dangerous outpost where people here on business are timid about walking after dark. New Orleans according to those living here is a cultural outpost where people laugh harder, cry longer and eat better than most.

Now, if only the spring weather stayed could stay longer than May.

Best,

Robert

Life in the French Quarter

2009-03-21T15:41:00.012-06:00

Dear Family and Friends,

Our sidewalks are brick and a parrot two doors away squawks when people pass her.

I've been in the French Quarter a short time now, surely not enough to call myself a part of the neighborhood, but long enough to have come home to random people on my stoop, my car rifled through by a homeless man and a next door neighbor who will sign for my packages.

Our house was built in 1830 and has 14-feet ceilings. My roommate Andrew and I, we bought a basketball hoop. It's nine-feet high; most shots are accessible and the toughest one makes you navigate a once-was-dining-a-room chandelier.

In the morning, sunlight comes through three bedroom windows. I wonder often who lived here when way back when was an era of horse-drawn carriages and dirt streets. Every time I hear people say that New Orleans shouldn't be rebuilt, I touch my keys and think someone has been opening a door to this place for 179 years.

The parking is atrocious. I have a lemon tree in my backyard. These two things cancel each other out. During the big events, Mardi Gras most recently, police sirens and drunken sidewalk singing sessions both invade my thin second-floor bedroom windows. On nights like these, I've found, it's better to be out with the people than trying to sleep through them.

When I look back and say "When I was 25..." I hope living in America's most notable neighborhood will make me smile.

But there are those nights when people seem to lurk too closely in the shadows. Recently, the news extensively covered the murder of a bartender by a 15-year-old in a stick-up gone bad. The intersection where it happened is about eight blocks from my house.

The news was clear to state that our police district is the smallest, yet has the most patrol units. Crime, although not acceptable anywhere, certainly isn't acceptable here. It is the French Quarter, our tourist livelihood.

"Walk on the side of the street without the cars," people say. "Muggers hide behind cars."

During my first conversation about moving in with Andrew, after he said how great living here is, he did, almost like slipping in an earmark into a piece of legislation, say that a man fired a gun from our doorstep his first night.

"Nothing has happened since then," he said.

I've said that we're urban soldiers. I hope this joke remains funny. The alternative is scary, of course, but not enough to not love living in New Orleans. Sure this place has its black eyes, bad roads and everything else that comes along with the fabric of a poor American city recovering from a major disaster.

But, today the temperature is 70 degrees. And I have a parrot for a neighbor.

Best,

Robert

Maya Angelou drives 22 hours to New Orleans

2009-02-14T01:16:00.009-06:00

University of New Orleans
February 12, 2009
New Orleans, La.

Dear Family and Friends,

When Maya Angelou appeared from behind a temporary partition, we knew tonight would be a life-long memory.

There were 2,000 people watching, but she made the event seem so much smaller. Her words convince some people that there is a wholly higher level of communicating.

She bends at the hip.

"Romance," she says. "Makes us who we are." Her voice is strong. It offsets the cane she uses to walk. Hers is a voice, people wouldn't mind listening to while on hold. If I could, I'd pay her to greet friends and colleagues leaving me voicemail.

"Hi, this is Maya Angelou, Robert isn't here."

Even her name is cool. Although I wiki'd her and found out Maya is a nickname and short for Mary Elizabeth. She drove 22 hours to New Orleans, she said, because airports make here anxious and she can't stand people hanging over her. And because she's always loved the City.

There isn't a shortage of doing good in New Orleans, though. It seems, that everywhere you look, more community meetings are held, more tutors read to kids, more protests about social injustice draw news media. The more I think about it, the more Maya Angelou gives a voice to the voiceless.

Because her success is about as unlikely as New Orleans success. Angelou is a child of the civil rights movement. She moved around, was raped as a young girl and became mute. A teacher and history's most famous wordsmiths revealed Angelou's voice she said.

She told New Orleans that there are always rainbows within the clouds. Coming from Maya Angelou, it didn't sound sappy at all.

Robert

Volunteers bundle Christmas Trees for Wetlands Restoration

2009-02-03T16:56:00.024-06:00

Former Recovery One Landfill Site
Bayou Sauvage National Refuge
Orleans Parish
January 31, 2009

Dear Family and Friends,

Somewhere between New Orleans East and Venetian Isles, the stacks of browning Christmas trees stand six feet high. In southern Louisiana, post-tinsel Christmas trees take on new roles as a part of the state's "Christmas Tree Recycling Program."

This year, the Sanitation department collected over 7,000 trees in Orleans parish. For the past two weeks volunteers have bundled the trees into fence-like structures, which experts say can catch sediment and deflect waves in America's most fragile natural habitat.

Since 1989, over 1, 500,000 trees have been placed in Southeastern Louisiana wetlands thanks to thousands of volunteers.

You'd think there would be more efficient ways to consolidate trees into bundles of 80-90 trees each than by using an assembly line of volunteers. Easier ways do exist, of course. But, as Wynecta Fisher, the director of the Mayor's Office of Environmental Affairs says, the education and awareness experienced by a citizen bundling process is extremely valuable.

Over 100 volunteers have come to bundle trees over the past week. The process is a team effort. Metal straps about 50 feet long are laid out and volunteers grab trees empty of all decorations and place them in a row. The bottom row takes about 20 trees and then another 60 are stacked in separate rows on top.

"The wetlands are an integral part of life in Orleans Parish," Erica Johnson, a volunteer says. "The volunteer project provided a fun and easy way to help preserve this valuable resource while enjoying the sunshine and the camaraderie of fellow volunteers."

After the trees are bundled, the National Guard donates two helicopters and 15 servicemen to place the completed tree fences in the coastlines of 19 Louisiana parishes. Over eight miles of tree fences are currently in Louisiana wetlands. According to the State of Louisiana's Department of Natural Resources, the primary goal of the Christmas tree fences is to "slow fetch and trap sediments." The fences reduce wage energies, while allowing the movement of water and sediments.

The National Guard has dropped tree fences in several types of locations according to the state like, open water bodies, shoreline protection, along the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway, interior lakes, and abandoned oilfield canals.

The Gulf Restoration Network (GRN), a Louisiana wetlands advocacy group, says the nearly a football field every 45 minutes of Louisiana's wetlands fully submerges because of Louisiana's natural subsistence problem as well as man-made destruction of coastal areas. The wetlands act as a buffer during storm surges and GRN as well as several environmental scientists say Louisiana has little time to rebuild wetland protection.

The Christmas tree project, however, is not the answer to saving the wetlands. Some analysts say it is a multi-billion dollar problem. But the tree cycling program is great to raise awareness and to expose New Orleanians to the largest urban wildlife refuge in America, Bayou Sauvage.

"The trees smell so good and great to feel like we were contributing to stabilize the wetlands," Michael Barr, a volunteer said. "And to just to get my hands dirty on a sunny day."

A night with EMS

2009-01-29T15:30:00.035-06:00

Underneath the Crescent City Connection
January 28th, 2009
New Orleans, La.

Dear Family and Friends,

From underneath, the bridge looks like it belongs in Gotham. Ambulances line a curbside and around the corner, there is a lot where EMS paramedics once grounded rescue helicopters after Hurricane Katrina. Nights like these, cold enough to see warm breath, are typically slow. No matter the temperature, paramedics respond to citizens' most vulnerable or embarrassing moments-sometimes they pick men up who've fallen off bar stools.

The New Orleans' Emergency Medical Services (EMS) department has 116 members. It's not so infrequent, however, that the department seems much larger because of EMT trained volunteers. They are called VIGORs, a 30-year-old acronym for the City's volunteer program, Volunteers in Government of Responsibility.

Many of them, especially the young and eager, volunteer more than 20 hours a week.

Ben Swig, 26, is one of those guys. He's a graduate student at Tulane University. A San Francisco native, he has been "riding" since age 19. "I love it," Swig says. "You learn the city really well by riding on an ambulance. You know the fastest routes and the best places to eat at 4 am."

Swig looks like a paramedic. Acts like one too. He isn't afraid to offer assistance or ask a patient a question. But he's the first to hop off the truck to unload a stretcher, a sign he knows his place. But, as T.J. Boudreaux, the lead paramedic on this truck says, "VIGORs are so valuable."

Our first call, a man is short of breath. As an on-looker, Swig, the volunteer, looks and acts like he's on the payroll. After they get the man on the ambulance, Boudreaux asks, "What was the (blood) pressure, Ben?"

Swig answers calmly and moves with Boudreaux's next orders.

The EMS-VIGOR program has been around since 1985 and many volunteers have been hired as full-fledged paramedics. Volunteers must have received their EMT-Basic credentials, which typically takes one semester to complete. They also agree to work at least one 12-hour shift every 60 days. At last count, 24 people are listed as active EMS VIGORs and paramedics rate their performance on every shift. The paramedics, who've been around long now, they like to talk about the young volunteers way back when who become powerful and prestigious doctors around the City.

Boudreaux has been with EMS for five years. He volunteered nearly three shifts a week for an entire year before being hired. "They get to know you," he says. "And I really got to see what being a paramedic was like."

They are scared, the first time.

Boudreaux was on a shooting call during his first volunteer ride. "You start out as an observer," Swig says. "But as you gain trust they give you more."

Paramedics, the men say, don't have queasy feelings regular people might have seeing tragedy. It's their job, they say, to get sick or injured people from "Point A to point B in the best condition possible."

On normal trips to the hospital, as one medic drives with red beams on high, the other works on the patient. Sometimes, if the patient is bad enough, the paramedic's options are limited.

"A VIGORs extra hands are important," Boudreaux says. "Working on a cardiac arrest, it doesn't stop. You need an extra hand, but if there is only me and the driver you have to stop doing other things."

The trio tonight includes EMT Anthony Calvin, 25, who jokes with Swig like he's a part of their crew. Swig says he knew he was in with Calvin and Boudreaux when he got to see pictures of Calvin's daughter.

"It's fun, you're always learning something," Swig says. "The friendship, we have a blast."

To inquire about volunteer opportunities with the EMS-VIGOR program, click on the EMS department's portal on www.cityofno.com

Best,

Robert

When Bush 41 and Bill Clinton came to town

2009-01-27T11:57:00.005-06:00

Ernest Morial Convention Center
New Orleans, La.

Dear Family and Friends,

I know a dishwasher who spent a week outside exhibit hall A way back when.

Yesterday, inside hall A. President H.W. Bush, 84 told jokes with irreverence and President Clinton followed recalling memories of his first car to 20,000 American automobile dealers.

Two Presidents, who are paid big money to give stump speeches, spoke with genuine interest about the future of the auto industry and the recovery of New Orleans. The auto dealers said all week how bad the last two years have been. The chairman of the National Auto Dealers Association says that 1,200 dealerships closed last year.

The Presidents spent most of the hour on the auto industry and recalling regrets and successes during their respective administrations. But both highlighted the role of the ordinary American, who before Katrina, may never have thought about New Orleans. Ordinary Americans, who helped donate 160 million dollars to the Bush-Clinton Katrina fund.

Resistance at St. Henry's

2008-12-17T13:34:00.044-06:00

St. Henry's Church
812 General Pershing St.
New Orleans, La.

Dear Family and Friends,

The 24-7 occupation of a local church has lasted longer than expected, on the backs of women in wheelchairs, retired couples, and on long-time parishioners who used to only see St. Henry's on Sunday.

It's a quiet place most hours now, where air mattresses are laid out for overnight vigil shifts and Christmas lights go on at dark. One vigiler leaves donuts for the people who relieve her. There is a mini-fridge, like the ones in Tulane dorm rooms about a mile away.

St. Henry's is 157, but the archdiocese of New Orleans closed it two months ago, citing a lack of priests parish-wide. After the final mass, when St. Henry's priest asked everyone to abide by the archdiocese's wishes, two parishoners refused to leave.

St. Henry's new existence, an around the clock vigil, enters hour 1, 500 on New Year's eve.

Leaders of the movement began a newsletter along with the vigil campaign. Their letterhead reads, St. Henry's: "Established by New Orleans Catholics in 1851 and Suppressed by the New Orleans Archdiocese in 2008."

When one month became two, parishoners silently congratulated their successes--spreadsheet schedules, breakfast duties and even a vigil cell phone left near the alter at all times. But, as these families are hoping for a victory--a sanctioned reopening of their parish--they are simultaneously preparing for a long and unglamorous task.

In Boston, one parish is staging a 24-hour vigil that will enter its fifth year in 2009.

"We'll be here as long as it takes to get our church back, vigiler Donna Williams says. "They can even turn the lights out on us."

Currently, all electricity works at St. Henry's because an adjacent building the parish owns is being rented, Donna says. Vigilers say that even if the power is shut off, their occupation will not stop. Most shifts last four hours, but the overnight shift lasts eight.

St. Henry is financially stable and had little flood damage in Hurricane Katrina according to parishoners. The archdiocese cites declining Priest roles as the reason for the closing.
“The driving factor is that there are fewer and fewer vocations,” archdiocese spokeswoman Sarah Comiskey told The Associated Press. “There are a declining number of priests and we have to be responsible as to how we assign them.”

The Louisiana Weekly says a total of 33 parishes have been closed to date. Among those, six churches have been converted to other uses. The three closed Oct. 26 — St. Henry, Our Lady of Good Counsel and St. Francis de Sales — are the last to be shut down, Comiskey said.

Parishoners have filed an initial appeal in Rome and recently found out that it was denied.

In a decidedly Catholic city, the parish closings have been lumped in with other post-Katrina tear-jerking scenarios. Tragedy piles are high, and the heaps continue their growth three years after the storm. Churches closed. Schools closed. Hospitals closed.

St. Henry's demise is head-scratching because parishoners claim financial stability, a physically sound building and a Priest who has been its leader for 19 years.

A statue of St. Joseph flanked my air mattress during my overnight vigil. I only decided to sleep in a church because it was a mini-adventure. I now realize though, people love their buildings. Especially in New Orleans, where so many were lost, keeping the ones we have means very much.

The buildings where people say, "I was born there" or "That was my school" are even more important to the health of a community. They keep the City's memories and host the new ones.

The final archdiocese-recognized activity at St. Henry's happened in November.

It was a wedding.

Best,

Robert

Hurricane Media

2008-12-14T13:05:00.021-06:00

December 13, 2008
New Orleans, La.

Dear Family and Friends,

It wasn't quite sunrise when I realized hundreds were here to write New Orleans' obituary.

That day, September 1, 2008, three hours until Hurricane Gustav was due, I slept little.

Outside, the wind blew back a reporter from the Weather Channel hoping for a live shot. Inside, I counted coins. Nickels first. I'd heard Katie Couric was staying in the same hotel. The only people in New Orleans, it seemed, were military and media. The military were necessary. The media, as I now reflect, I'm not so sure.

The previous 35 hours, we evacuated 18,000 New Orleanians on trains, planes and buses. Over 2 million fled the region. Officials estimated 5,000 people stayed in the City for Gustav. It's unclear whether they count about 1,000 media members.

They came from around the world. Reporters with notebooks. Cameras. Production teams. Microphones. As I watched them work, and read their words on blogs and websites-- while witnessing what they were witnessing--I wondered how many stared at hotel room walls, penciling out their yet to be printed versions of "Death of a City."

Most only knew two neighborhoods. The Lower 9th Ward and the French Quarter. Most tourists only know two neighborhoods too. Lakeview? Nah. Broadmoor? Forget about it. The difference between a breached levee and overtopping? Does it matter?

And, I guess, that's what bugged me most. Are journalists from New York or LA qualified to report events in unfamiliar territory? I went outside several times during Gustav. And I went back to my computer every time I came back inside.

And nearly every time, the national headlines read something entirely different than the reality I'd just experienced. But, I turned on the local radio and the local media and minus a few instances, I felt like they were getting it right.

There were not doomsday photos flying across the wire like the one of a nearly submerged stop sign near the industrial canal. If the photograph was taken by a local journalist, it would have been, with local knowledge, understood that the area off the St. Claude bridge floods with a hard rain.

I felt like the national media were willing a story that wasn't there.

At one point, however, in a sign of redemption, CNN actually started a live feed of a local television station. It seemed like a producer finally woke up and said you know what, somebody who lives in New Orleans should be our voice!

As it turns out, no obituary was written about New Orleans. In fact, I believe once the storm had passed and there was no turning back, the national media had to cover the positives of an historic and successful evacuation.

But I'll still remember feeling like a TV crew speaking Italian in a New Orleans bus depot as awkward and uncomfortable. So much so that I started taking pictures of the journalists. You see, the people who left with assistance have told their stories enough. They've spelled their names and the neighborhoods for the last three years.

Not much after one writer finished interviewing a man boarding a bus, I went up to him.

"What's your name," I said.

"Jerry," he said.

"Good luck."

Because sometimes, a notebook can be a scary thing.

Best,

Robert

fifty people one question

2008-11-19T10:45:00.003-06:00

fiftypeopleonequestion.com
November 19, 2008
New Orleans, La.

Fifty People, One Question: New Orleans from Benjamin Reece on Vimeo.

Be a New Orleanian. wherever you are.

2008-10-13T21:48:00.033-06:00

Dirty Coast Headquarters
5704 Magazine Street.
New Orleans, La.
October 13, 2008

Dear Family and Friends,

Stickers are on skateboard bottoms and little boys' bedposts. On backpacks and lunch boxes. And as time goes, stickers generally do too. Skateboards break. Little guys grow. Backpacks wear and lunch boxes just aren't cool anymore.

But sometimes, no matter where or how long some stickers stick, they last.

Recently, when I saw a “Be a New Orleanian. wherever you are.” sticker on a leaning post in a struggling New Orleans neighborhood, I knew it had staying power--even if the post doesn’t.

Blake Haney, 33, created the sticker while he and several-hundred thousand other New Orleanians found themselves displaced in different cities and towns after Hurricane Katrina.

“'Be a New Orleanian. wherever you are.' is a shout to all of us that were scattered across the country," Haney says. "Even if you're stuck in Houston or Jersey, remember to be who you are."

It’s now the adopted ode of displaced locals around the world, frequent visitors and never-beens who can’t shake Katrina images from their minds or internet searches.

Three years post-Katrina, Haney and his business partner Patrick Brower, 30, have turned the "we're in this together" rallying cry into a profitable tee-shirt company called Dirty Coast.

Their flagship shirt was an adaptation of the “Be a New Orleanian. wherever you are." sticker. They have since released over 50 often inspirational, sometimes satirical and always pro-New Orleans tee-shirts. Dirty Coast's best-seller these days has a head shot of Barack Obama, with “Geauxbama” underneath in homage to Louisiana’s French roots.

Others play recognizable American themes with post-Katrina New Orleans twists.

Their shirts have ended up in national media on the backs of Angelina Jolie, Jimmy Fallon, Brad Pitt, Sienna Miller and others. The company has grown considerably from the weeks after Katrina. They opened a store in a hip section of New Orleans and hope to open a second store in the next two years, while continuing to grow internet business at dirtycoast.com.

There are at least 30 more shirts in the developed idea phase according to Brower.

Dirty Coast's trademark X and fleur de lis sometimes trips fans up because of the thousands of spray painted Xs on the facades of New Orleans homes.

"The X marks the spot and New Orleans represented by the fleur de lis is the treasure," Brower says.

Haney created the X marks the NOLA design while in a coffee shop in Lafayette, La. about three weeks after Katrina.

"If you know New Orleans, there is something about it that attracts a certain personality. It's a mindset, a way of being, and I think it's the thing locals and NOLA converts connect with."

Haney ordered 5,000 stickers while to return to New Orleans. Guerilla marketing, Brower and Haney say, built Dirty Coast.

"I started dropping off stickers at local businesses when I got back," Haney says. He knew he was on to something when he would return and storekeepers asked for more.

"They couldn't keep them in the stores."

Dirty Coast has distributed about 800,000 stickers, Haney says.

They've ended up on turn tables in LA, bar shelves in Manhattan, bumpers in Maine and water bottles in South America.

One New Orleanian, Brower says, tattooed an image of the sticker. He has a picture at his desk to prove it. It's even signed by the tattoo artist.

About 10 minutes after Brower shows me the picture and after several more stories of random "Be a New Orleanian..." sticker sightings, I ask him where the craziest place he's heard a sticker is.

"Oh," he says.

A moment goes.

"That guy's back."

Best,

Robert

To buy Dirty Coast gear, go to http://www.dirtycoast.com

To see some places where the sticker has been sighted:

http://www.flickr.com/groups/312424@N20/pool/

Volunteers Key to Successful Evacuation

2008-10-09T15:53:00.001-06:00

http://www.nola.com/timespic/stories/index.ssf?/base/news-0/1223097623224550.xml&coll=1

504ward

2008-09-28T13:30:00.003-06:00

504ward Promotional Film from Benjamin Reece on Vimeo.

A buddy of mine, Mark Martin and I are in the above video as well as some other young professionals in New Orleans.
--Robert

Competition Looks To Keep Youth In N.O.

NEW ORLEANS -- Business leaders are launching a competition aimed at trying to keep 23- to 35-year-olds who came to the city to help rebuild it after Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans longterm.

The competition, part of a new initiative called "504ward," a play on New Orleans' area code, offers a package worth more than $200,000 _ including cash and professional services _ for the winning idea, according to The Idea Village, an economic development group that invests in local entrepreneurs.

"There are so many challenges in New Orleans," said Tim Williamson, the group's president.

Those who are smart and have drive can rise to lofty positions _ in business and elsewhere _ at a relatively young age now, he said. "Those folks don't have the historical baggage of what was; they look at how it can be."

Applicants must meet certain criteria, including being a for-profit with "high potential" for long-term sustainability and demonstrated ability to hold onto that prized demographic. Just what they propose _ and how broad their reach may ultimately be _ remains to be seen.

Pitches for the initial round must be submitted by Dec. 4 and can be made on YouTube. There will be three rounds, with five finalists brought here in March.

After Katrina hit in August 2005, volunteers flocked to the region to help with relief and recovery work, such as house gutting. The city was billed as providing Peace Corps-type opportunities for younger people, and idealists of any age, interested in helping rebuild a major U.S. city and key institutions, like the public education system, flawed before the storm.

Younger people came; there's evidence of that in the new teachers in the state-run Recovery School District and within city or redevelopment agencies.

But some new-recruit teachers and fellows are with finite commitments, like two years. Keeping them beyond that is a trick for a tourist-dependent city still faced with violent crime and limited health care and in the midst of efforts to tap into the green revolution and otherwise diversify the economy.

504ward plans a Web site to act as a networking hub, plus a mentoring-style program to link younger and older professionals and bring them into the business fold.

Greg Rigamer, a demographer who's closely tracked post-Katrina New Orleans, said he'd expect young people moving to the city to register to vote if they're committed to the area longterm and that he hasn't seen "any blip" in voter registration rolls relative to pre-Katrina to signal a major influx of such newcomers.

"What we really have to do is build a sustainable economy," he said. "That's what keeps people here."
___

On the Net:
http://www.504ward.com/
Copyright 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or

The First Re-vacuee

2008-09-19T10:38:00.017-06:00

Union Passenger Terminal
September, 2008
New Orleans, La.

Dear Family and Friends,

It seems long ago now, July 9th, when kids played homeless men, old ladies and mothers with children during a dry-run of the City's Assisted Evacuation Plan (CAEP). Afterwards, everyone involved not-so-quietly hoped we'd never have to do it for real.

Hurricane Gustav's path became apparent on the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. That cruel irony heightened some New Orleanians' senses--eyes, ears and the little hairs on their necks--enough to pack up and leave town three years to the day they saw their City drown.
Over the next two days, nearly two million residents fled New Orleans and Southern Louisiana. Part of that number were 18,000 New Orleanians who used the first no-kidding rendition of the CAEP.

They were New Orleans most vulnerable citizens.

A homeless man with one shoe. A mother with five kids under eight. An 80-year old married couple.

Thousands representing the family-unit in poor, Urban America came through the turnstiles. I never quite realized how matriarchal it was.

Great-grandmothers, grandmothers, mothers, and sisters towed small children.

Sometimes family units would be 16 people. They'd often have a single spokesperson. It was usually the most senior woman unless she was extremely elderly. Family after family came through that way. And off they went.

Several hundred homeless residents came through.

Nearly 1,000 Latinos with little English skills came through and bi-lingual translators assured them they wouldn't be hassled about their residency status.

The spectrum of evacuees was large. Many evacuees were run-of-the-mill New Orleanians, who, for some reason or another, have not adopted the American "I need a car" mindset.

My favorite group was the 20 international young people who work on temporary visas as servers and busboys, linen changers and line cooks in French Quarter restaurants and hotels. They arrived with huge traveling backpacks and "What did we get ourselves into?" looks on their faces.

We waved and well-wished several people I'd known pre-evacuation, including a clerk at the Walgreens beneath my apartment and a retired bookkeeper who volunteers at City Hall.

The planes, trains and buses took evacuees to cities and towns in northern Louisiana like Shreveport as well as shelters and Tennessee, Alabama and Arkansas. The process took just over 35 hours to complete. Residents had 17 different pick-up locations where they could catch a ride to the main transportation hub for the evacuation.

The local city-bus operators shuffled thousands from the different neighborhood pickup points to the Union Passenger Terminal. Special needs citizens were given door to door service.

Once the UPT shut its doors about 12 hours before Gustav made landfall, it looked ready to resume Amtrak and Greyhound service. A City employee who worked the Superdome during Katrina said one of the CAEP's litmus tests of success was the appearance of the UPT after the last train headed to Memphis.

When we left, I told him I'd be happy to eat a bag lunch on the floor.

Larman Sparkman's left foot hit New Orleans' soil last Thursday, making him the first returned resident in New Orleans historic and unprecedented assisted evacuation. There wasn't a welcoming committee waiting for Sparkman and the people he'd spent the past week with, just a few people who happened to be on sight at New Orleans' Union Passenger Terminal planning for the first of the evacuee arrivals to begin the following day.

Sparkman (pictured in white) and 26 returned others became the impromptu trail-blazers of an elaborate plan that, by and large was a success. The measurement stick: the evacuation would have saved several lives if Hurricane Gustav had actually carried the bite forecasters feared.
There are three camps with observations about the treatment of City Assisted evacuees once they arrived at shelters.

Some evacuees said they were treated miserably. Bill Quigley, a Loyola University law professor and other social activists are protesting alleged inhumane shelters in northern Louisiana.

Quigley volunteered during the evacuation and more than once he told me how well he thought the plan was working.

Shelter-condition protesters came to City Hall on Tuesday. As residents of Galveston and other Texas communities deal with Hurricane Ike devastation and as several southern Louisiana parishes are still in states of emergency, the timing seemed off. There is no doubt a time and a place is needed for those conversations, however.

Others said they'd had pleasant experiences and would definitely use the service again.

Finally, there were accounts from people like Gloria Ivory, 64. She wasn't upset by the conditions or the treatment at the shelter in Knoxville, Tenn. She was "embarrassed" by her fellow New Orleanians that fought, stole and were disruptive while in Knoxville.

"I doubt they'd ever take us back," Ivory said. "I don't blame them."

Gustav missed New Orleans and the City was largely spared minus the week-long, city-wide power outages.

Several scenarios and replays, reflections and "lets work this out" discussions have and will continue to occur while preparing for the next hurricane. The biggest fear for us all, however, is that many evacuees who returned weary, beleaguered and bleary-eyed from Gustav will choose to stay for the next storm.

Sparkman said he'd do it again. Beverly Mitchell, the volunteer at City Hall, said the same.

Best,

Robert

Photos: Robert X. Fogarty, Julie Plonk

City Assisted Evacuation from Hurricane Gustav

2008-08-31T22:10:00.013-06:00

Written from City Hall
8/31/2008
23:00

Dear Family and Friends,

By now you've heard.

What you may not have read however, amidst the impending danger, was New Orleans' ability to evacuate 18,000 people without alternative transportation. Homeless, elderly, special needs, you name it, they came through the assisted evacuation program.

There were guys like Jerry, 51 from the Carrollton neighborhood. There were thousands of people like Jerry actually, all scared about what lies ahead yet sensible enough to leave. The process is called the CAEP and the city, state and federal government have been planning it for three years.

We hoped it would never be needed.

Over the last 41 hours I spent 20 of them at the Union Passenger Terminal.

You might be wondering why I was there? Backstory, 25 words or less. Been here 18 months. In AmeriCorps. Coordinate volunteers for Mayor's Office. Needed volunteers for this plan.

---- Original Message -----
From: Robert X. Fogarty
To: xxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Sun Aug 31 15:11:05 2008
Subject: Volunteers at UPT

Over the last two days concerned and invested New Orleanian Citizens and AmeriCorps members displayed incredible passion, knowledge and unlimited willingness to do whatever incident commanders at the UPT needed to successfully run the CAEP.

Working a minimum of 12 hours with shifts often more, loaded buses with a highly effective counting system taught to the by the La Natl Guard. By O700 Sunday AmeriCorps members from around the country who have moved to New Orleans after the storm were running the bus loading process along side state employees.

AmeriCorps members also embedded with Red Cross personnel to distrbute thousands of bottles of ice cold water.

Concerned citizen and AmeriCorps volunteers also were the first to greet evacuees and afix tracking bracelets to their wrists. When special needs citizens needed help getting off buses AmeriCorps members were their to provide wheelchairs.

A special team of bilingual volunteers who were on site to translate and calm anxiety of non-english speaking latinos.

Bilingual translators were community leaders who were calling with bus updates on the hour to local spanish radio stations

With a drastically reduced help from city and state organizations who had large numbers on Saturday,
citizen and AmeriCorps volunteers were vital to the CAEP on Sunday.

Incident Commander John DeMartini and Lt. Col. Jerry Sneed are cc'd'on this email.

Over the last 72 hours citizens and post-K AmeriCorps transplants now living in the City accounted for over 700 hours of service to this evacuation.

Breakdown
30 individual New Orleanians
25 AmeriCorps members provided by sponsoring organization Rebuilding Together a local non-profit whose mission is to restore homes or elderly and disabled citizens. Rebuilding Together executive director Kristin Palmer were on site to lead. 16 AmeriCorps National Civilian Community members
10 AmeriCorps members sponsored by the Tulane University Center for Public Service.

So there's the skinny. I'm hunkered down at City Hall with the Office of Emergency Preparedness and their command center. It's the safest place I could be.

I hope to be able to do these things at least once a day, but sleep may become a priority.

Know this about the people you see in these photos. They are safe and sound outside of the City. No matter what happens, remember that.

Best to everyone,

Robert
(8/31/08 23:40)

Year Three

2008-08-17T22:43:00.022-06:00

August 29, 2008
New Orleans, La.

Dear Family and Friends,

The calendar is still valid here. Modified, of course.

Post-K New Orleans turns three today, and the City still carries the markings of its embattled recovery. Over 100,000 people have left, one in three residential addresses is vacant or blighted and its crime rate has passed casually guarded on its way to "Wow, I really do have to think about my safety."

Government-dispensed spray paint still lingers on many homes' facades. The X's are as common as mailboxes around these parts. "They're memorials," my friend says.

But, we, as Americans, shouldn't give up on New Orleans.

You'll read a lot about the bad today. And you'll read a little about the good.

For that, a buddy of mine decided to round up the 100 best things to come out of New Orleans since Katrina to balance the good versus bad scale. Like never before, thanks to the internet, bottom-up information gets the same street credentials as the stuff delivered to your doorstep.

He calls the list the NOLA 100.

New Orleans blogosphere is filled with citizen activism. No grants, no awards. Nothing but concerned citizens in love with their City. Likewise, neighborhood groups have been and continue to be the leaders of recovery. Caring for returned neighbors and the resurgence of one's neighborhood now comes right behind family, food and church.

They're paying it forward too. A contingent of neighborhood organizers went to Cedar Rapids in the weeks after the Iowa floods to give best practices on mobilizing neighbors.

Observing neighborhood resilience is enough to for me to know New Orleans is going to be fine. People who came back right after the storm will tell you that the City has progressed in many ways.

My co-worker Loretta, she uses military-issued "filtered drinking water" on the office plants.
We still have a case of the stuff.

She spent three months on the floor of a college basketball arena in Lafayette, La.

Talk about progress.

Now that I feel like I've got one foot in here, I sometimes forget about Loretta's story. The everyman story here, actually.

I watched the Spike Lee documentary When the Levees Broke the other night. My friends and I, who've come here post-Katrina, we should be obligated to re-watch and re-read the accounts of New Orleanians who watched their City drown.

Because sometimes when we're partying till sunrise, New Orleans without the baggage feels too damn good.

My friends in DC, policy kids, capitol hill kids who get chided for their insatiable need to be inside are sending similar criticism towards New Orleans' transplants.

"You're using New Orleans," they say.

And now I wonder aloud. Is New Orleans becoming a frontier for socially-conscious opportunists? An it phrase on a resume?

I must disclose now that I didn't move to New Orleans with its professional benefits on my mind. I thought a year here would do me good. The "you're only young once" mentality.

Tulane University had more applicants for this year's incoming college class than ever. They stopped taking applications at 34,000. Shut down for an entire semester after Katrina, Tulane is now the most selective school in the country.

Seventeen-hundred new Tulanians began class on Wednesday.

People say the flood of applicants to Tulane is a direct correlation to the service trips by church groups and other organizations since the storm. Talk to any neighborhood activist and they talk about service volunteers like knights in shining armor or guardian angels.

But the need for unskilled grunt work is nearly gone now, any houses that still need gutting should be demolished. Volunteers are being used nicely to help curb neighborhood blight, however. Because, as I said earlier, one in three residential homes is vacant.

I sometimes question how people still coming to help view this place. Is it a pity trip? Is New Orleans like a kid whose black eye is seemingly still swollen?

Maybe.

The black has turned though. Kind of yellow and brown now. Just give it awhile.

Best,

Robert

Hurricane Evacuation Exercise

2008-07-11T16:13:00.016-06:00

July 14th, 2008
New Orleans, La.

Dear Volunteers,

I once stood in the dark with Ken Fisher.

He'd taken me over to the municipal auditorium where 250,000 bottles of water and 25,000 packaged meals are stored. "Just in case," he said. "We're ready this time."

Mike, a fictional Category 3 Hurricane was 50 hours from landfall last Wednesday during the Southeastern Louisiana evacuation exercise. Fisher was an important decision maker in the New Orleans Emergency Operations Center. As you waited at pick-points and went through registration, Ken was getting fictional worst-case scenarios thrown at him, making strategic decisions.

"Ken, yet again, demonstrated his prowess in emergency management last week during our Hurricane drill and the after action comments indicated as such," Jerry Sneed, the director of the New Orleans Office of Emergency Preparedness said.

Ken died Saturday.

It was quick. Natural causes, Sneed said.

Times like these that make you remember the value of friends and family. A sense of community. Last Wednesday, while you didn't see him, he was watching out after you.

After all, it was his job and he loved it.

This letter began as a simple thank you for your efforts. With a heavy heart, I realized Ken would be proud of your engagement. He'd also be proud of those of you who had comments of uncertainty about the evacuation plan. If anybody could handle heat, Ken could.

So, for your time and insight last Wednesday--Thank you.

Three hundred and twenty volunteers was the largest volunteer turnout for a Hurricane evacuation exercise in a single parish since Katrina.

If we learned anything Wednesday, it's that the real thing will not be easy.

You played elderly and disabled. You played criminals and pregnant women. And sometimes you felt like yourself, and wondered why first responders weren't treating you like you were 86.

The drill, you said, is an imperfect operation with progressive concepts and unsettling setbacks.

In the real deal first responders will not have the bright orange cards identifying special needs. You asked, "How are you going to tell?" "What about a sick person who gets separated from his family?" "Are bus drivers considered first responders?"

Others found the evacuation exercise eye-opening and positive. The City has a plan and the ability to execute it kind of thinking. "I'm glad it wasn't easy for us because it won't be easy if it really happens," one volunteer said.

Wednesday was hot like it would be during an actual evacuation. All of you sat hours with little information.

Cole Judge, a volunteer, said, "At one point, I felt like I was actually evacuating."

Another's eyes teared, knowing how close it felt to 2005 and how it might feel if it happens again.

An emergency planner said that the evacuation exercise shows that preparing to get out on your own or to hitch a ride is the best way out. From an organizational standpoint, the drill was a success, officials say. They found glitches they need to work out. Several first responders wondered aloud where all the volunteer role players came from.

You challenged them.

The emergency operations center at City Hall is on the ninth floor and behind a security door. It's a little enclave of technology and information. Ken watched monitors, tracked the storm and made decisions with you in mind.

He loved talking about the stockpiling of goods for the next storm and the improvements the office had made after Katrina. Especially the evacuation plan that you were so valuable in testing last week.

Thanks Ken. We'll miss you.

Best,

Robert

Day 473

2008-06-22T20:56:00.010-06:00

New Orleans, La.
June 22, 2008

Dear Family and Friends,

New Orleans is a city of things uncommon. Its core is filled with orange cones and flashing yellow street lights that are the everyday signs of consistent brokenness. The longer I stay here, the more I believe back to normal is in a constant state of maybe tomorrow.

This is a move away from my honeymoon days when I neither cared nor noticed the systemic problems that may never be fixed. Or maybe I noticed the problems too much, still naive to believe that one year's time was long enough to make a difference. Now, when six days pass before a downed streetlight is removed, I shrug and say, "Only in New Orleans."

I don't blame the City's department of Public Works. In fact, I applaud their efforts. Sixty-thousand blocks are in New Orleans and all of them have been neglected for decades. Throw in Katrina, which devastated infrastructure and City staff, and New Orleans picked up more broken streetlights, massive potholes and missing street signs.

Then again, people aren't screaming from the rooftops about these daily inconveniences.

This has always been a violent city. The French sent criminals and prostitutes to populate the colony. Decades later, the Ursuline nuns came to center their spirituality. Today, in high crime neighborhoods, street signs suddenly become far less important where police staffing is low. The New Orleans Police Department lost 500 officers after the storm and the post-K attrition rate is just now starting to settle.

When people ask me whether I'm apprehensive about my safety, I used to say no. But, now, little doubts have crept in. As a 473-day veteran of New Orleans, I know now there are inherent risks while living here. These are the tiny disclaimers that everyone should hear, I suppose.

Out of my extended circle of friends, five have had their cars broken into and/or stolen, two have had their bikes stolen, one had her house broken into, one has been mugged.

One has been shot.

My friend who was shot loved the neighborhood he worked in, despite its notorious reputation for drugs and overall down-and-outness. He was AmeriCorps member and spent three weeks in the local (LSU) university's hospital. One of only four fully functioning hospitals here, by the way.

Thank whatever deity you choose that he was a college athlete. His physical strength saved his life, doctors say. He's back in Pennsylvania, and I'm hoping, not entirely spoiled on his altruistic post-college pursuit to do something bigger than himself.

Because laying floorboards and hanging drywall for poor people is a long way from where he could have been during his first year out of school. He'd joined a new community worked long for little and finally was fed up with his friend's car being stolen for the second time. When he and a friend saw the thieves, "We chased after them," he told his local news station. "I caught up with one of them and when I caught up to him he pulled out a gun and shot me twice."

Some say he was stupid to chase. His youthful gumption was courageous, I say.

It's too bad, but only $10,000 of his $90,000 in medical bills will be paid by AmeriCorps.

"It's a horrible thing that happened, but I met a lot of good people, lots of friends down there and I helped a lot of great people, so I don't regret going down," he told his local news station.

So, yes, New Orleans is a City of things uncommon. Uncommon because with all its flaws, the little heartbeat it still has left beats loudly enough for us all to want to be near it. Perhaps, those of us who aren't locals, have been drawn to its dysfunction. Every day here is unlike any other day somewhere else.

And now, during my 473rd day, I wonder whether we're working for a restoration we'll never see.

Who cares, I say. As long as we try.

Robert

Ten month wild ride

2008-05-15T19:49:00.021-06:00

Camp Hope by Habitat for Humanity
May 15, 2008
St. Bernard Parish, La.

Dear Family and Friends,

They aren't glamour children. Often they're just out of high school or taking a break from less than starry-eyed college experiences. Some have finished their degrees. Whatever the path, AmeriCorps NCCC members are quietly doing some of the most important work in the rebuilding of the gulf coast--the stuff that happens in the sun and sometimes the moonlight.

At the Orleans St. Bernard parish line Claiborne Avenue becomes Judge Perez Avenue, residents' skin goes from black to white in nearly an instant. The boarded doors and vacant businesses remain strikingly strong, similar.

Fifteen miles past the parish line, an old elementary school now houses up to 600 recovery volunteers a night. They cook for each other, clean up after each other and ultimately work with each other here in south Louisiana, understandably foreign to all of us.

One license plate in Camp Hope's parking lot tonight reads, "Ontario."

Camp Hope is the brainchild put into action by Habitat for Humanity. Currently there are about 200 people staying here because of President Jimmy Carter's blitz build happening this week. The non-profit hopes to start and finish 7 homes from start to finish as well as dedicate and/or start 50 more.

But, I've come to meet some of the most interesting young people in America. Of the 200 people staying here, about 110 of them are members of an AmeriCorps' program called the National Civilian Community Corps (NCCC).

The "N-triple-C" members implant themselves into communities in teams of 11 for three months at a time. They are at the beck and call of the non-profits they serve. Once the locals get to know them, the National Civilian Community Corps members are referred to simply as the "N-trips." Their total term of service is 10 months.

Jessie Loubet, 24, is a leader of an NCCC team. His nails are painted black and his hair passes his shoulders just enough to look like a rocker on R and R. He says his team works 9-12 hour days that include physical training three days-a-week. NCCC teams live, eat, sleep and work together. All teams are composed of Americans 18-24.

It often, former AmeriCorps NCCC members say, becomes the Real World without the cameras.

"At the end," Loubet says, "we become like family."

Loubet's team is working in New Orleans with a non-profit called Hope has a Face. They are working to turn a warehouse into a community center and volunteer housing quarters. Before New Orleans, the team spent seven weeks in Pearlington, Miss. This is the best description of Pearlington, written by blogger and photographer Clayton Cubbitt:

Pearlington Mississippi was never much to look at, as far as towns go. Even before Katrina it had barely 1,600 citizens. It doesn't have a main street, or a town square. It doesn't have a mayor or a city council. Since Katrina, it doesn't have a post office, a library, or an elementary school. It's a collection of winding country roads, of mossy trees and swamps, dotted with a patchwork constellation of homes, most quite humble even before the storm sank them under twenty feet of muddy water. It's primordial America. It's America before mega-malls and exurbs and freeways stitched it up and plasticized it. But this isn't the autumnal village America featured in political ads or Rockwell paintings, either. This is the dirty deep American South, scruffy and proud. Red mud and fried shrimp. Hard work and love of God. Blacks and whites on different sides of town, mingling in the middle. It sits on old Highway 90 midway between the decadent nights of New Orleans and the white beaches of Biloxi. It's a tiny microcosm of Louisiana and Mississippi lost in the bayous on the border between them. It's the old American dream, covered in drifting Spanish moss (www.operationeden.blogspot.com)

Pearlington, corps member Andrea Portales says, made the team of 11 bond quicker than expected.

The town had no stop lights and no places to go, so they spent time with one another, she says.

At 24, Portales is the oldest on the team.

"They used to call me Mother Goose," she says.

Portales is from Del Rio, Tex. She started school at Texas Tech in Lubbock and went to school for three years. "I'm going to have to start all over," she says. Portales isn't unlike many of the people NCCC attracts. Young Americans looking for something bigger than themselves and the personal benefit of getting 10 months to think about their next move.

On Loubet's team, three have college degrees, five have attended some college and three have not been enrolled in school.

"Last year I got the experience of a lifetime. I gutted homes in New Orleans, I did forestry work in the hills of Tennessee and tutored kids in Charleston, S.C.," Loubet says.

"What other program can you do that in?"

There's four teams (44 people) working with Hope has a Face so they've broken the work into shifts for all the teams. From sunrise to darkness, NCCC teams work at the warehouse.

The last team finishes just before midnight.

Best,

Robert

AmeriCorps week profile: Narda Hernandez

2008-05-07T07:26:00.027-06:00

May 7, 2008
Tulane University Community Health Clinic
611 N Rampart Street
New Orleans, La.

Dear Family and Friends,

When we heard the news, it made us feel like, at least for a moment, somebody got something right.

Narda Hernandez, 23, has been awarded a fellowship to stay and work in New Orleans for two more years. There's talk down here about a brain gain--young people with educations moving here falling in love with the City and staying.

Hernandez is a part of this group, but she's more valuable than most, because she's big on ideas others don't pay much attention to.

Hernandez is from Laredo, Tex. Her word choice switches from English to Spanish, sentence to sentence, no matter the native tongue of her counterpart. She came to New Orleans with the AmeriCorps, a one-year commitment she made right after graduating college.

Over 600 AmeriCorps and Teach for America members are currently working in the City.

After the storm, Spanish-speaking day laborers flooded New Orleans. They, in no small part, have been major contributors to the recovery.

She's always had an interest in community health, and heard about the migrant and seasonal workers moving to New Orleans. Hernandez wondered what kind of health care options would be available.

New Orleans' Latino population pre-storm was only 3.1 percent according to the 2000 census.

Tulane University Community Health Clinic organizers tell the simple beginning story of one doctor, one table and an ice chest keeping the tetanus shots cold. The clinic is now funded by a portion of the 100 million dollars the nation of Qatar gave to New Orleans after the storm.

Sheikh Hamad Bin Khalifa Al-Thani, Amir of the State of Qatar, visited New Orleans two weeks ago. Maybe to see how his money was being spent.

Since she's been in New Orleans, (less than a year) she's started a language translation program at the health clinic. At almost all times, a Spanish speaker is available to translate doctor-patient dialog. When Hernandez first came, few Spanish speakers used the clinic. Receiving healthcare in a different language is often an intimidating or unpleasant experience, Hernandez says.

"Word of mouth started spreading and we started getting alot of Spanish speakers," she says.

Now clinic officials say that they see 30-50 Spanish speakers a week in the four full-time doctor staff that is augmented by medical residents at the Tulane University Medical School. The Spanish interpreter program is volunteer based with eight people who commit to six to eight hours a week. Tulane University undergraduate Spanish students also volunteer during the school year.

Hernandez will be leaving the AmeriCorps and community health clinic at Tulane in June for the the New Voices fellowship. New Voices provides the salary for its fellows to work for two years in accredited non-profits around the country and its mission, like the name, is to fund social entrepreneurs who may not look like decision-makers from previous generations.

"Eso es mi mero mole (That's my thing) ," Hernandez says about working with the Latino population here. During her fellowship Hernandez will be working with the Common Ground health clinic. She'll continue healthcare outreach to the migrant workers in New Orleans, but will be focusing on the Latinas who work in the hotel and tourism industry.

"The focus has been about helping males," she says. "But what about the Latinas?"

Hernandez is one of the won't take no for an answer people that New Orleans desperately needs. The small group working to improve Latino access to healthcare is strong she says.

"There is a sense of uncertainty about what will happen. The health care infrastructure is above us, but because we are a community health clinic, it gives us a sense of flexibility," she says.

"There's nothing stopping us from a community front."

A spring afternoon

2008-04-16T19:12:00.020-06:00

Holy Cross Neighborhood
Lower 9th Ward
April 16, 2008
New Orleans, La.

Dear Family and Friends,

I am not a New Orleans expert. I’ve only been here 24 days. Houses have no windows. Houses have no doors. Houses have no roofs. Concrete foundations sit isolated and open, almost waiting for a DJ so they too can serve a purpose again. Only this time, these foundations can only become makeshift dance floors. But there isn’t much celebrating going on in this neighborhood. Really, there isn’t much of anything going on.

It's been a year now, since I said the above, a description about a place I knew little about then and still know little about now. I went back to the Lower 9th Ward on Tuesday. Crossing over the Industrial Canal and into the face of New Orleans' despair, I hope the signs of progress will have appeared.

Grocery stores and gas stations.

The gas stations are beginning to come back, grocery stores are lagging. It still is, in many ways, a photo opportunity for what it hasn't become.

But, when you go out to the Lower 9th Ward, get away from ground zero and cross a street called Claiborne, a different more vibrant section of the area appears. Holy Cross, a junior and senior high school for boys, was the foundation of the community for over 100 years. The school moved sites after the storm. The neighborhood towards the river off of Claiborne has kept its namesake.

Neighborhood leaders have big plans for the Holy Cross campus. A community center with a focus on green, eco-friendly and sustainable living.

Until then, it's a time capsule.

The Holy Cross neighborhood isn't what you'd think it to be if you listened to the New Orleans' naysayers. Homes are nice. Yards are kept. People are active in the recovery. And by the river there are two steamboat homes that were built at the turn of the century. They provide the backdrop for Twain-like spring afternoons.

The Holy Cross neighborhood association as well as a cooperative by Tulane and Xavier Universities called the Center for Bioenvironmental Research invited scientists and academics from around the country and the world to talk environmental triggers in hormones. Stuff I can't and won't try to explain.

Know that the people were smart, very smart. I tagged along.

So when I said a year ago that there wasn't much celebrating going on, it's because at ground zero, there isn't much there. I had no idea what was nearer the river about 10 blocks away. On our afternoon, the Hot 8 brass band played, the Mississippi river behind them. The Hot 8 have become one of New Orleans most popular local live acts. Lil' Dizzies, a noteworthy restaurant and caterer, served red beans, crawfish etouffee and baked chicken.

Scientists danced.

The afternoon was the first time that I'd experienced happiness in this part of the City. I'm usually showing it to people while their jaws drop or stomaches ache when seeing it for the first time.

It's such a joyful place, New Orleans, but the celebrations are usually held on the other side of the canal. The sun set over New Orleans' skyline. The Holy Cross neighborhood has the best view of the City, its residents say.

There's nothing sad about that.

Best,

Robert

Little bit of NOLA everywhere

2008-04-11T12:15:00.008-06:00

American Flyer Ski Lift
Copper Mountain, Colo.
April 8th, 2008

Dear Family and Friends,

It contributes to pollution and maybe the ambassadors of environmental stewardship on Copper Mountain hate the Mardi Gras beads hanging from trees at 10,000 feet.

I'm stretching by saying that the beads hanging next to the Copper ski lifts somehow symbolize New Orleans. But I'd be willing to bet the what comes next for the skiers who say "look at that" is a fleeting image of New Orleans.

Leaving the City this time has boosted my battery. Living there is living in the center of joy and pain, optimism and doomsday. It takes energy, persistence and devotion.

I'm sitting at the gate now in Denver. We board in 20 minutes. The flight will be full. People are flying stand by. I just peaked over a woman's shoulder. Her itinerary is headed with "Girls New Orleans getaway." This, for lack of a better explanation, is positive.

She's not being dragged by her company to a convention. Judging by the pink stationary, they picked New Orleans for all it once was and continues to be. The guy behind me is also taking his wife to the French Quarter festival this weekend. "We wanted to go down and spend some money to contribute to the recovery" he says to the women sitting next to him.

The women are going for a healthcare conference. I'm a total eavesdropper.

The man goes on to tell them how the doctors in New Orleans are well-versed in gun trauma. "The turf battles" he says. I already knew this was how conversations outside New Orleans go. He then goes on to butcher some French Quarter street names. But to them, he's a New Orleans' authority.

New Orleans:

Sympathy from the storm
Great Food
Wonderful Music
What about the Violence
How about my Safety

And so it goes. On and on. Over and over in boarding areas and inside of airplanes the perception of New Orleans' instability rules.

The couple I sat next to on the plane are on a weekend getaway from San Francisco. "We've never been to New Orleans," the man said. "Our friend told us we had to come."

--Best

Robert

Bertha's Place

2008-03-28T16:03:00.010-06:00

1523 Basin Street
February 25, 2008
New Orleans, La.

Dear Family and Friends,

We were misfits.

Locals in first-name friendships with Bertha Bradley, the owner and bartender, wore fedoras and shiny-tipped shoes. The sign outside said, "No one under 30 allowed." None of us met the age requirement, but a girl in the group had met Walter "Wolfman" Washington, the night's act the week before.

Bertha said we were ok.

Bertha's Place is on the corner of Basin Street, curved like several of New Orleans' streets. Her bar sits where the road begins to straighten. I'd driven by it often, noticing the bright purple and white sign, a portrait of Bertha in a white hat bookending the right-side.

"Bertha's Place. Where customers become family," the sign says.

We found her on a Monday night. The group walked in and stood out. People watched us order drinks, talk in the corner. I felt out-of-place. This wasn't our spot. We were too young, too pale to be inside. But Bertha came over and introduced herself after setting down the buckets of beer. This was her place, she said. Thanks for coming.

The music and friendship were what you look for in a night on the town--good-natured and hassle-free.

Bertha moved to this corner 13 years ago when the area had seven bars. It was spot of hot nightlife for the Treme (tra-may) neighborhood. Today, Bertha and one other are the only ones left. Treme, New Orleanians say, is where New Orleans musicians are bred. When you talk to someone from the neighborhood, they tell you how Treme kids learn on trumpets taller than them.

Historians call Treme the oldest African-American neighborhood in America. In the late 1700s and into the early 1800s, African slaves who obtained freedom were able to purchase property in Treme. Hundreds of properties were owned by free people of color in this neighborhood during an active-slavery era in America.

Bertha's business takes work. She spent 80,000 dollars to repair from Katrina's damage. It's a lot of money for a woman who charges three bucks a beer and offers free catfish and potato salad on Monday nights.

"It's been tough," she said.

Most times, when insiders talk to outsiders, they give the glossy-eyed answer that's been in circulation during year two of the recovery. The "we're plugging along and we'll be back" answers. I've noticed this often in the outsider role.

Bertha was different. She teared up. Tired now of being one of the few small business owners to come back in this section of the City. Afraid of ending up like bar-owners who end up old and penniless.

"I don't want to grow old in a bar," she said. "But I felt I needed to come back."

Bertha is originally from Pensacola, Fl. She moved to New Orleans and worked for the phone company in the 80s. She also was a bar-maid at Club 38 in the area of
town she's now synonymous with. "I always wore gloves and had my hair done," she said. "We knew what brought the men in."

Today, close to 60, she's the same way. "I always need to have a hat on," she said. "I feel naked without one."

She treats her employees like family too. In this business, she says, if the bar-owner doesn't make money, neither does the help. Too often, she's heard stories where the help didn't get paychecks.

"She paid us out of her own pocket," Maura Batiste, an employee for Bertha since 1996, said.

Walter "Wolfman" Washington plays here every Monday. It's new, she says, acknowledging that Washington is helping her increase business on a typically slow
night.

"1985 was the first event Walter worked for me," she said. "He said it was an honor to come back."

Best,

Robert

Alternative Spring Breaks attract students to New Orleans

2008-03-15T15:26:00.012-06:00

Gentilly
March 19, 2008
New Orleans, La.

Dear Family and Friends--

New Orleans in March was a do-gooder gathering. Thousands of different students came each week. They hammered nails. Read to kids. Built playgrounds and surveyed neighborhoods.

I've heard many times that the volunteer effort in New Orleans is the only reason why the place is where it is today. A credible argument, for sure.

But it's 2008 now, and the once-a-year week long visits are tripping some of these students up. They're stuck in a moment that down here most folks are desperately trying to put behind them. The summer of 2005 is burned in all of our brains, though, d when spring-breakers come here, these are the images that guide them.

When they look at a home with six-feet high grass and a hole in the roof, they wonder what happened to its owner.

Too often they don't wonder about the next-door-neighbor who is back. When a group of Howard University students volunteered last week doing surveying, they were asked to assess conditions of homes in some of New Orleans' flood affected homes. Good, fair or poor were the ratings.

"How is this helping the people in Houston?" a student asked fearful that what he was doing wasn't helping in the relief effort, but actually hurting.

I didn't answer it the way I needed to. I danced, trying to calm his concerns because the last thing I wanted was 200 students who drove 20 hours on a bus to get here and think they're somehow hurting the community.

What I should have said is this. The people in Houston, if they're coming back, are keeping up their homes-which typically means they're paying someone to cut their grass. The homes you see in disarray aren't coming back. Chalk it up and lets help the people who are here or who are keeping their property up remotely.

The fly-in volunteers, I hope, will move with returned residents in this paradigm shift.

Day 365

2008-03-02T23:53:00.007-06:00

March 6, 2008
New Orleans, La.

Dear Family and Friends,

My dad is here. He's come with an expectation of viewing a City patched with band-aids and duct tape. He wonders if the City staggers like a beat-up boxer or claws like an an unruly underdog. To this, I've told him, "It's a little bit of both."

In either description it's safe to say that, down here, the K-word will always be worse then the F-word.

Residents grit their teeth. About insurance companies. About naysayers who call them stupid for living below sea-level. About life, really. Loretta, my co-worker, has given up on the insurance companies. "I'm going to let my lawyer handle it," she says. She had flood insurance. She had hurricane insurance.

She received $1,000.

To the naysayers, the best response I've heard is something like this. Call it what you like, it doesn't have to be New Orleans, but there must be a city here with people to operate the port at the mouth of the Mississippi. It is and will always be fragile. But, a society must be here.

Then there's the bad stuff. Visitors expect it on the drive from Louis Armstrong Airport and are often surprised when they get to their downtown hotels without seeing what they watched in 2005. The bad stuff exists in areas outside of the bells and whistles of the visitor's section of New Orleans.

The bad stuff has left those areas bleak to the observer. But insert yourself one step closer. Attend a civic association meeting in a battered neighborhood and you'll find an illustration of how civic participation is supposed to work. There were over 200 people at the Lakeview neighborhood association meeting last Saturday.

They announced a post-office would be opening in the area soon, catalyzing applause and even more side conversations about how nice it's going to be when the three-day-a-week mail cycle increases to six.

I feel like the whispered-opinion in America at-large says that the slow recovery in New Orleans is the fault of the poor, black people who live here.

The whispers are wrong.

A drive through the on-its-heels New Orleans exposes that the politically- correct view of the storm, the one that says Katrina knew no race or class, is actually true.

Many people have asked whether I've seen any progress since moving here. For the first six to eight months I would say it's too early for me to recognize any changes. But, lately it's safe for me to say that yes, I do see progress during my trips throughout the City. Construction is steady, reports of returning New Orleanians put the Orleans-proper at a smidge over 300,000. Four-hundred and fifty thousand lived here before the storm. Several thousands of that loss though are people who've moved out to the greater metro area, not to Houston or Dallas. And any of them will tell you, they're still New Orleanians who work and play here, dine and dance here.

Wonder all you want about New Orleans future. But, know there are amazing people devoted to this place. I think most of the young people who've moved here will come and go gaining incredible experience in the process. At the end of the day, it's up to the locals. Like one resident told me last week at the neighborhood meeting,

"Don't worry about us, we're going to be ok."

Riding with the NOPD Crisis Unit

2008-02-22T16:52:00.011-06:00

Riding with the Crisis Unit
February 21, 2008
New Orleans, La.

Dear Family and Friends,

The night began and ended like many others. Two friends continued a bond that began in kindergarten. Life in the new New Orleans for David Mitchell and Kenny Martin contains a fiancée and a stepson for Mitchell, a young wife for Martin and new business together. These days, there are speckled moments of the previous New Orleans, where normal actually meant normal—before Mitchell spent three weeks first-responding in the Superdome and Ninth Ward. Before Martin went to Baghdad.

Tonight, they’re together, like they always are on Thursdays, patrolling New Orleans streets.

Voluntarily.

The two are members of the Crisis Intervention Unit of the New Orleans Police Department, an all-volunteer force tasked with transporting the mentally ill to local hospitals after a 911 call comes through. They are unarmed.

“Just our mouths and our fists,” Mitchell says emphasizing that they’re called to calm situations, not irritate them. On the books, they’re called “Peacemakers” he says.

Why would anyone help patrol New Orleans for free?

“It’s our way of giving back,” Mitchell, 23, says.

The story goes a bit further. Mitchell is a third generation emergency man. His grandfather was a New Orleans firefighter. His father was too. He’s a paramedic that also works for the New Orleans Emergency Services department.

Martin, 22, joined the Louisiana National Guard before he finished high school. By 19, he’d gone to Iraq. Thinks he'll be called up again. "Afghanistan," he says. The two would text-message while Martin was away.

Mitchell joined the Crisis team right after the storm. Martin joined him a few months ago.

Their first and only call tonight came at 7:42 pm.

The call came from a New Orleans thoroughfare familiar with police on a street where I once saw two toddlers each wearing a roller skate, one on the little girl’s left foot, the other on the little boy’s right.

Two men who’d been in scuffles before were screaming at each other. Curtis* is a paranoid schizophrenic. He tells a nurse at the hospital that he’d kill the guy if he’d ever saw him again.

“How?” the nurse asks.

“With a gun.”

“Do you have a gun?”

“Yes.”

I can’t help but not take him seriously about the gun part. He didn’t sound malicious. Didn’t look it either.

Curtis carries his medicine in his pockets and has a plastic bag with a bunch of clothes. He’s not quite sure where he lives, but his mom is going to buy a place he says. He agrees to an AIDS test. A condom falls out of his pocket.

I smile. Not a "ha-ha that's embarrassing" smile.

Martin asks him his name. “I’m in my 40s,” he says, I’m getting too old to remember exactly.”

“Do you do drugs?” Martin asks.

“I used to smoke crack and drink whiskey,” Curtis says. “Not anymore.”

Mitchell tells me that everyone they transport says he or she isn’t on drugs anymore.

Since Nicola Cotton, a 24-year-old police officer was killed by her own gun by a homeless schizophrenic last month, the police department says the mentally ill they drop off at hospitals are supposed to be “fast tracked” and kept for observation. Bernel Johnson, the 44-year-old who killed Cotton, had been picked up on a night like this three months ago.

“Nobody even knew that name then,” Mitchell says.

They talk about how the hospitals don't like to see the Crisis van coming. Mostly, they say, because there aren't the beds to treat the people. Charity hospital, closed since the storm, used to handle the lion's share of the police's mental health drop-offs.

Now, it's a struggle to spread it out evenly. Mitchell says that the calls from uptown homes and white-collar families for emergency assistance after the storm have gone up. They are called whenever a suicide is attempted. But, most often, he says the unit deals with the chronically homeless.

I ask what the mission of the Crisis unit is. Mitchell says that it's a way for a police situation to be resolved for people who don't need to be taken away by officers with guns. The Crisis team is a more humane option, he says.

Mitchell and Martin are part of an often unrecognized community in the new New Orleans.
People who have lives and jobs but are also neighborhood association presidents and community organizers, food donors and youth mentors.

They are a tribute to the resolve of America's City on the mend.

When Mitchell walked to the end of the St. Claude Avenue bridge during the aftermath of the Storm and saw a lake that used to be a neighborhood, "my world just dropped."

He pulled people off their roofs on a 16-foot-boat. For two days, Walter Boasso, a state Senator from nearby Chalmette, La. helped along side him. During much of the three-week rescue mission, Washington slept on the boat.

"When we were in Iraq," Martin says. "We had a bed and a warm meal to go home to. Katrina was nothing like that."

They drive the van through all parts of the City listing the hot spots and shadowy corners as well as prospective job sites for their heating and air conditioning business. When midnight comes, Martin pulls into an NOPD driveway, saying he'll be the early person into work the following morning. Mitchell says that he'll stay later then.

True friends.

-Best

Robert

Obama Outtakes

2008-02-12T00:14:00.004-06:00

Tulane University
February 7, 2008
New Orleans, La.

Dear Family and Friends,

There were the early risers who stood outside in darkness and the late risers who stood outside during Barack Obama's speech.

And then there was me, somewhere in between.

From my days as a sports information intern at the University of Oregon, I know how easy it can be to get into an event by pretending to be with the media. My fellow late risers were already being shuffled to a veranda where Obama's audio would be played.

"Where's the press entrance?" I ask a 20-something volunteer.

"Over there," he says, pointing towards a door into Tulane's gymnasium.

This is the point that I start to get nervous. I know where I need to be, I know I'll have to fib a little to get in. Few bloggers are recognized as actual journalists. I wait and tell myself,

"Act like you've been there before."

Around the corner, I couldn't be happier to see two student volunteers handling the press credentials. The last people you want to see as gatekeepers are middle-aged women on a power trip. But two young college girls?

I had the props. Camera. Writer's notepad. Pen behind my left ear.

"I need a credential," I say. "But, I didn't request one, sorry."

"Do have a media id?" she says.

The moment of fiction.

"Yeah." So I confidently pulled out my id, which says nothing about being media, and put it down on table.

"Ok, sign in here." she says.

At 9:30 I was in. My friend Pavel had called at 6:55 am saying they were getting ready to go.

They had seats in the 20th row.

Now that Obama is filling stadiums and not high-school gymnasiums, security has gotten tight. They called the Transportation Security Administration in from Louis Armstrong Airport to do the security screening. I count 10 of them near the door. They frisk everyone with their magic wands.

Men with microphones whose cords sneak down their necks and into their jacket all stand over six feet. I go outside to try to find Obama and his crew of writers, publicists, campaign managers and other staffers. Most of the ways around Tulane's Fogelman arena are blocked off.

I take a scenic route around the Union, hoping to get to the backside of the arena, which is adjacent to the Union. It is the only place that wasn't blocked. I keep walking and see his SUVs and more guys in suits.

A cop stops. "You can't be back here," he says.

"But, I'm with the press."

He laughs. "I'm gonna let you go now, if those guys see you," he says. "You'll end up somewhere you don't want to be."

I take his cue, turn around and join everyone else.

Best,

Robert

Obama in New Orleans

2008-02-06T23:53:00.000-06:00

Tulane University
February 7th, 2008
New Orleans, La.

Dear Family and Friends,

Credit Barack Obama's advance team.

When mental illness and a six-foot-four frame met Nicola Cotton two weeks ago, the City stood still. She was a police officer shot by her own gun. The culprit was a homeless man given up on by his family and released from a mental institution three weeks earlier.

When the news came, the women in the office began praying.

I leaned back and grabbed my head--Nicola Cotton was 24.

It's supposed to be the age where life begins. We've glimpsed the struggles and rewards of responsibility, the fears of growing up gain traction with every year. But still at 24, we're more babies than breadwinners.

And it's just above the median age in the full gym at Tulane University today where people lined up before dawn to see him speak two hours after sunrise. Over 3,000 people came.

Nestled about 15 minutes into the speech full of crescendos ending with standing ovations, Obama prepped for another that ended with a reference to Cotton and New Orleans' crime.

"And instead of unsafe streets and shocking crimes, we will help New Orleans rebuild its criminal justice system. We'll start a new COPS for Katrina program to put more resources into community policing, so that heroic officers - men and women like Nicola Cotton, who gave her life serving the city she loved - have more support."

The text doesn't reflect the emotion of a room tired of being America's crime punching bag, although, in many ways, the bruises are deserved. I'm so glad that his research and speech writing team noticed that Nicola Cotton's death is still fresh here in New Orleans.

He referenced education, the broken levees and said President Bush's fly-over of New Orleans' Katrina damage was a metaphor for Bush's presidency. At times he was specific and others he was cautiously ambiguous.

The 100-year flood protection is already in the plans, Category 5 levees are not. So Obama said,

"When I am President, we will finish building a system of levees that can withstand a 100-year storm by 2011, with the goal of expanding that protection to defend against a Category 5 storm."

Goals aren't promises.

Overall, the people I spoke with and Facebook status messages I read used words like "trance" and "high" to describe how they felt during and immediately after the speech.

Obama is a superstar in game that rarely produces them. His youth movement is taking hold, like older generations say, they did in the Kennedy era.

I read that Obama's go-to-speech writer is 26. Obama and his wordsmiths are giving all of us young people an inspiring political fairy tale (a good kind) that we're talking about as Kennedy-like.

Funny right? We're not even old enough to remember him.

Best,

Robert

Edwards and Poverty

2008-01-30T15:48:00.000-06:00

4000 N. Roman
Habitat for Humanity's Musician's Village
January 30th, 2008
New Orleans, La.

Dear Family and Friends,

That cold day two Decembers ago, Orelia Tyler thought she'd be getting a few college kids to move some dirt. The kids showed. So did John Edwards, announcing that he'd be running for the Presidency again outside her home.

Tyler came to Edwards' "I'm getting out of the race" announcement the other day in New Orleans' Ninth Ward, a place, he said, is a symbol of the poverty he's fighting to eradicate.

He also said, "We'll never forget you."

When he said it, I wondered if he's the type of big-time politician who has perfected the handshake and forget, handshake and forget routine. When I met Miss Orelia (That's how people address their female elders here in Louisiana), I wanted to know: Has Mr. Edwards stayed in touch?

Miss Orelia is the perfect person to ask, Edwards used her front yard to announce his candidacy. Her destruction was his foundation. "Every time he was in New Orleans, someone from his staff would call me," she said. She saw him at least four times throughout 2007.

A year into the campaign, Edwards' staffers told him that Miss Orelia's mom died. Burdia Jordan was 72. It happened two days before Christmas. Miss Orelia said Edwards called, offering his condolences.

When he'd finished his run and stepped of a make-shift platform, he gave Miss Orelia a hug. The journey had come full-circle.

Edwards had said it was time for him to move over for the other two democratic candidates to make history. He never had the It factor so many are seeking for the future President. But he said he vowed to keep up his fight against poverty in America and that Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton agreed to make it part of their campaigns.

There is a new normal here. New Orleans, at least for awhile, will be the American symbol of social ills that exist within all urban environments. The country's dirty secrets are on display. It's the most honest City in America.

Edwards stopped by a homeless camp by my apartment complex. Some of the people that stay there, I'd call them regular acquaintances. They tell me different "Why" stories all the time. One day, it's the depression, the next it's the drugs, the next it's "I've been clean for months."

Edwards says 200,000 veterans sleep under bridges and on grates each night in America and that we Americans have lost the compassion necessary to care for our poor. A VISTA I work with once said that in all religions, there is a story emphasizing that the poor will always be with us.

I think this is the rub for Americans. Are we willing to care for the weak? In New Orleans, down the street from my home, I see it in their teeth. If I were 50, toothless, skinny and shriveled would I have the will to save myself?

I hope I never have to find out.

Do we have the will to care for them? The guys like Raymond Hall and a guy named Chris who comes into my office almost every day. Chris lost an arm when he was a kid. Hit by a car, he says. He zips his backpack with his teeth. He's a piece of what he once was, I'm sure, speaking in erratic and confusing sentences. Truth is, I've found myself wanting him to leave so I can go about my day.

And then he comes back again the next day or the next week. For the moment, I'm happy, because I know he isn't dead. Chris is the kind of guy that is so far gone that even the homeless camp wont take him. He's been shunned like a nerd in a room of jocks. The homeless make fun of him. Isn't that something, the human condition at all levels, it seems, searches for something to be better than. In this case, Chris is the ammunition for other down-and-outers to say, "At least I'm not him."

It takes a saint to care for the people who sleep under bridges, not a politician. An amount of compassion, which, I believe only a sliver of people have. The fight needs a few more foot soldiers and many more donors.

Then, maybe, our Chrises and Raymonds will have a roof and hot food.

That's what we all want right? Food. Shelter. Happiness.

New Orleans has an NBA team-For Now.

2008-01-29T16:48:00.000-06:00

New Orleans Arena
1/28/2008
New Orleans, La.

Dear Family and Friends,

On another night in another city, Chris Paul would already be a superstar. From the stands, he seems unassuming, like a guy that sits in the front row of a class but doesn't ask questions. You know he's smart, but he doesn't advertise it. Even his socks lack the normal NBA standoutness. They aren't the ones that are so low they're not visible or so high that they cover the entire leg.

On this night, in this City, Chris Paul just hopes people come watch his team play. The New Orleans Hornets, until recently, had the lowest attendance in the NBA. My friends and I, we live two blocks from the arena. On a game night, we can walk to the box office and for 10 dollars see the game.

Ticket availability isn't because of a bad product. The Hornets won eight in a row going into last night. Actually, the Hornets won eight in a row by over 14 points, and led the NBA's Western Conference. For the non-basketball readers, it's a pretty big deal for this time of year.

My roommate Jules, a buddy named Pavel and I walked to the arena to see the Hornets try to extend their streak against the Denver Nuggets. As we walked, we talked about how the state of Louisiana and the owner of the Hornets, inked an agreement that would allow the Hornets out of their arena lease after the end of next season if attendance doesn't average at least 14,375 fans a game.

Even on their streak the Hornets haven't been winning at the turnstiles. They've fallen short since the deal was signed. The attendance reporting began on December 7th. Pavel and I went to the Portland Trailblazers game last week with 11,000 others. Pavel says that the Hornets have the most marketing and ticket promotions in the league. I had a guy sell me the tickets to last week's game at work-- a door-to-door salesman in 2008. Tie and ID card included.

As we rounded the corner, the Superdome in the corner of our right eyes, larger lines were forming than I remembered seeing at the two previous games I'd attended.

"Geez, maybe we won't get in," I said.

We did. But, the 10 dollar tickets had sold out. We went up to the 20 dollar section and saw plenty of empty seats but less than the Portland game. The attendance ended up being over 15,000. So, in the race to keep the team here, last night the people of New Orleans kept pace.

The Hornets won their ninth straight game beating Denver by 24 points. Fans chanted "MVP" when Chris Paul left the game in the fourth quarter.

Some say it'd be a PR nightmare if the Hornets left New Orleans. They can't leave until 2010. It'd be five years post-Katrina and the country will really have made the Storm a once-a-year commemoration by then. The Hornets' future can be determined by the residents, it's one of the only outcomes where the people have control.

Best,

Robert

Photo: CNNSI.com

Neighborhood groups take action

2008-01-20T17:35:00.001-06:00

Olive Stallings Park
January 19, 2008
New Orleans, La.

It’s 6:30 am and Kate Parker’s eyes are bleary.

The clouds that will be visible an hour from now drop cold rain pellets on people’s plastic rain slips and nylon ski jackets. A forecaster has even called for a slight chance of snow in New Orleans this morning.

Snow. In New Orleans.

The conditions are the only thing Parker, the president of the Faubourg St. John neighborhood association, can’t control after months of planning today’s playground. Three hundred people are expected in 90 minutes to volunteer for the all-day affair complete with a mural, tree-planting, horseshoe pit and a spiral slide.

Some will come from the local universities who are mobilizing in honor of Martin Luther King Day. Others are neighborhood residents or AmeriCorps NCCC members, the traveling troupes who spend 10 months sleeping on floors, and other random places.

Parker, the president of the Faubourg St. John neighborhood association since 2006, and members of the Kaboom! playground project have been setting the build since Thursday. Walls were primed, holes dug, and x’s spray painted to mark the destination for purples poles, the structure of the playground.

“Rain, sleet or snow,” Kaboom! members say, “we’ll build in any of it.”

Group by group volunteers went into the rain and cold, equipped with zip-locked bags that contained directions and tool belts with wrenches and sockets, nuts and bolts.

Garbage bags became rain slips for the unprepared.

Funny thing about a volunteer build: figuring out the difference between an Allen wrench and a socket then figuring out how to use them.

One of the Kaboom! captains comes by our station and looks at some of our assembly. Wrong bolts he says. A fellow volunteer and I looked at each other, “I bet he could do this whole thing faster than all of us,” he says.

It’s true, the project managers could probably do this in their sleep. Their patience, with well-intentioned beginners day after day, build after build, must wear thin.

New Orleans’ neighborhood associations, local Bobby Wozniak says, are catalysts of on-the-ground action in post-Katrina New Orleans. “It’s a 100 times more than it was,” Wozniak says. “We figured out that we have to make it right this time. If we’re (New Orleans) gonna do it, we’re going to have to do it ourselves.”

Michael Green agrees. He’s under a big white tent with a smoker being loaded with hamburger and hot dogs for the volunteers. Friends call him “Cobbeannie” although he didn't say why. He had a restaurant before the storm, but now runs Cobbeanie’s grill, a catering business that is “doing really well.”

Green grew up at Stallings park and has been a bit of an advocate/greens keeper ever since. He learned to play sports here, played pick-up basketball on the courts beginning at age 12. He’s in his early 4o’s now, but has never lost his affection for the nights he grew up here.

“One time when I was 12, we were practicing outside and the street lights went out. We practiced in the dark.”

“Any legends from Stallings?”

“A guy named Willie Bland," Green says. "He ended up playing in college and would always be around playing pick-up,” Green says.

“And me.”

I ask Mark Andry, Green’s friend if he’s a legitimate Stallings legend.

“Cob is a Stallings park legend, he’s a neighborhood legend,” he says.

Green feeds the volunteers who are helping improve the place he’s been “replacing the nets at for the last 2o years.”

A woman comes by with an empty platter to bring the food inside to the wet-socked, muddied pants volunteers.

“They love your burgers in there,” she says.

Outside Tigers versus Buckeyes

2008-01-07T18:29:00.001-06:00

Central Business District
January 7, 2008
New Orleans, La.

Dear Family and Friends,

The rain sent fans in silver and red, purple and gold running for cover two hours before the beginning of LSU's celebration night. 79,651 attended. A record, Superdome folks say.

For those who came to the game, but weren't inside, technology has made tailgating the best of both worlds. The electric feel of being there along side the convenience of coolers, chairs and television sets.

Tonight, RVs replaced Humvees in the Holiday Inn hotel parking lot.

The lot has housed in the the National Guard's vehicles, here to help the New Orleans Police department protect New Orleans. The National Guard is still here, of course, many of them Louisiana residents. The Humvees now occupy the southeastern corner of the lot.

"We grilled over 1,000 pounds of meat, and 1,000 pounds of crawfish," New Iberia, La. resident Lee LeBlanc says. LSU fans might be more knowledgeable about what happens outside the field than they do inside. And that's not a knock on the fans' collective football IQ.

"Here, have some duck wrapped in bacon," LeBlanc says. He and his father have rented 45 car spots at the Holiday Inn parking lot and brought in 10 MotorHomes, all equipped with TVs and lights.

The game, like last year, turned out bad for the BCS and good for the college football needs a playoff advocates. Tiger fans' celebration walk and the Buckeye's somber stroll both ended on Bourbon Street.

After watching the game from home, two friends and I decided to walk to Bourbon to see the spectacle. We saw a man, middle-aged with a big gash on his forehead. He'd fallen and looked confused as other fans and police attended to him. My friend's sister works at the municipal courthouse, she said they didn't have room in the parking lot for all the fans arrested for public intoxication last night.

By the end, when Monday had given way to Tuesday and long after my friends and I had returned home, the sun began to rise. LSU supporters who stayed out stumbled back to couches and beds, hotels and friend's apartments, leaving a night of excess for an afternoon headache.

Best,

Robert

2008

2008-01-04T15:40:00.000-06:00

2008
January 4th, 2008
New Orleans, La.

Dear Family and Friends,

It's the little things that kick people while they're down. We all drive past the schools that say classes are in session, reminders that people mark time here by the summer of 2005. Probably always will.

It's 2008 now, and some people are painting over the time capsules, saying it's finally time to move on. Today, I went back to one of my most favorite acts of artistic and social expression. In June, the side of the building said "Welcome to K-Ville."

The spray paint is gone now. I'd say the neighborhood is better for it. The entire City is better every day the "X"s are painted over and the time-stamped readerboards get updated.

Will 2008 be the year of the disappearing "X"s?

I didn't think I'd drive by the "Welcome to K-Ville" building today and find it painted over. It's not like it was even a job-well-done. The building is vacant--I hope it was a neighbor fed up with walking past the sign every day.

"This is my-ville," she might have said.

New Orleans, in 2008's infancy, has open its arms to the world once again. Ten-thousand Hawaiians traveled here to cheer on their University's football team in the Sugar Bowl. Today, the City hosts the BCS college football national championship. Then, it's on to Mardi Gras and the NBA All-Star game.

Even LeBron James threw a party last week, I hear.

The City is on stage. This is an audition with high stakes and big dollars. To those who ask, and there's a bunch of you, yes it's safe to walk in the French Quarter at night. In the areas visitors don't see, 2008 has been called a make or break year. Until now, it seems, day-to-day living have been social experiments in survival not strategy.

But, fewer people are calling my office with lumps in their throats.

More people, like my co-worker Loretta, are calling contractors and picking out countertops. The final steps, she says, to being finished and leaving the mortgage payment at the broken house and the rental payment at the temp-house life she's had since the Storm.

"I'm almost there," she says. "Just have to get those countertops."

Best,

Robert

Brad Pitt. The Pink Project

2007-12-23T19:36:00.000-06:00

Tennessee and Derbigny Streets
December 26th, 2007
Lower 9th Ward
New Orleans, La.

Dear Family and Friends,

Until recently, the daylit view off the Clairborne bridge was an unlikely inspirer. Looking towards the intersection of Tennessee and Derbigny, the residential lots blended together. Grazing grass replaced front yards.

What once was a lively part of the Lower 9th Ward had become an American eyesore that millions flocked to see. Devastation tours became big business.

Now, however, an artistic expression, a battle cry for sustainability, and a stab at correction is covering the most devastated area in New Orleans. The experiment is Brad Pitt's Pink Project. The Make It Right foundation hopes to build 150 homes here.

Over 400 scaffolded triangles and squares wrapped in pink are scattered across 15 square blocks symbolizing the homes lost in the Storm. It's an art installation on a massive scale, and I'm beginning to think the symbolic merit of the process will ultimately be its most important component.

The 150 homes rebuilt are a drop in the bucket in a neighborhood where over 5,000 homes were destroyed. This is not a save the City project by numbers. It's far more important from a spirit and upside outlook. The sounds of diesel engines and heavy machinery--not silence--give way to the crickets at dusk. When people drive through "ground zero" they don't think, "What's going to happen here?"

Too many Americans have left this neighborhood feeling angst, hopelessness, pity and shame.

The art component of the project is genius, really. We're a culture of extremes. If it isn't the fastest, the slowest, the youngest, the oldest, the biggest, smallest, the worst or the best it ain't a headline. For two years and four months, despite the truth that 80 percent of the City sustained considerable damage, these 15 blocks were the center of attention.

The Lower 9th Ward was Brad Pitt. We were the paparazzi.

Pitt called the project a small act of civil disobedience, citing pink as the color that screamed the loudest. The bright pink thingees have achieved what no guide or resident has been able to do--inspire.

Each time $150,000 dollars is raised by the Make it Right Foundation, the fragmented pieces of pink scaffolding will be joined to form a house in wrapping paper. Currently, enough has been raised for 52 of the 150 homes. At night the installation exhibits similarities of several pink jack-o-lanterns on a really big porch.

Pitt had 13 architecture firms submit designs for the homes, with sustainability a key concept.

“If you have this blank slate and this great technology out there, what better test than low-income housing?” Pitt told the New York Times. “It’s got to work at all levels to really be viable.”

"You can adopt a tankless water heater or a solar panel or a tree or a low-flush toilet,” Pitt told the New York Times.

And for those who've wondered whether Pitt is figurehead or real contributor--friends close to the project say it's the latter.

--Best,

Robert

Donations can be made through the Make it Right foundation's web site: www.makeitrightnola.org.

Photo Credit: Lee Celano, Reuters.

Transplant indiscretion

2007-12-10T19:05:00.000-06:00

December 10, 2007
CJ Peete (Magnolia) Housing Projects
New Orleans, La.

Dear Family and Friends,

The rumble in the green space between units at the Magnolia housing projects is gone now, replaced by the muffled sounds of the expressway nearby.

The physical structures are barracks-styled, they look much like a Northeastern boarding school or what servicemen might have stayed in during World Wars. There aren't many who'd say these public housing projects aren't built well. A joke down here is, "The only time people are running to the projects is when a storm is coming."

Jokes are funny. But they only work with little truths. People have always run from the projects. They run when crimes are committed. Or they run away pursuing a better life. Before the Storm, the public housing projects were centers of violent crime, poverty and poor education. Magnolia, in its pre-storm days, had developed a national reputation for its violent crime.

It has been locked since the Storm.

Magnolia and three other of the City's largest projects are due to be demolished beginning next week. Advocates of the New Orleans' public housing projects aren't going quietly. Last week, they marched on the City Council meeting. Today, recent whispers of human road blocks became yelps of intent. You see, many of the housing projects suffered little damage in the storm, and some, according to anti-demolition advocates, are move-in ready. Many public housing residents are still displaced and those who've come back returned to locks on their residences.

It's a bit of a paradox in New Orleans--tearing down usable buildings.

This is not an arena for me to tell you about whether I think the demolitions are right. The price tag is large and the outcome calls for mixed-income communities. There are passionate people on both sides.

The clash (read: human roadblocks) between government and grassroots arrives on December 15th. Until today, these advocates had played a flawless game of call-to-action and political dissent. Many of these human roadblocks will look more like me than the typical New Orleans' public housing resident. Thousands of young, mostly white and well-educated Americans have transplanted themselves here post-Katrina.

They are hip, socially-conscious and technologically fit, blogging, photoshopping and disseminating media to all corners of America and abroad. So today, when the signs appeared reading: "For every Public Housing Unit Destroyed, A Condo Will Be Destroyed," --I didn't see angry and powerless people behind them.

I saw transplants with far less invested creating a firestorm in a racially divided City already on fragile ground.

I was at City Hall when these signs appeared, and I've seen many of the socially-just post-K white well-to-doers at the protest on several other occasions during my time here.

After all, I guess I'm one of 'em. I might have even sat at their lunch table, if this was high school.

It was disappointing that transplants had become the story. Disappointing that, if this was a game, role players lept at an opportunity to become more important than they are. The fight between government and grassroots in an old city doesn't need newcomers with little invested inserting themselves into the dispute. The FBI is investigating. I believe it's propaganda produced in a corner coffee shop that went too far. I think most have the same attitude.

We are a generation of altruism. A demographic of go-getters and big dreamers. More so, I'd say than any who've come before us, given our development in relatively peaceful and prosperous times. Somewhere along the line, behind the big ideas and world-beating attitudes, a little narcissism crept in.

It took a lot of gumption to adhese these signs to City Hall and around the Central Business District. I think it took even bigger egos.

I've said it before and I'll say it again, this is not our place to become the story, or the world-changers. A guy told me the other day that he's a little tired of the idealistic transplants who think they've "come to save our shipwreck from itself."

I'm all for idealism. I'm all for world-beaters. But, we must all remember, the people from New Orleans are a courageous and competent bunch and we, the young transplants, will learn more from them than they'll ever learn from us. There is a delicate balance between learning, listening and serving a community and doing what you think is best.

--Robert

Stuck. 8/26/05

2007-12-04T16:26:00.002-06:00

December 2, 2007
Thomy Lafone Elementary
New Orleans, La.

Dear Family and Friends,

The silence is the scariest part.

All but one entrance has been boarded. Shattered glass and bent plywood rest in front of the door I've entered. If I'm caught, is it only and entering?, I wonder. After all, someone else has done the breaking.

My breath is loud. I try to quiet it, there could be people in here. It's funny really, I worry more about the people who may be mad about me getting in here and less about the people who may be living here. People who may have guns.

The walls of Thomy Lafone Elementary School are preserved as they were, Friday, August 26, 2005. Ms. Becknell taught in Room 233. Her lesson plan is still attached to the wall, just under the light switch.

8:00-9:30: Literacy
9:30-10:00: LEJS
10:00-10:30: Writing
10:30-11:30: Math
11:30-12:15: Lunch Duty
12:15-1:00: Language
1:00-1:45: Science
1:45-2:30: Social Studies

I'd like to find Ms. Becknell. I'd ask her what she's done since she left Room 233.

In another room on the second floor, a news-clipping montage is on the wall. When I read it from a far, I thought someone had put it up as a social, political statement for the post-K wander-iners of Thomy Lafone to read. The headlines, "New Orleans mourns" and "Darkest Day" and "This is a Sad Day in America" were what I saw from a distance.

They were September 11 clippings, there to remind the children of what had happened. Our language, as beautiful as it is, has limits of expression. The words we pull out in tragedies--they're recyclable, no matter how different the scenarios.

As I walk down the circular stairs that so many others have walked with backpacks and pencil pouches, scrunchies and Air Jordans, I get sad. It's an odd, selfish sadness though, about how I'd feel about the elementary school I went to going through what LaFone did.

Do you remember the kid who always picked his nose or the teacher who gave you candy when your spelling test was perfect? These are the memories of Katrina kids are making somewhere else now. Often in multiple places since the Storm.

I walk past a clock that looks like ones I used to visualize skipping forward until the end of the school day. But this isn't a place for fast-forward. If anything, New Orleanians wish they had a two-year-and-some change rewind button.

Even if we wanted to, we couldn't turn the clocks back inside Lafone.

None of them work.

--Best,

Robert

Tuesday at the Maple Leaf

2007-11-21T01:18:00.000-06:00

Maple Leaf Bar
8316 Oak St.
Just after Midnight
New Orleans, La.

Dear Family and Friends--

Last night, when the Rebirth Brass Band's drummer walked through the door 30 minutes late, no one batted an eye.

"They need you," the bouncer said.

Rebirth is worth the wait. They began at 11:30 for a 10:30 show, administering their instant injection of pro-New Orleansness to a mixing pot of college kids, hipsters, brothers, sisters, barbie dolls and senior citizens.

The senior citizen part is true. They enter at their own risk, with no guarantee of replacement if a hearing aid breaks.

The Maple Leaf bar is positioned on a road out of a Jack Kerouac novel. The store fronts have character because the proprietors have character. Oak street is stuck in a time warp, but has installed wi-fi and bikram yoga spots to suit the needs of our 21st century quest for information and spiritual centering.

Its music hall is small, and fire codes are broken. People file in and in and in. At the end of the herding and beginning of the brass player's craft, your shoulder is next to a person whom you don't know but don't mind bumping into. Two vintage ceiling fans are doing a terrible job of circulating air. Fifty-watt light bulbs are off and the collective bounce of the crowd makes the little metal chains attached do their own jigs.

Everyone sweats. I'm talking man my clothes are sticking to me and I'm wiping my forehead every 30 seconds sweat. I bet girls hate this, especially the ones that put stuff in their hair to make it "volumous." The light is just dark enough so the condensation factories we call our foreheads aren't on display.

The light is so good in fact, that a goofy guy bobbing unnaturally and wearing a bass fisherman's hat looks cool.

I love this place.

You can do anything and have no fear that about people watchers sizing you up. I've found several places like this in New Orleans-- places that don't wholly follow trends or fashion labels or attract women who've bought into the one-look man.

Outside, my friend Cole and I meet a French girl. She says New Orleans isn't anything like the European or American Cities she's visited.

Her response solidifies what many transplants from around the world have been suspecting-- there is no place like New Orleans. I know you've heard it a hundred times, but it's true and you must see it for yourself.

You can stay on my couch.

Best,

Robert

VISITORS AND LOCALS

2007-11-17T17:46:00.000-06:00

Ernest N. Morial Convention Center
National League of Cities Conference
November 14, 2007
New Orleans, La.

Dear Volunteers,

The free-filled days of the average Southeast Louisianan are gone. So, when we write this letter or shake your hands, thanking you for your time, it’s sincere. Because we know what your time is worth. Many of you may have lived in the Cities represented this week at the 84th Annual Congress of Cities. The mayors, city council people and other officials from Sandusky to Seattle are here.They want to know about what it means to live in New Orleans. They want to know what it’s like to operate in a post-disaster environment. They’ll get information from the local leaders of the Southeastern Louisiana parishes. But, you, the citizens have the stories they need to hear as well. Your duties this week are to greet and disseminate information, distribute bags and take tickets. But at the end of the day, we ask you also to tell your stories of life in a post-disaster environment. Tell the Mayor of whateverville your story. If they return to their City remembering only the conversation with you--call it a success.

The mayors flew in from the east, the west, leaving their towns full of grain mills or expansive office parks. They came to the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center for the Congress of Cities, an annual convention of locally-elected officials. The Convention Center, over 1,000,000 square feet feels more like an international airport concourse than a meeting place when you first walk in.

The students who came to the Convention Center this week to greet the mayors were honor students and homecoming queens, athletes and class presidents. Both teachers from Cox and McDonough 35 spoke proudly about their students.

"People stay in New Orleans," Helen Cox teacher LaToya Bailey says. "It's just how it is down here."

But Bailey says many of her students are on their way to colleges around the region and country. Many will stay here in New Orleans and attend historically black colleges Xavier University and Dillard University. Xavier, McDonough 35 teacher Dan McLean says, produces more African-American med students than any other school in the country.

Helen Cox junior Greg Monroe came to greet the mayors. Monroe is attending Georgetown University once he graduates from Helen Cox in 2008. He's 6' 10 and the top-ranked high school basketball player in the country for the junior class.

When the Helen Cox students formed a gauntlet at the entrance of the escalator, Monroe manned the last spot. "Welcome to New Orleans," the students sung and yelled.

This was the only time I've ever seen middle-aged, middle-American, slightly uncoordinated men and women dancing--feeling like rock stars.

Over 300 volunteers helped welcome the locally elected officials. The Council of United Way agencies donated over 500 hours. Trinity Christian Community, based out of Hollygrove, donated 200. They did it because so many in the non-profit and relief effort down here believe that visitors aren't getting the whole story. This was a way to tell the leaders of other communities what's happening here.

Boisterous volunteers with a little gumption went up to people and began conversations. Most of the Mayors told me when they left that New Orleans wasn't what they had initially thought.

I have a theory about this.

This, whatever this is down here, has too many layers and niches, nuances and details to be condensed into a news story by a national syndicate. What you get in your living rooms or on your coffee tables is the stuff that is digestible.

It takes a trip here to see the progress and the struggle. Five-thousand mayors and city council people had the opportunity this week. Twenty-thousand ophthalmologists did the week before.

Somewhere in blank-ville, a mayor has stashed a folded "I love N.O." shirt in her closet.

Best,

Robert

Halloween

2007-11-01T15:45:00.000-06:00

Frenchmen St.

November 1, 2007
3:45 a.m.

Dear Family and Friends,

I'm not alone. Six-thousand of my closest friends will be hitting snooze this morning. Fear of oversleeping runs wild in our thoughts. It's a quarter to four and five hours until the experiment we call work after Halloween in New Orleans begins.

In New Orleans, much like New York, the new attitude is work hard, play hard. People tell me, that pre-K, it was more like work some, play more. Dr. Edward Blakely, the City's recovery czar, says there should be no more "Easy" in the nicknames for New Orleans.

The work hard play hard mentality that is beginning to permeate this place, especially with the 22-34 demographic. I hope it defines post-K New Orleans. Maintain the coffee at sunset, the cocktails at sunrise, dance six feet from of a trumpet player all night long activities. Right after work is finished.

Frenchmen Street occupies a sliver of New Orleans that is steeped in funky. Architecture, people, smell sometimes. The neighborhood, called the Marigny, has residents who follow the building structures: they are often colorful, sometimes tilted, but overall incredible to look at or know.

On Halloween, Frenchmen Street turns into a mass of alter-egos. Wonder-women, Harlequins, Marie Antoinettes, Bumble-Bees. Beetlejuices, Where's Waldos and Larry Craigs (Ha). The area can hold 10,000 people I'd say.

The it's ok to take alcohol outside as long as it's not in a glass container law promotes the makeshift-no-invitation-necessary-because-this-a-street-and-not-a-living room party. They tend to sprout up often in New Orleans.

On holidays like Halloween, these parties turn into massive celebrations where new friends are made, acquaintances reunite, and several people try to take snapshots with police officers.

The no glass rule kinds of goes out the window by midnight. Jules Goins, my friend and roommate, dresses like Tiger Woods. I'm his caddy. We bought a roll-out putting green and brought it to Frenchmen St, put it down and started yelling "Putt for beers!"

There is something special about watching a vampire with a golf club. No way this would fly at New Orleans Country Club. By the end of the night we'd gone through our inventory, and our last spot was at an intersection. Twice unrealizing motorists had to be escorted through the crowd by the New Orleans Police Department.

"Game on," Wayne from Wayne's World yelled.

Right out of a movie.

Eight hours earlier, New Orleans under 12 population is spending Halloween in Palmer Park. The Mayor and his wife have outfitted it with hot dog stands inflatable play pens, fire trucks, police cars and one scary guy who is 7-feet tall with a tiki torch and a fierce make-up job.

The trick or treating and costumes have put smiles on children and adult's faces. There is a feeling a safety and community here. The Mayor says to the crowd thanks for coming and that more events like this will be planned for the City's children.

Nights like these are a litmus test of this recovery. New Orleans knows how to celebrate holidays. In a symbolic sense, I think a City without hope wouldn't celebrate.

The funniest thing is, several people told me, "Just wait until Mardi Gras" with you haven't seen anything yet looks.

This makes me scared, happy.

Best,
Robert

The Convention Center

2007-10-31T16:51:00.000-06:00

Ernest N. Morial Convention Center
October 31st, 2007
New Orleans, La.

Dear Family and Friends,

You may remember, over two years later, the images of the Superdome and the Convention Center. Images of heartbreak.

I'm not the one to tell you why. I wasn't here.

But my friend Teddy was. He says that living for three days outside the Convention Center were the most horrific of his life. Teddy says that all the rumors you heard about the Convention Center were essentially true. Some of the crazy stuff like rampant rapes weren't. But, guys with guns and the rising of underworlds and tribes like something out of "Survivor" did happen.

Teddy left the Superdome because like thousands of others, he heard that the government had opened the Convention Center as a shelter. No order was ever issued. There was no food, water or preparations for the Convention Center to be used as a shelter.

Teddy tells people he's going to charge for the next time he tells his story. It's true, this guy should be getting paid for his knowledge. Journalists, even embedded journalists, can't tell a story like the one he has.

Dead New Orleanians were left for days on the street outside the Convention Center, he says.

Generally, like the ways of our primal world, these people were our elderly or special needs citizens. Just goes to show how fragile civilized society is. I'm not a New Orleanian, but I'll use pronouns like we to describe this. This was a national event. These were all of our brothers and sisters--our grandfathers and grandmothers.

I went to the Convention Center today. Sixty million dollars of renovations later, the one million square feet of space looks pretty darn good. Hall "A" the oldest part of the Convention Center, built for the World's Fair of 1984, was the most heavily damaged during Katrina and the days of pain after.

One of the Convention Center's event planners gave me a tour of the place. Every square foot of carpet has been replaced, all doors repainted, he says.

New Orleans has always been a Convention destination battling Las Vegas and Orlando for top honors. The convention are returning steadily to New Orleans. I've read some of the welcome brochures of these conferences. No matter whether it was the American Association of Surgeons or the World Association of Police Chiefs or architects or pharmacists, each welcome letter focuses on "the feeling that we must help New Orleans in it's time of need."

True that.

The Convention Center canceled all events from September 2006 to March 2006 due to Katrina related damage. In 2007, the Convention Center says it expects 324,568 people to visit and particpate in events held at the Convention Center. For 2008, they've booked 382,914. In 2009, they've booked 541,860 and 504,240 for 2010.

What happens when the feel good stuff runs out though?

It's the thing I fear most for this City's economic livelihood.

The airport reports as of the two-year anniversary that it's operating at over 80 percent of it's pre-storm level. That means visitors are coming here. Convention visitors are coming back and big events are coming back.

But these things can go elsewhere if New Orleans, the City, doesn't amount to a fantastic destination anymore. All indications point towards that not happening. The people I've met and spoken with who've come to New Orleans say they're gonna go home and tell a friend, "hey, New Orleans was great."

For the paradigm of how we think about New Orleans to shift, it will not be because of the national media. It will be a few consecutive years of millions of visitors coming--and leaving--with the "New Orleans was great" attitude.

"Do you do exit interviews with Convention people?" I asked

He says they have people rate their satisfaction with the Convention Center and the City. "I don't think I've seen less than a 7 since the storm," he says. Overwhelmingly, the response has been fantastic, he says.

This was good to hear.

The feel good Katrina reasons for coming here will dry up, it's inevitable. But, New Orleans' hospitality won't go away, no matter how you get here.

See you soon.

Best,

Robert

After Midnight.

2007-10-22T19:24:00.000-06:00

1:30-2:30 a.m.
New Orleans, La.

Dear Family and Friends,

How do you connect with the people that sleep outside of your comfortable and secure apartment building? I hope I never have to use a cardboard box for a pillow. At first, I thought it was stupid to bring food outside in the middle of the night.

I have food. No wallet.

Henry Gray, 51, of no address is “High.” “On Budweiser,” the old-timer says.

A woman is on the neutral ground too. She speaks in tongues and walks in circles. Rollers are wound tightly in her hair, a soiled week-worn sun-dress covers her.

The two actually aren't unlikely characters for this time of night in this type of neighborhood.

Gray and I dig into leftovers from early in the evening--red beans and rice from Mother’s Restaurant. It is a great time for midnight snack. I splash some hot sauce, he grabs a spoon.

And we listen to her.

“Jesus Christ” she says. “Mistas please buy me some cigarettes.”

“Nothing is open,” I say. She doesn't hear me. She's retreats to tongues, her comforting circle-walk.

I turn to her, “What’s your name?”

“I don’t have one,” she says. “Actually, I don’t remember my name.”

Henry and I watch the elderly woman, a hospital id bracelet is affixed to her left wrist. Maybe she had worn the dress under different circumstances--before becoming one of the walking forgotten of post-KATRINA New Orleans. Maybe she used to be the matriarch of a family.

She comes back to Henry and me.

“Those red, beans and rice?” she says. Her gums smack together when she speaks, no teeth to buffer her speech.

“Yeah,” Henry says.

“I make me some good red beans and rice,” she says.

“What’s your secret?” I ask.

“Honey, just gotta make sure them beans be tenda,” she says.

Henry and I hear water flowing. No, it’s urine streaming down her legs. She begins an internal but audible conversation with a family member. A sister, perhaps.

“Regina” she says. “Regina, why don’t you come on over here.”

Henry and I talked about the embarrassing ironies of post-KATRINA mental health care in New Orleans. Over 80 percent of New Orleanians have reported battling a least one bout of depression or some sort of post-traumatic stress since KATRINA came.

“Did you know that there was an exodus of psychiatrists and psychologists after Katrina?” I say.

“No, man,” he says. “But that lady needs some help.”

The sanctuary for the mentally-ill, Charity Hospital, closed its doors after Katrina. New Orleans went from 412 psychiatric beds to 82 after KATRINA.

She had been in a hospital.

There were id bracelets to prove it. But what happened? No beds and no doctor to care for her, I’d assume.

I start taking pictures of Henry and me. The first one doesn't come out. You know the ones. When you get together and hold your hand with the camera out. We look at the picture: my face and Henry’s knees.

“Don’t be snappin’ no pictures of me,” she says.

But I had to. I needed to. She was the face of the New Orleans’ mental health crisis. I felt anxious, but took the picture.

No flash.

“Quit that boy,” she says. I take two more duds. She’s after me now in a hobble. She is at least 70 and hardly a thoroughbred. I walk away from her and back around to say goodbye to Henry.

“Bring me some Budweiser when you come back in the morning,” he says.

I say I’ll try, knowing water is the only thing he’ll get from me. The camera is in my pocket. Still with no clean image of the woman with no name, I take it back out. Her reaction is different this time.

“You want to take my picture?” she asks softly. “Yeah I do, can you smile for me?” I ask.

“Is this for my obituary?” she says.

“You’re not going to die,” I say.

“How do you know?” she says.

"I just know," I say.

I focus and shoot.

“Mista, print that out for me when I die.”

She goes back to her circle dance, her foreign tongue.

Henry and I have lost her for the last time.

Best,

Robert

New Orleans' Music. The Second Line.

2007-10-16T15:53:00.000-06:00

September 30, 2007
Congo Square
New Orleans, La.

Dear Family and Friends,

When I die, throw me a party.

It's the only way it should be. Like the ones who thought up jazz funerals so long ago will tell you, the dead are off to a better place. Pick up your feet, raise your hands and celebrate cause you'll see them on the other side.

I went to a second-line the other weekend, the formal name for a musical procession through the streets for an event or more historically to honor a fallen New Orleanian musician. They call it a second-line because the first line is typically the band and integral members of the deceased's family and friend circle. The second line is the scrum of people--old and young, friends and never-knew-hims who dance behind.

Sometimes, I hear, they last for miles.

The one I went to wasn't a celebration of a musician's life, it was kick-off of to a music festival--and my first time. I went telling everyone, "it's my first second line!"

Such a tourist.

A friend told me, "Do you see why New Orleans is worth saving?"

There is this old-guy in the band. I've seen him around town. He's always wearing a bowler's top hat, the one that famous pale white guy with the funky mustache wore.

Charlie Chaplin?

But this guy, a member of the famous Treme (Treh-May) brass band, he's cool. Cool, like only a guy who plays an instrument and knows it like an extension of his hands. Many of the city's musicians have moved on, taking their acts to the clubs of Austin, Tex. or New York City.

The ones who've made it back, including the bowler-top-hat-wearing-I'm 70-years-old and cooler-than-most-gen-y'ers, have the soul of this city in their lungs, hands and feet. In New Orleans, people say, the music must continue, the show must go on.

This second line started at a church called St. Augustine. It ended in Congo Square, the section of land just outside the French Quarter where African slaves spent Sundays playing music and dancing in 18th Century French and Spanish-controlled New Orleans.

It rained. People danced without regard. Others hid for cover.

This is New Orleans. And Austin, you can't beat it.

Best,

Robert

Remember Carl Davis? An update

2007-10-08T16:32:00.000-06:00

New Orleans Public Library
October 10, 2007
New Orleans, La.

Dear Family and Friends,

Carl Davis looks skinny. Skinnier than the first time I met him in June, when he told me things I felt wrong to repeat. Davis says its ok to repeat these things.

A man on the ropes isn't much on maintaining an image, I guess.

But, it's a man on the ropes who isn't afraid to give a story, a real oh my god that's whats going on and I'm no shrink but that's some crazy stuff kind of story. That day, Carl Davis told me how Hurricane Katrina had psyched him out. Voices that talk to him everyday. Voices that have told him to kill himself twice since the storm.

The last three months have been better for Davis physical condition. The terribly-sun blistered lips are now more healthy. The damage, I'm sure, will always keep Davis' lips looking a little off.

His head is still in shambles though. "There are two voices," he says. I asked what they look like--if voices had a face. White guys he says. The bad one, the one that tells him to kill himself looks like the devil.

"The good voice is telling me you're alright, Robert," he says.

Knowing that Carl has something else making judgments about me are unsettling sure, but he is a gentle man, whispering when words matter and other people are around him.

Davis weighs 135 pounds. "The voices tell me not to eat," he says. "It's poison," they say.

"The bad voice told me to kill myself the other day."

He's living in an apartment with the help of a homeless shelter in town. They gave him a deposit and first month's rent on a little place off MLK Boulevard.

"I got robbed again," he says. "It was stupid, I bought me a piece of ass."

"I hadn't had no ass in a year."

Asking was shameless and intrusive, but the answer would be a market rate snapshot in America's underworld of desperation--so I wanted to know:

"How much?"

"She had charged me 20 dollars and stole my keys. Her boyfriend came back with a gun."

They took 600 dollars, he says.

After we met in June, I didn't think I'd ever see him again. He's a classic disappearing act, but not in the romantic world traveler way. When he came to see me, we hugged. We walked three blocks and sat in the shade, ate snickers and drank orange juice.

"I'm glad you came in," I said.

"I just heard you were giving away tennis shoes," he said laughing. "I'm an 11 and a half."

Best,

Robert

To see initial Video and Column about go to the "JUNE" Folder

The new New Orleanian

2007-09-30T08:12:00.000-06:00

(Click on Photo to enlarge)
Ashe Cultural Arts Center
September 30, 2007
New Orleans, La

Dear Family and Friends,

I cringed when she said it. "I want to change the world."

I met her the other night. Her socially conscious mantra got her here, I'm sure. New Orleans is experiencing a surge of America's well-educated and upwardly mobile 20 and 3o somethings.

Some call us vanguards. Others YURPs (young urban rebuilding professionals). We reflect America's portrait of higher education. We--Americans--all seem to be represented, but the new New Orleanians are dominantly white.

The program I'm in reflects the transplant trend. There are 17 people under 3o in my AmeriCorps program. Fifteen are from outside New Orleans. Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Connecticut, Texas, Nebraska, Ohio, Arkansas and Maryland are represented.

Twelve of us are white.

The upwardly mobile transplants must remember that New Orleans is different from New York, Seattle, San Francisco or Chicago.

It was her first night in town.

She had the attitude that a good New Orleans first night will give to anyone--the I love it here attitude. She didn't say "I want to change the world" in a very serious manner. It was more of a "why'd you choose here questions and a because I wanted to change the world" answers.

If you think about this place post-storm, any new person somehow has that idea inside them somewhere. I do believe we're all optimists. The Cubs are going to win the series and I'm going to save New Orleans kind of deep down thoughts.

It's poetic.

But, I cringe, not because of the thoughts. I have them too, sometimes. But, because in a City that was 70 percent black before the storm, that romance and heritage and whatever adjective you want to put in that made it worth saving in many ways was built by African-Americans.

In comparison to the birth of New Orleans, renaissance-driven YURPS or Vanguards will be important but not world beaters--role players, not stars.

So, yes, I cringe when I hear "I'm going to change the world in New Orleans."

Whatever we do, vanguards must remember that money for deposits and travel, dishware and furniture is a luxury few have. Over 100,000 New Orleanians are still displaced. Many homeowners are still paying mortgages on destroyed houses or played roulette with minimal insurance on homes they owned outright. A couple hundred bucks a month means more to some than others.

Many say the new New Orleanian is what this City needs to survive. I say, the City--its displaced and returned--have done more for us than we've done for them. That fragile balance, between new and old, must be thought and spoken about as New Orleans recovers.

Best,

Robert

The storm you almost heard about

2007-09-24T17:52:00.000-06:00

September 24, 2007
New Orleans, La.

Dear Family and Friends,

Whew.

So the storm you almost heard about turned out to be clouds. Guys like me still needed sunblock for the supposed day of wind and rain. Tropical depression "10" had been tracked to hit New Orleans on Saturday morning around 4 a.m. Ten wasn't big enough to pose a threat to foundation-housed-residents, but the 60,000 people living in FEMA trailers in and around New Orleans began throwing out what-ifs and where-to-gos.

No, I didn't add a zero. 60,000.

The City of New Orleans Office of Emergency preparedness announced shelters would be open for FEMA-trailered residents.

Storms and Shelters are two words people in New Orleans don't want to hear. It was the first time since Hurricane Rita that a storm posed danger to the fragile rehabilitation of New Orleans-physical.

New Orleans-mental went into a tail spin--albeit a tiny one. More like a tail-pirouette. But, the City took it seriously. They prepared. They readied shelters with cots and food, volunteers and generators. My buddy Jon and I were ready to work a 1:30-am-10:00 am shift at a high school gymnasium. The Office of Emergency preparedness called and said the storm moved. I text messaged Jon.

"We're off the hook."

"Ten" didn't even come close to New Orleans. It turned out to be a test run for the most vulnerable. What if it had been real, I asked myself. What if people either in FEMA trailer parks or with FEMA trailers in front of their house had their temporary residences blown over by the big bad number "10?"

There is nothing big or bad about a tropical depression in these parts. But to 60,000, even a tropical storm poses major threats. FEMA trailers are to be evacuated in the event of a tropical storm, which begins at 35 mph.

Two-lane street winds.

Thousands of people worry here when the tropical depressions/storms huff and puff their little lungs. Ten was neither big nor bad for anyone in New Orleans. But another of these little storms will pose a problem for those hung up in foundation-less homes.

Bad little wolves.

Best,

Robert

The Superdome

2007-09-12T11:11:00.000-06:00

The Superdome
Central Business District
11:00 p.m.
New Orleans, La.

Dear Family and Friends,

I met a girl the other day. Told me she watched a man fall from an upper-deck seat to the field in the Superdome.

"I can tell you so many stories," she says of her time in the Superdome during Katrina and her aftermath.

She's 21. After meeting her, I know that what people say is true: Age really is just a number.
Most 21-year-olds I know are happy to waltz into bars and pubs joking about the days-gone-away when they had to sneak inside.

Not many of my friends have ever seen a man die.

Her 44-year-old boyfriend kicked her out five days ago. She's sleeping down the road from the Superdome. You can't really call it sleeping, she says. If you sleep she says, as a woman, you're vulnerable.

"I try to keep standing, walking," she says. "But, I doze off sometimes." It's how she was at the Superdome, she says. The micro-society inside the dome didn't form protection fast enough. In there, often it was every woman for herself.

Tonight, all is calm in the Poydras St. moonlight. I have a copy of Chris Rose's 1 Dead in Attic in the backpocket of my linen pants. My linen shirt breathes. I wear no socks.

Damn New Orleans' heat.

If you haven't heard of Chris Rose, google him. He's made a name for himself as the post-Katrina voice. He is a satirical and real, laugh-inducing and tear-jerking local newspaper columnist.

As I sit on some granite with the Saint's Fleur de Lis logo etched in it, I open Rose. I've been reading it on and off for two weeks and knew there had to be a story about the Saints Monday night football game last September. A Night to Remember, he called his column.

I'd like to share with you excerpts from what I read in solitude under a dim streetlight outside the place that means more now socially, politically, economically--any ly than it did before Katrina.

A Night to Remember
9/27/2006

...Now of course there were naysayers out there in the Great Elsewhere. All that money, they said, that could have been used to fix people's houses. All that effort that could have gone somewhere else. All this fuss--about a game?

The simple answer is that, for the city's economy to survive, the Convention Center and the Dome had to be fixed-first and fast-because they are the bread and the butter.

A more nuanced answer is this: Better a Saints game to rechristen the building than a boat show or a gun show, for the irony of that would have been simply too much, even here in the city whose chief export in the post-Katrina age is, in fact, irony. By the ton...

This building, this monument to our shame, our disgrace, and our sorrow, will always be so, but it always has been and always will be more than that. Neither Katrina nor Tom Benson has been able to make the Superdome go away.

Its durability is our durability...

The game. When they blocked the punt and scored the first touchdown, something inside me that I didn't know was there broke loose. I let out a yell so loud that my throat still hurts today.

I fell into a human scrum that consisted of a tall skinny guy, a short woman, a cop, and a beer vendor. Every layer of authority and sociology was stripped away. We literally fell on top of each other. I have never experienced a flash point of sudden emotion unloosed so fast...

It is superficial and meaningless and a total loss of perspective, but I stand before you and I declare: It is good to feel like a winner...

Ah, but let us live it, just for today, because who around here hasn't felt as though we've had a big L stamped on our foreheads for the past year and I, for one, am ready to wipe it off...

Only a game you say?

Like hell it was.

Thanks, Chris.

Now, Reggie, Deuce and Drew are the patron saints of New Orleans' spirit. They hold services every Sunday.

Michael, Mary and Joseph have some stiff competition.

Best,

Robert

To purchase 1 Dead in Attic
go to www.chrisrosebooks.com

To Read A Night to Remember in full, cut and paste the thread below:
http://www.nola.com/news/t-p/frontpage/index.ssf?/base/news-6/1159337420130960.xml&coll=1

Normal in New Orleans?

2007-09-10T09:40:00.000-06:00

Audubon Park,
Uptown
September 9, 2007
New Orleans, La.

Dear Family and Friends,

In K-Ville, nothing is easy.

Post-Katrina normal has returned since the two-year water mark came 12 days ago.

During that week, Senators and Congressman, Presidents and Prime Ministers flew to New Orleans to deliver messages of hope.

Senator Barack Obama said, “I can promise you this: I will be a president who wakes up every morning and goes to bed every night with the future of this city on my mind."

President Bush said, “This town’s coming back. This town is better today than it was yesterday and it’s going to be better tomorrow than it is today.”

Senator Hilary Clinton said, “Rebuilding New Orleans is not a local obligation, it is an American obligation. And we must finally begin to fulfill it.”

John Edwards said, “America is better than this. We need a national effort to end poverty in America, and we need every American to take action in our fight to build One America. And we need to make sure another Katrina never happens again, in New Orleans or anywhere in America."

Mike Hukabee, the Republican presidential candidate and current Governor of Arkansas said the country needed to put “people first, paperwork next in a disaster the size of Katrina.”

The fingertips of the Newsweek writers and the voices of the CNN reporters came too. They switched interchangeably from New Orleans to the Big Easy and the Crescent City.

New Orleans, the word, started to sound redundant. The amount of material published was massive. For two days, the Big Easy was on everyone’s mind.

Then it was over.

Back in Ohio or Oregon or California, you picked up the kids and snuck in a round of afternoon golf--everyday American life.

That life isn't lost and gone forever in New Orleans.

Last week, your alarm clock still wasn’t a welcome sound.

Same here.

Last week, you sat in traffic on your way to work.

Same here.

Last week, you bought your coffee at Starbucks.

Same here.

The Anderson family has cruisers. Their bikes are stylish and hip. The youngest daughter even has the ribbons on her handle bars.

The ones that stream when the open trail warrants straight-away biking. Jasmine, the mother, says the only thing normal these days is her daughters’ school. Their eighth-grader went to four different schools during the chaotic months after Katrina.

Her husband Eugene owns a furniture refinishing company and has “more work than he can handle.”

They, like hundreds of others, are playing in Audubon Park. A highly-rated golf course is kept in immaculate shape. People run, jog and play Frisbee and football.

People also barbeque at the “levee.”

In K-Ville, nothing is easy; the school and health care systems are starting from scratch. Thousands are still in trailers. Everyone here knows the length of the "K-to-do-list."

Even in K-Ville though, there are still days at the park.

Best,

Robert.

Two Years Later...

2007-08-29T08:46:00.001-06:00

August 29, 2007
Midnight
5223 Basin View Drive
New Orleans East

Dear Family and Friends,

It's midnight in Katrina's garden of ups and downs. Yes, two years ago Michelle Mohammed, like so many other New Orleanians watched her city drown.

She lived in Portland, Oregon for over a year after the storm. In October, 2005, she flew from the Northwest to see the home she'd owned for 11 years for the first time.

"There's nothing else you can do when you see that, I broke down and cried."

I work with Michelle. I went to the University of Oregon so we had a connection from the first day. Over time Michelle and I grew closer. She has a 23-year-old daughter and a 19-year-old son.

One day Michelle said to some co-workers, "Look ladies, that's Robert, that's my son!" We joked about it. A black woman with a white son. We joked about going to restaurants and telling the waiter.

And then something real happened. On my 24th birthday, Michelle showered me with gifts. Like only a parent gives kind of gifts. A new shirt, a tie, a pair of pants, and a bottle of cologne.

"I wanted my son to look sharp on his birthday," she says. Later that week, a friend and I spoke of the gesture. What started out as fun had become something much more for the both us, my friend said.

"Robert, you know she's really adopted you. You're her son, she tells us that when you're not around."

Mohammed's house took eight feet of water. Her husband still lives in Portland. The 21-year-veteran of the New Orleans Public Schools was without home or career because of Katrina.

She's shown me that people overcome obstacles and do it with grace.

"It's been a struggle."

It's close to 1 a.m. She walks me back to my car.

"I love you," she says. "I love you, too."

"You know I pray for you, Michael and Aryanna every night. It's the only way I can go to sleep," she says.

I drove home.

And slept well.

Best,

Robert

Katrina's eve. How about something good?

2007-08-28T09:55:00.000-06:00

August 25, 2007

Circle Food
1522 St. Bernard St.
New Orleans, La.

Dear Family and Friends,

Wherever you are, New Orleans will be on your tubes and your screens, your breakfast and coffee tables this week.

Whatever you read in the big shop media this week--read it with a critical eye.

There will be stories of struggle and heartache. The ones that tug and make you say, “Oh my.” It’s what writers want you to feel. It’s what writers dream you feel.

These are good writers. Human interest is what we--humans--are all about.

And then you’ll read about the crime. And the still partially sutured status of what The New York Times calls our “Patchwork City.” You’ll read about the lack of this and that and slowness of here and there. And the “Two years later the Big Easy struggles to Recover” headlines.

It’s all true.

But, know that buried underneath the stories of struggle and patchwork, stories of strength and persistence are here, too.

And I’d say: Where are those stories?

Take the Circle Food, a grocery store in New Orleans’ Seventh Ward, which had been in operation since 1938 until Katrina. This weekend, the owner, Dwayne Boudreaux opened Circle Food in its parking lot to test the viability of reopening.

“We were the original one-stop shop,” Boudreaux said. “We tried to provide what the community wanted and needed.”

I met a woman and her mother at the parking lot grocery store. People came and shopped, I asked them whether they’d shop at Circle Food if it reopened.

I must have seemed out of place. After all, I had a clipboard.

The interactions with a few discrepancies went like this,

Excuse me, mam, may I..?”

“Oh, Baby yes, bring my Circle Food back!”

“Well, why?”

“Because I’ve been coming to this store my whole life. It’s the only place in town where you could get five peppers for a dollar and pay your utility bill too.”

I think Circle Food will reopen, insiders tell me so. Boudreaux wants to do a few more one-day sales to gauge the community need. Again, he’ll bring people in for a make-shift block party where people leave with peppers and seafood, toilet paper and iced tea.

Saturday was hot like everyday. A sheen topped the parking lot. People without sunglasses looked funny, really. One eye open or squinting, saluting the sun while they shopped, socialized and listened to a DJ underneath a tent.

If Mr. Boudreaux has anything to say about it, they’ll be inside the store soon enough.

Chalk this column up in the Boring Category. Circle Food is a solid this is happening but not quite amazing enough or sad enough or despicable enough story for a headline. But it's good enough to know New Orleans will be ok kind of news.

And I’m ok with that.

Best,

Robert

Day 163

2007-08-14T17:10:00.000-06:00

Day 163
New Orleans, La
August 16, 2007

Dear Family and Friends,

You could call my 163 days a whirlwind. The nights are long, days are bright and it often doesn't matter if my eyes realized the transition. People in New Orleans are saying more and more, "New Orleans got you didn't it?" Yes--like an addiction--New Orleans has me.

But no one ever said honeymoons last forever.

There have been days filled with frustration. What is frustration for a healthy-white-24-year-old with a degree, a job and a place to stay anyway?

It's nothing like what the people here experience daily.

Maybe Webster could condense the word for the rest of us--we could call it "frust."

Or frustralite.

For the transplants, these are the days you look around at mothers with children, dirty and unhealthy. You drive by vacant residential and commercial real estate. You listen to stories of struggle and heartache. The ones that begin the same, but always take unique twists, making each increasingly harder to hear than the previous.

And then I go home to my apartment, which I'll never have to rebuild. Or I go to the romance of the French Quarter and refuel my affection.

"Frustration" should only be used by New Orleanians.

People down here call it "Katrina fatigue." Everybody gets it. My friend at work lives in a three-bedroom ranch house with 11 people. She sleeps in a twin bed and jokes that her seven-year-old doesn't realize, "Mommy doesn't like legs in her face, honey."

But she remembers the king bed she used to have. She remembers the home she used to own.

"How long do you think it will be until you have your own spot," I ask.

"Probably another couple months," she says.

Like I said at day 77, the human spirit is stronger than I initially imagined. But people are tired and more and more I hear, "I don't even want to hear the word Katrina."

I ask my co-worker how she does it.

"It's what you gotta do," she says.

Best,

Robert

Baseball and levees

2007-08-11T10:31:00.000-06:00

Lower Ninth Ward
Intersection of Roman and Reynes
New Orleans, La.
July 30, 2007

Dear Family and Friends,

Ray Chang’s professional baseball journey started in stop-light towns like Beloit, Wisconsin where mayors double as maintenance men. But with every promotion, Chang, a 23-year-old with a gregarious school-boy’s demeanor in a Major Leaguer’s body, plays in bigger, more glamorous cities.

He isn’t quite two full seasons into his professional career, but the undrafted, a-scout-found-me-at-an open-tryout-shortstop, finds himself playing for the Portland Beavers, one call away from becoming a San Diego Padre.

Recently, he played in New Orleans, a City, it seems, in the eternal international consciousness. His travels have never taken a turn quite like this, he says.

Storm surges sometimes topped 20 feet in New Orleans' Lower Ninth Ward. City-owned street signs rarely exist. At the intersection of Roman and Reynes, a centerfield to home plate’s throw away from Hurricane Katrina’s Florida Avenue Canal breach, a house sits doorless, a house sits roofless and a foundation sits houseless.

Several foundations on this block idle in the Louisiana heat. So Chang brought his glove. At least for a day, this former kitchen floor served a purpose. As he plays catch, the only returned resident on the block stops his yard work and stares.

Leaving the Lower Ninth for the higher ground of New Orleans, where the romance of the French Quarter and the majesty of Garden District mansions are, Chang turns back.

“That was mindblowing,” he says.

He went 3-4 the night before, but he’ll never remember New Orleans for the baseball. He’ll remember this stop for the nights in the French Quarter socializing in buildings nearly 300 years old, and for the disparity of existence between the haves and the have nots of the Big Easy.

The Lower Ninth Ward is nothing like he ever imagined, he says.

“I’m glad I came.”

We talked about the lack of residents in the neighborhoods closest to the Florida Avenue Canal breach, and the flow of outsiders driving around in taxis stopping in intersections and snapping photos.

After all, Ray and I are them minus the taxi.

The resident who watched Chang play must have been confused. Baseball? On an empty foundation?

This time at least, the gawker wasn't a visitor.

Best,

Robert

Face #3 New Orleans Mental Health Crisis. Meet Raymond Hall

2007-08-01T16:02:00.000-06:00

Duncan Plaza
New Orleans, La.
July 2007

Dear Family and Friends,

Raymond tried to eat the slice of pepperoni pizza. He really did. Problem was, his teeth are falling out. But before they leave, he says, the teeth break off in pieces.

Hall was one of the first homeless New Orleanians I saw who came to protest the inadequate public housing in Post-Katrina New Orleans. Over 100 people night after night sleep in the shadow of City Hall at Duncan Plaza. They sleep in the gently elevated grass and under a statue of George Washington. And next to a boarded and vacant state office built the same year as City Hall.

As I walked by them the other evening, the air had cooled, many people were up telling stories, smoking cigarettes. The main branch of the New Orleans public library is next to Duncan Plaza. About 30 people sleep under a library canopy too. An electrical outlet is used by a woman’s boombox. It’s not quite a nightlight, but she seemed peaceful.

Hall, 56, wasn’t here for KATRINA. He’s one of the few, I’m sure. But, as a Vietnam veteran who lost two young children, ages three and five, in a house fire, he deals with his share of psychological trauma.

“In less than 30 days I was back on a plane to Vietnam.”

He, like many homeless, are in “as is” condition. His chest is ribby, with wispy grey hair. He could use 25-30 pounds. A crucifix hangs from his neck. Hall isn’t the only one who sleeps outside with a faith in a god.

He came to New Orleans after losing federal disability assistance in Florida. He tried to explain what happened, but it was tough to follow. It’s a similar story for many I’ve spoken with. Hall couldn’t remember dates, he jumped around, didn’t know names of lawyers instead beginning with “The guy said…”

Carl Davis was the same way. “He’s out of DC, ah, I can’t remember the guy’s name” kind of thing.

It’s one of the most difficult things about learning their stories. Truth is, often Davis and Hall probably remember only half of their own.

But, Hall came here as a musician. A percussionist, he says. Like Davis, Hall hears voices, “They say different things, like spirits” he says. He’s diagnosed with post-traumatic stress, but has no prescriptions to tame anxiety.

When he feels bad, Hall says he just wants to go away. He understands his problems.

“I need medication,” he says.

Problem is, there aren't many here to prescribe it.

Best,

Robert

Nebraska Football: Recruit from New Orleans is a mystery man

2007-07-22T09:13:00.001-06:00

BY ROBERT X. FOGARTY AND TONY BOONE
FOR THE OMAHA WORLD-HERALD
JULY 22, 2007

MARRERO, La. - Eric Harper didn't exist.

Sure, people around the way knew of Eric Harper. Those up in Ferriday, La., knew him, too.

But in Nebraska? No way. Out in Cyberland, where college football junkies flit through prospect lists like side orders on a restaurant menu, Eric Harper wasn't an option. The recruiting wonks, who make it their business to know every high school football star in the land and slap them with a star rating? No clue. Five stars? Try no stars.

"I'm like an undiscovered talent who came from behind the curtain," says the all-metro player who more than a few coaches watched on film and offered a scholarship before ever seeing him in person.

* * *
Ehret's Eric Harper has the perfect graduation present awaiting him in December, a football scholarship to play for the Nebraska Cornhuskers. Harper, a tall, rangy performer who played seven positions in 2006 and earned All-Metro honors as a linebacker, verbally committed to play for Nebraska on Tuesday. At 19, Harper has exceeded the age limit to play in the Louisiana High School Athletic Association, but he is qualified academically to receive an NCAA scholarship and will do so once he earns his high school diploma this winter, Ehret Coach Billy North said.

* * *

Yes, Eric Harper was born 19 years and some odd months ago, but as far as folks who follow college football are concerned, those words in the Times-Picayune the morning of July 11 were his birth announcement.

And that's just about right. They mark time here by the summer of 2005, when Hurricane Katrina made sane men crazy, old women cry, and kids like Harper, well, disappear.

Now, as a faint heart beat returns in the Big Easy and the Gulf Coast, it is a player's future potential united with people like coach Billy North and a former Nebraska football player that have given a kid back an identity lost in a killer storm.

Harper's case needs no detective. Just a little time to sort it all out.

OUT OF THE WAY PLACE

Drive the nine miles south out of the heart of New Orleans, past the Superdome and over the Mississippi River. John Ehret High School is nestled in this sleepy suburb. That's where you'll find North, a sturdy hometown product who built a program that has produced more Division I football players than anyone can remember, and six who went on to the NFL.

Pictures of former Patriots like Kordell Stewart, Reggie Wayne and other notable football alumni hang in his cramped office. If asked, North, who often punctuates his sentences with a bookend "Ya hear," would probably call this a cranny, but a comfortable one. Ehret High's been home for nearly 20 years.

Ask about a kid named Harper, and you get the feeling North might be clearing room on his wall someday for another picture. The storm had most to do with Harper's anonymity, North says. It sure wasn't due to lack of talent.

North's not big on measurables - the tools of the Web site wannabes. He's big on results. All you need to know is that after viewing a highlight tape, Nebraska defensive line coach Buddy Wyatt, previously an assistant at Alabama, expressed strong interest, North said. Not long after, Nebraska coach Bill Callahan's official scholarship letter arrived May 25. Before that, blind offers also came in from Texas A&M and Mississippi State.

The Times-Picayune article notes how Harper chose NU over those schools, as well as Auburn, Southern Mississippi, Arkansas, Tulane and Louisiana Tech, despite never making a recruiting visit to Lincoln. But the suitors continue to call.

Inevitably they ask, "How come I'd never seen you on (the Internet)?"

"A lot of things, I guess," Harper says.

After news broke of Harper's commitment to NU, a writer for a recruiting Web site called North asking how he'd missed Harper. "You know what I told him?" North said. "Fantastic, that means you guys don't have everything."

HUSKER ON THE WALL

Barry Cryer missed him, too. Little did Cryer know that Harper didn't miss him.

As an Ehret High product, Cryer's picture hangs on North's wall. The jovial Cryer started on the interior of the Husker defensive line last season and is now preparing for training camp with the San Diego Chargers.

Kids like Harper listen to guys like Cryer, who visits his old school whenever he's back home. Hitting the weight room is a good way to stay in shape while attempting to persuade the current prep players to maximize their potential.

"Anytime I get some time to take off, I go back down there and hang out with the kids," Cryer said. "I work out with them just to let them know you can do something outside of the rough neighborhoods."

Go to school, play football and get an education, is his message. "I just let them know, (school's) where you want to be, and it's your life to live."

After Katrina, words of hope go a long way at Ehret High.

In his first meeting after the storm, North had five coaches and four players. A week later, the Patriots played their first game with 19 players and finished the season with 33. "We've been building from then on," he said.

But it's been slow. Last season, the Patriots still had problems with numbers. After having nearly 80 players on its roster in Cryer's day, Ehret had just 45 in 2006, meaning some players were playing on both sides of the ball in Louisiana's largest classification.

In Harper's case, he was playing all over the field. He saw time at defensive end, inside and outside linebacker, strong safety, wide receiver, tight end, running back, quarterback and kick returner. He was named to the Times-Picayune All-Metro team in New Orleans as a linebacker, and may have been the newspaper's defensive player of the year if not for the dominating season by teammate Drake Nevis, a defensive tackle headed to LSU who shared co-MVP honors at Ehret with Harper.

It was Nevis with whom Cryer talked most during his recent trips to the weight room, according to North. Cryer didn't really know who Harper was.

Turns out Harper was usually in the room listening to discussions between Nevis and Cryer, North said.

"I think Eric saw where Barry ended up as far as getting an opportunity to get into an NFL camp. Nebraska has done good things for Barry Cryer, and our community has seen that. And Eric is a part of that community. We've all seen what Nebraska's done for one of our kids, and I think that sold Eric on Nebraska's program.

"It means a lot when a kid from our school goes to an out-of-state college, comes back and says good things about that college. It seems like there's always a domino effect. We've had four kids go to Colorado. At one point, we had three kids go to Fresno (State). It seems like they always go in pairs or two or three years in a row because of the experience of our former players."

KATRINA FORCES MOVE

Before the storm, Harper and his family evacuated to Ferriday, an inland town of about 3,000 residents along the Mississippi and not far from a national wildlife refuge known as Frogmore Bayou. There isn't much in Ferriday once you pass the "Home of Jerry Lee Lewis" sign.

In all, Harper lived away from New Orleans nearly four months. He played for Ferriday High in 2005, a Louisiana version of a Nebraska Class C-1 or Class B school.

"I couldn't wait to come back to New Orleans," he said. Neither could his family, which includes three sets of twin boys. There is Eric and his twin brother Derrick, who are the youngest. Next in line are Marvin and Marlin. Terry and Jerry are the oldest.

"My mother didn't rhyme them, I swear," he says. "We are all named after male family members."

Harper's Katrina story is an everyman tale of New Orleans. Located just outside the city's West Bank, Harper's home wasn't near the levee breaches, which flooded 80 percent of the Big Easy. But when his family returned to survey the storm damage, ruined floors, broken windows and an unwanted sky-blue view greeted them.

"A tree from the back yard had gone through the roof. Birds were flying in and out," he said. "We took a little under a foot of water."

When Harper returned for the field for Ehret High for the 2006 season, his football resume wasn't long. He'd played sparingly as a freshman at Ehret, and then the small-school season at Ferriday as a sophomore.

That wasn't enough to put Harper on North's "Coach, you have to see this kid play" college list.

"I'm not going to lie. I had to see Eric really play first," North said. "I have some credibility here."
SHOWCASING HIS SKILLS

Harper was enrolled in pre-school at age 5. Now 19, he's too old to compete in 2007. Because of his age and the relocation caused by Katrina, last season was North's only chance to get a good look.

"When he first came to us (three years ago) ... he was a strong safety-type player. I didn't know he could throw the football, I didn't know he could catch the ball and I didn't know he could run from the fullback position at that time. Then in the Katrina year of '05, we didn't even have him. It took us some time to realize what he can do.

"Physically, we're 5-A football. We play the biggest classification in the state. It's very difficult to play both ways. That doesn't happen a whole lot in 5-A football here in Louisiana.

According to North, Harper's best football is ahead of him. North calls him "a skinny 220" and believes he'll be 20 to 30 pounds heavier while still running the 40 in 4.6 seconds by the time he's through.

"He's an exciting kid. He likes to make plays," North said. "His excitement will add something to the defense at Nebraska."

A NEAR UNKNOWN

In a wired recruiting world where seemingly nobody falls through the cracks, Harper nearly did.

But he was savvy enough to not let it happen, all the while staying focused in the eye of a cataclysmic storm.

Academically, he is qualified with an 18 on his first ACT attempt. He wants to retake the exam even though a scholarship offer and a spot in school isn't dependent on a higher score. "I didn't meet my (own) standards," he said. "I know I am better than that."

He carries better than a 3.0 grade point average and will graduate a semester early to attend Nebraska beginning in January.

And even though coaches from LSU, Auburn and Louisiana Tech have all called within the past week, his allegiance to the Huskers appears strong.

"I've been ready for this," he said.

He doesn't own a winter coat, and he's never been to Nebraska. But he's comfortable with his choice.

Turns out, his tale isn't much of a mystery after all. He's just a too-old-to-play, displaced-by-Katrina kid with a load of talent and a lot of faith in his coach, a guy in the weight room named Barry Cryer, and ironically, the Internet.

"I typed Nebraska into Google," Harper said. "It showed anything you wanted."

National championships, academics, weight room, coaches - the Internet had it all, he said.

It just didn't have Eric Harper.

A CEO, Commissioner and Ambassador walk in...

2007-07-17T14:02:00.000-06:00

Tournament Players Club Louisiana
July 2007
Avondale, La. (20 minutes from Downtown New Orleans)

Dear Family and Friends--

Norman has big eyes, the kind kids with something to believe in have. He’s 15, and I’ll bet he believes he can win the U.S. Open someday. Fantasies like these make kids great—and unaware of suits and slacks, shakes and waves, the day to days of grown-up business.

The PGA TOUR’s Commissioner, the CEO of Zurich Financial Services and the Former U.S. Ambassador to Switzerland addressed hundreds of Zurich Classic of New Orleans advocates and donors the other day. They announced the agreement to keep Zurich title sponsor of the professional tournament until 2010. Tournament organizers also announced that over400,000 will be given to charity from the 2007 event.

Chad, Chris and Norman are products of the First Tee program, whose mission is to give non-traditional junior golfers an opportunity to learn and play the game so many admire.

“Who has the best golf game?” I asked.

“I do,” they all said.

“We’ll have to see about that,” I said.

So Norman, Chris and Chad followed me to a hole on the green. “Ok, right here, six feet,” I said.

Chad, 10, was the sure underdog. He had a training set of clubs. Chris, 11, was also new to the game. But Norman? He dedicates his free time to golf.

Chad sinks his first, but goes one for three from six feet. Chris hits his first putt 12 feet, his second putt four feet, but nails the last.

Norman leaves his first two attempts short. “Oh man, I can’t lose to you kids,” he says. He makes his third attempt.

“Sudden death.” I say. “Oh yeah,” Chad says.

But Chad misses. Then Chris misses. Norman makes his putt with a “you’ve got a long way to go kids” smile on his face.

I gave them a wave and walked off the green. I had to do grown-up stuff. On the putting green, fantasy still rules. It’s the best thing about being young.

You can be a U.S. Open champion, someday.

Inside, suits and ties, microphones and cameras fixated on lottery-style checks and heartfelt words from a few very important people. A CEO, Commissioner and Ambassador--three dreams come true, I’m sure.

But they have to wear suits. And rarely get big trophies.

Best—

Robert

Face #2: The New Orleans' Mental Health Crisis

2007-07-05T23:42:00.001-06:00

To view 70 second video in Full-Screen click inside picture, it will take you to YouTube.

Column below:

Duncan Plaza
City Hall
New Orleans, La.
June 2007

Dear Family and Friends--

“Raven, are you hungry?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said in a waning rasp.

Who knows what happened to his clothes, but the hospital gave him scrubs--four days ago.

Usually, scrubs like these are worn outside the hospital by only by chic high school and college kids. They are, in many ways, the new sweatpants. For Raven, however, it had become his wardrobe.

Senator Barack Obama came to New Orleans today. He spoke at the Essence Music Festival, the country’s largest celebration of African American culture.

Obama said everyone should be able to access health care. He didn’t however specifically address the mental health problems of New Orleans. He didn’t go into detail about his plans. But, for the 30,000 in attendance, his candor and general promise seemed to be enough.

I wonder what the next administration will do for the Ravens of New Orleans and the country. In many ways, KATRINA still claims people every day. People like Raven. He didn’t tell me why he was in the hospital. And I must confess, I’m making an assumption that his mental health was less than stable. But in a City where 9 of 10, rich or poor, black or white, have been affected by depression or post-traumatic stress, federal aid is a necessity not a “It’d sure be nice.”

When police find our mentally unstable on the streets, they take them to jail when psychiatric beds are full. And in Post-K NOLA, psychiatric beds have fallen by over 80 percent. This is not a statistic that should be ignored.

Mental health is not as stigmatized in New Orleans as it is in the rest of the country. People are open. People tell stories. And people cry. They say how hard it is. Many are not veiled in secrecy in New Orleans because, “We all went through it,” one of my friends said.

But in a City where it seems the residents are ready to speak; where people are open to their new existence, those trained to help are rare.

The mental illness spectrum in New Orleans is large. Some are unsavable. They have frequent bouts of psychosis. But what about the blue-collar man fighting through what he thinks must be the blues?

Will they come forward? Who knows. Right now, we aren’t prepared even if they wanted to.

Best,

Robert

St. Bernard Parish: New Orleans' Overlooked Neighbor

2007-07-01T19:43:00.000-06:00

St. Bernard Parish (County)
New Orleans’ Overlooked Neighbor
Chalmette, La.
June 2007

Dear Family and Friends,

People are drawn to the places they’ve lived. I couldn't imagine returning home to devastation. Still today, sunglasses block eyes, but not tears. For the residents of St. Bernard, many approaching year two in FEMA trailers and frequenting restaurants not quite like they remembered, every day is a struggle for attention.

New Orleans became the crown jewel of KATRINA’s seedy remains and attention. The Big Easy is the high school quarterback in the post-KATRINA competition for love and affection.

It’s made St. Bernard Parish feel like the last kid picked for dodge ball.

Murphy Oil, based in Chalmette, La., failed to properly hurricane-proof one of its massive storage tanks. Twenty-five thousand barrels spilled on the parks, streets and homes of St. Bernard parish. St. Bernard's road to recovery has and will continue to be an uphill battle given its proximity to Orleans Parish.

A friend of mine and fellow AmeriCorpsian, John Haley, is stationed in St. Bernard Parish. He lives in a FEMA trailer. The digs are nice but small. They remind me of a studio in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood.

John took me on a tour of St. Bernard. Born out of white-flight during segregation, most Chalmettians are white working middle-class citizens. Pre-K population of St. Bernard was 67,000 according to the 200o Census. Locals estimate about 27,000 are there today.

The homes are suburban renditions of the Lower Ninth Ward. Two and 300,000 dollar pre-storm properties sit gutted and vacant block by block, neighborhood by neighborhood.

One high school is open. So is one major grocery store. And one entrepreneurial Domino’s franchise owner operates out of a trailer adjacent to his flooded business. The delivery guys take pizza through a makeshift drive-thru window.

Massive FEMA camps are the new neighborhoods for many Chalmettians.

When a visitor, developer wants to volunteer or help in the gulf-coast they think, “New Orleans, here I come. “

It’s only natural.

Overlooking St. Bernard could be fatal for the parish, New Orleans’ neighbor to the east.

Many St. Bernard residents, according to John, are optimistic about their Parish’s future. And in America, the last kid picked for the game usually grows up to be the Doctor of the group.

Best,

Robert

Rally at the Louisiana Capitol Building

2007-06-24T22:45:00.001-06:00

Click in the image to begin Video. The images are grainy and unsteady. Kind of like the City in some ways, I guess.

Video #1: New Orleans' Mayor C. Ray Nagin
Video #2: A 18-year-old New Orleanian on his way to Tulane University in the fall.

New Orleans’ Rally
June 13, 2007
Louisiana State Capitol Building
Family and Friends—

Disclosure: This was a political rally and since I have employment ties to the Mayor’s Office, I will not comment directly about the videos.

It’s 80 miles to Baton Rouge. Organizers of the rally procured 20 brand new bright yellow school buses to take New Orleanians to the Governor’s mansion.

These buses were beautiful. “At least the schools have new buses,” I thought.

I walked behind one. “Mississippi” the plate read. And the next one, “Mississippi” and the next “Mississippi.”

“We can’t even get Louisiana buses to transport our citizens,” a resident said to himself but loud enough for me to hear.

It was the first hot day of the Louisiana summer. Pants stuck to men’s legs by nine a.m., sweat beaded while standing, and ladies’ nylons must have been bordering on unbearable. I wonder why women still wear nylons.

We made the drive to the Governor’s mansion and state patrolmen, politicians and news cameras greeted the New Orleanians. Signs lamented about the broken Road Home and poor medical conditions. The people talked about how their state had failed them. News reporters asked what they thought the rally would do for the future of their City.

People cheered, laughed and smiled. This wasn't an angry crowd. People walked and hugged all the way to the Capitol steps.

Leaders and residents from St. Tammany, St. Bernard, Jefferson and Orleans’ parishes spoke. The laughter turned serious. Their voices trembled. Their voices carried. And politicians were concerned little about following protocol.

And after standing for an hour in the Louisiana heat, the people went inside. They walked by docents and security guards, lawyers and legislators, all enjoying the comfortable capitol air conditioning.

The Mississippi buses pulled away at 2 p.m. People were hot, but happy, all wondering what the gathering might accomplish.

Best-
Robert

After Dark: St. Louis Cemetery #1

2007-06-16T23:48:00.000-06:00

St. Louis Cemetery #1
New Orleans, La.
10 p.m.,
June 6, 2007

Family and Friends—

The wall was only seven feet high, and I wasn’t going sacrifice-hunting before sunset. The night was just beginning for the New Orleans Police Department, whose lights flashed on the upriver side of the St. Louis #1 cemetery wall.

Fables and news reports say drunken French Quarter tourists have been sacrificed in St. Louis #1 by Voodoo Priests or Priestesses. But, I couldn’t help humming “Thriller” to calm my heart rate. And then I smiled. Wait, I thought, is “Thriller” disrespectful to Voodoo?

I had come in peace to St. Louis cemetery #1, respectful and with no desire to be sacrificed.

People tell me that the easiest way to describe Voodoo is like a drink. Splash some pagan and splash some Catholicism and you’ve got Voodoo. Of course, to those inside the religion, the nuances are what make it special.

After I realized I may have upset someone much more than me, I made the sign of the cross. New Orleans is decidedly Catholic. I know no Voodoo symbolism.

St. Louis #1’s walls block the dead from the street. Only the most extravagant tombs can be seen from street level. Most tombs look like mini-houses, but the ones visible from North Rampart St. are more like mini-palaces.

The dead rest above ground in New Orleans. They’d float away in traditional underground sites.

The cockroaches have colonized on the wall of one mini-palace. They were nowhere else in this massive place. “Had a Voodoo priest cursed this family?” I wondered. I didn’t care to find out.

So I walked down the rows, more cautiously when I turned corners, knowing it doesn’t take an Olympian to hop the wall. I didn’t see anyone. I was alone with thousands of dead New Orleanians--old New Orleanians. The ones with , African, Caribbean, French and Spanish and Native American blood. A French Quarter transplant from Michigan will never be buried in any of the St. Louis cemeteries.

Angels and crosses were the norm. Many tombs are extravagant, a reverence to those who lay inside. And some are rather humble, with fireplace brick chipping in the corners. I climbed on top of one of these and looked at the New Orleans approaching midnight sky. The big house Canal St. hotels look out on the French Quarter and St. Louis #1, which is about one block to lakeside (north) of the Quarter’s boundary.

The sharp white marble tomb next to me read:

Armand le Merciep du Quesnay

Kingston, Jamaique 22 Juin, 1815-Nlle Orleans 13 Oct 1892.

The silence was peaceful.

I think they like it here. I hopped over the wall. A guy gave me a funny look. No sacrifices, tonight.

Best,

Robert

PS: I will never ever go to a cemetery alone after dark again for those who have already or who were planning on scolding me. Sorry.

Meet Carl Davis. A Face of the New Orleans' Mental Health Crisis

2007-06-04T21:53:00.000-06:00

May, 2007
Duncan Plaza, City Hall
New Orleans, La.

Dear Family and Friends,

Carl Davis makes me nervous. Asking a homeless guy if he’s a hustler doesn’t happen everyday. But, I wanted to know.

After all, he might be one of the best hustlers on the streets of New Orleans. He was charming despite terribly sun-cracked and blistered lips.

“Are you a hustler?” I ask.

“You know what a hustler is?” he says. “They’re the guys that ask a few bucks from everybody, line up 30 or 40 dollars and buy crack with it.

Then, they’ll try and bum a cigarette the next day.”

Carl and I are on the steps of Duncan Plaza, the park outside of New Orleans’ City Hall. The things he says are frightening. And the dent in his head is all the evidence I need to know he’s truthful.

He’s been homeless on and off since 1981. The father of six is “ashamed.” “I don’t want them to see me,” he says.

He also hasn’t seen a mental health professional in four years. It’s early morning now, and the voices haven’t started yet, he says.

We talked openly about the mental health struggles he’s had. “I see monsters,” he says. “They try to get me.”

Voices tell him to jump in the Mississippi river. He’s tried twice since KATRINA. Both times, a more loving voice told him not to do it. “I want to go to heaven,” he says.

He tells me that the drugs made him groggy and that New Orleans doesn't have any good psychiatrists. It’s funny, there really aren’t enough here to take a sample of good and bad.

Twenty-six psychiatrists are registered in Orleans parish post-Katrina. There’s probably more on one block in Manhattan.

Psychiatric beds are down more than 80 percent. The mentally ill homeless picked up tend to be taken to jail by the NOPD. It’s out of necessity, not malice. There is nowhere to put them, the police department says.

Some people say the earth is not a cold, dead place. But we do forget people.

Carl Davis is 54. He was a pipe-fitter, has a great smile and better demeanor.

Don’t forget him.

We Americans have forgotten enough people post-Katrina in serious need of help with their mental health.

It’s a crisis. More psychiatrists/psychologists/crisis counselors, etc. are needed here.

Write your Senators and Congressmen.

Best,

Robert

Post-K Video for AmeriCorps Contest

2007-05-30T14:45:00.000-06:00

You can vote for the winner after June 11 at www.americorpscontest.org

Robert

Day 77

2007-05-23T01:18:00.000-06:00

Day 77
May 23, 2007
New Orleans, La.

Dear Family and Friends,

She fascinates me. Seventy-seven days have passed quickly in New Orleans, the City I may be falling for.

My love affair with her will be like any relationship, I’m sure. There will be days when she frustrates me. There will be days when I wonder why I’m here. But for now, our honeymoon is strong.

And maybe soon, she’ll let me get to second base. I want to uncover her secrets. Because the glimpses she’s given me have been nothing short of magical.

I’ve seen musicians make a tired baby dance, but work for dollars in a bucket. Who, now, in 2007, must remind patrons that a dollar doesn’t go as far as it used to.

I’ve swum at sunrise in a hidden French Quarter pool.

I’ve heard ghost stories about the oldest bar in America, Lafitte’s Blacksmith Shop on Bourbon St.

And the red beans and rice? You haven’t eaten red, beans and rice until you’ve come to New Orleans.

I’ve had a woman living in Houston cry to me on the telephone, desperately wanting to come home to her Mamma New Orleans.

I’ve drank a beer and a coffee on the same day in the middle of the same street. The beer just before noon, the coffee just before midnight.

“We do things a little differently down here,” New Orleanians say.

Much like love, New Orleans has broken many hearts in recent years. I’ve seen that human spirit is much stronger than I initially imagined it could be, and this has been nothing short of life-altering.

So please don’t sell New Orleans short without seeing her first. There is enough of her beauty to go around, and I’m ok with that. In fact it’s the only way our relationship will ever work.

She’s too amazing for me to be selfish.

Best,

Robert

The Most Important Person in New Orleans

2007-05-16T08:29:00.000-06:00

The Most Important Person in New Orleans
May 9, 2007
New Orleans, La.

Family and Friends--

Ed Blakely strides into places quickly with never much more than a quick shake and a glance.

Magazines have called him the “Master of Disaster.” Others refer to him as the New Orleans’ recovery czar. And after controversial comments of his were printed in an April edition of the New York Times, some called City Hall and asked that the guy take a hike.

He’s Dr. Edward Blakely to be exact--the most important man in the Big Easy.

When he walks by you quickly, perhaps the 70-year-0ld is envisioning what New Orleans could look like 20 years from now. Or maybe he’s thinking about a grand plan to raise $1.1 billion by June. But he might just be human, searching for the coffee pot or a lavatory.

If he is a mere mortal though, many New Orleanians hope Blakely has a dash of magic hidden somewhere.

What the New York Times called an ace up his sleeves, Dr. Blakely began his mutual courtship tonight with Tulane University, one of New Orleans Universities, which are a huge asset to the City, he says.

Unlike neighborhood meetings where emotions and tempers flare and end in occasional tears, the crowd of about 3o academics seemed unusually calm. In neighborhood meetings, the residents ask for his help.

But tonight, “I need you” he said to Tulane deans and professors. “Especially, law, architecture and environmental programs.”

Blakely says that the City of New Orleans is receiving no money from the state and federal government for his efforts. When he said that, the breath of the room slowed, almost halted.

When asked if the future of New Orleans should be a 2008 Presidential issue, Blakely said. “Absolutely.”

No one running for President in 2008 can afford not to come to New Orleans he said. But, “we won’t let a politician in here without writing a check first.”

Poltico-photo-ops in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast have gone on long enough he says.

Blakely has been at the center of many major American disaster rebuilds. Most notably 9/11.

“Mr. President, we don’t want you here without your money,” he said to George W. Bush in Post-9/11 New York.

The same will go for Post-KATRINA New Orleans and the 2008 winner.

But will Tulane step up in these fragile and infant rebuilding days? Will professors and deans band together with Dr. Blakely or make decisions with only Tulane in mind?

Rumors and water cooler speak at Tulane generally carry the tone that the belatedly appointed Dr. Blakely is recreating the past. President Scott Cowen was chairman of the first rebuilding plan proposed by Mayor Nagin’s “Bring New Orleans Back” commission.

“Are those documents collecting dust?” Cowen probably wonders. When I asked Dr. Cowen if he was coming to the meeting with Dr. Blakely, he politely responded that he’d be out of town. If I remember correctly, he ended the interaction with,

“I’ll call him (Blakely) when I need him.”

Dr. Blakely, influential in the rebuilding after 9/11, the San Francisco World Series Earthquake and the 1991 Oakland fire may have the soothsayer vision of a 2027 version of New Orleans swirling in his central lobes.

Critics say he’s late.

But in the Crescent City, the clocks are always a little slow.

Best,

Robert

If you are a member of a University who would like to participate in the rebuilding of New Orleans email me at rxfogarty@yahoo.com. The Office of Recovery Management would like to see many American higher-education institutions aid the local Universities in the recovery effort.

Photos Courtesy of Rebecca Mann, City of New Orleans.

New Orleans' Inconvenient Truth

2007-05-07T22:42:00.001-06:00

For The Children Literacy Program
May 3, 2007
New Orleans, La.

Family and Friends--

The people in room 213 have what you want in lawmakers.

Passion. Clarity of thought. Action.

It’s too bad they’re in the fifth grade.

At Banneker Elementary, students are penning letters to Louisiana Congressman Bobby Jindal about the daily erosion of the Louisiana wetlands, which serve as a natural protection from hurricanes and tropical storms for New Orleans.

“I think that we need the wetlands because it slows down the hurricanes that are coming our way,” 11-year-old Alvin says. “We don’t want to have the Gulf of Mexico to be right next to us.”

Ten-year-old Thaddeus wants Coastal Erosion and its threat to be a 2008 Presidential issue.

Dear Senator Barack Obama,

“I don’t want the Gulf of Mexico to be in the Ninth Ward because that is where I’m from,” he wrote.

“I was here for the hurricane and I live in the lower ninth ward and I had to swim in 22-feet of water.

I lost my step-little-sister in the flood. My little sister was only four-years-old.

We lost everything. See, this is why we need to save the wetlands.”

The hour before, the AmeriCorps team had a discussion/yelling contest about Coastal Erosion using New Orleans'
Times -Picayune writers Bob Marshall and Mark Schleifstein’s three part series, “LAST CHANCE: The Fight to Save a Disappearing Coast” as a reference.

Marshall and Schleifstein say that wetlands the size of three football fields are lost every day. What was once a 70 mile buffer for New Orleans from the Gulf of Mexico is now 30 miles. By 2040, at current rates, New Orleans will be a coastal city according to experts.

They say we have 10 years to fix the current erosion dilemma before it passes the point of no return.

“We’ll just have to put up a huge floodwall,” AmeriCorps member Jeff Swartz said intentionally mimicking the "laissez le bon temps rouler" attitude often used to describe New Orleanians.

“After reading LAST CHANCE,” another said “I was wondering why we are rebuilding in the low-lying areas...in 10 years will this all be for naught?”

Michael Pizzolatto, our AmeriCorps supervisor at Tulane and life-long Louisianan stopped the conversation. He had the “I have something to say and you all better listen” face.

All over the country pundits and critics of New Orleans say not to rebuild. They say it’s too dangerous. But only 50
percent of New Orleans is below sea level, he said.

“What about Miami?" The entire city is only three feet above sea level at it's highest point with no natural hurricane protection, he said.

When they say not to rebuild New Orleans, pundits conveniently forget or do not know that New Orleans ports are the life-force in American exports and imports.

Do they say, “The largest port tonnage-wise is between New Orleans and Baton Rouge?”

Or, “Twenty-eight percent of the US Energy supply comes from SE Louisiana?”

“No,” he said with one of those “I’ve been frustrated by this for a long time” looks.

The AmeriCorps team talked about the Tennessee Valley Authority that was a part of FDR’s New Deal. How in the 1930s without the luxury of 21^st century technology, but with massive man power and post-World War Era dollars solved major ecological problems including flooding and erosion.

“But we’re in a war,” another AmeriCorpsian said.

To stop Coastal Erosion and block the Gulf of Mexico from moving in as New Orleans’ new next door neighbor, a serious federal commitment is needed.

We’re talking “How much do they want?” numbers.

One-hundred billion dollars would be a good start. If not, we can always build that big wall.

It would be a shame to see New Orleans' youth lose their homes in another storm.

"Can you please give us the money to fix the wetlands?" Alvin asked.

Best,

Robert

To view LAST CHANCE: The Fight to Save a Disappearing Coast, a Three-Part Series in the New Orleans Times-Picayune, click here:

Erosion images by Ted Jackson of the Times-Picayune.

http://www.nola.com/speced/lastchance/t-p/index.ssf?/speced/lastchance/articles/day1.html