Your Home. Hearth. Safe Haven. Your Domain. Your Comfort. Your Center.
Imagine that it was all washed out in a moment and you had to leave all you own behind, rescue your family and flee for your life.
After that, what would you do?
When I was in New Orleans, this was the question that confronted me.
One Option: Don't Come Back. Make A New Life Elsewhere
- We met a woman in the Holy Cross Historic neighborhood. 18,000 people used to live there. 3600 have returned.
- One of our projects was to canvass in our own neighborhood, called Hollygrove, to see who still needed help with rebuilding. The project’s goal is to catalog every house in the neighborhood. Every day we would talk to people who were rebuilding their homes, who could point to house after house on the block with stories of, “He hasn’t come back…She hasn’t rebuilt….Nobody knows what’s happening with that house.” In every block, there are so many people missing. They just haven’t come back. People are living with major holes in their community. They have so much pride in their homes, but they are living next to boarded-up houses, homes with toppled-in roofs, homes with crumbled walls, empty houses filled with mold.
- In the Lower Ninth ward, right near where the 17th St. Levee broke, it is clear why they haven’t come back: On a typical city block, which used to be densely populated, now you might see just one house standing. One house on the entire block. The rest of the block is vacant lots—no rubble, no nothing, just foundations of houses surrounded by grass. This was a neighborhood of modest homes, modest incomes, so these people typically would have poured all their resources into their homes. Without their houses, where are they living? Where have they gone?
Another option, and what we were there for: To Rebuild
At the Holy Cross Project, a green rebuilding project, we saw a banner made by children. Some of the sayings:
"Rebuilding Piece by Peace"
"Rebuild New Orleans Back to Life"
"Smile Now, Cry Later"
One of the children wrote a poem on the banner:
"After Katrina New Orleans was a tragedy
But we don’t let it stay raggedy
We are rebuilding houses and parks
So everyone can come home instead of staying apart.
The goal is to rebuild our city and keep it safe
For the kids that like to play
To make New Orleans a good place to live
All we need is to help and give
Now New Orleans is getting back on track
So I hope that everyone can come back."
These children speak of the powerful pull of home and of community. In Hollygrove, Margalit and I and the others met many people who have rebuilt, and more who are in the process. They gutted out their homes, they re-sided the exterior, and now they are working on the inside, living in trailers. Or, more common, they have worked on the inside and maybe half of it is livable now, but the outside still has mold marks and bears the spray painted X’s left by the rescuers right after Katrina, when they checked every house, looking for bodies. These houses are surrounded by abandoned homes, homes with boarded-up windows and high weeds, houses with the roof or walls partly crumbling in.
My cousins live in New Orleans. One cousin’s house was right near a levee, and his first floor was destroyed. He had to gut it out. He remodeled and rebuilt, right on the spot. (His sister told me that she would not have made that decision. She wouldn't rebuild there. She lives on higher ground.) My impression is that those of means who decided to return—and my cousins are comfortably middle class—for the most part have rebuilt or are well into rebuilding and are putting their lives back together. We spent most of our time working with people of more modest means, and for them, the rebuilding is far from over. They’ve lost most of their assets in their homes, yet they still have to pay their bills, including their mortgages! There is a huge problem in New Orleans of contractor fraud. The government reimbursements for the damage is non-existent in many cases, and when people do get it, it only comes in $15,000 increments, so it is hard to fix up your whole house without assurance of where the money will come from.
So why do they rebuild?
Perhaps because it is all that they had.
Perhaps it is pride – pride of self, pride of place.
They love their city.
Margalit and I saw a placard that was stuck in the ground in front of many toppled-down buildings. It said:
“I am coming home!
"I will rebuild!
"I am New Orleans!”
Perhaps you rebuild because of the powerful pull of your home, your community.
Your home is you.
You have to wonder, what would you do in the situation?
One of our projects was to help paint a house being built by our organization for a much beloved local reverend who lived in our neighborhood. Hollygrove is a working-class neighborhood of small one-story houses set close together on small lots. The Rev, as he is called, had suffered a fire in his home, a modest one-story like the others, not long before Katrina. He remodeled the entire place and then, just months later, Katrina came through and destroyed his home. He’d been busy helping everyone else in the community, but finally it was time to build his home. He got matched up with some architecture students, who designed him the house of his dreams, an experimental 3-story structure with many green features, banks of windows, multiple porches, an open layout, and a very modern feeling. The home has been framed and the core fixtures have been installed. Our job was to paint all the framing. Remember, this is an open-layout home, so all the interior posts and beams will show. When we got there, the instructions were to do an exacting faux-style wash, painting with one hand and wiping it down with the other, to create a very specific look and feel in the home. At first I was surprised. “What?! Did I come all this way to build a dream home? Hey, if I have time to do faux paint jobs…what about my house?!” Then I heard the Rev’s story, and then I got to understanding what it means to have your house washed away.
So there was my lesson about the power of home and the power of rebuilding: That some people survive by looking to the future and believing that there are always new possibilities. I listened very carefully to those who could see the opportunity not just to re-build, but to build better, even as they mourned the tragedy—those with something to look forward to, those who believe that they can see a better future. The Rev isn’t trying to erect a shed to live in temporarily, for an emergency. He is trying to create a home that he can thrive in for decades to come…for the rest of his life. The power of home is that it is yours, that it expresses who you are today, and that it houses your dreams. I ended up feeling privileged to have the opportunity to enter into this man’s life over my one week in New Orleans and, through my labor, to help make the rest of his life possible.
I think it was he who gave me the gift.
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