In your kitchen, if you drop and break a glass by accident, how long would you leave the pieces on the floor before picking them up? One minute? A few hours or days? Try two-and-a-half years, and counting.
In thinking about going with Hillel Foundation to New Orleans for spring break, I knew we’d be doing community service in the continuing effort to clean up the damage inflicted by Hurricane Katrina in August 2005. I thought we might get to meet some homeowners.
I considered that we would be staying at a volunteer camp with other campuses, and I might meet some new college students like myself. I even hoped that I would get a tan.
Eight students from the Hillel Foundation University of Wisconsin headed south over spring break, unsure of what was to come.
While many of our friends were lying on a beach somewhere close to the equator, we were living in hastily built shelters, sleeping on wood planks with thin mattresses, and eating iceberg lettuce and rice each day.
A post-disaster bus tour; a walk through the French Quarter; a visit to the Tulane campus; an afternoon on the beach — we truly experienced so many aspects of New Orleans.
However, it wasn’t until I had spent some time in the city and working on site that we attended a lecture with Times-Picayune managing news editor Peter Kovacs. He had lived through the storm and helped me to understand the meaning of the X’s we had seen on nearly every home in the city.
Under a bridge
These X’s were a spray-painted mark that meant the house had been checked for survivors — in many cases weeks after Katrina had passed. In the top of the X sat the date that a group had come to inspect the house.
On the left side of the X was the name of the group; often in print was “TFW,” or “Task Force Washington” — a group from the federal government that had inspected many of the neighborhoods.
On the right side of the X was listed the hazards found within the home to explain why others should or should not re-enter. Below the X was a number indicating the number of bodies found in the house.
When driving the daily hour-long commute from our campsite in Kiln, Miss., to the Ninth Ward in New Orleans, rather than commenting on the cute shops starting to re-open, or the neon colors on newly painted houses, we would sit in silence, reading the X’s as we drove by, praying to see zeros. Most of the time we did. But each time we would see a one, or a three, or a 14, and often with a notation below it “ 3 dogs,” we would become silent.
I saw a situation that shocked me as an American when our group leader inadvertently got off at the wrong exit from the interstate. On the back roads we were forced to take, we saw hundreds of American citizens living in tents underneath the interstate bridge.
We later learned that many of these people are working poor or mentally ill who have little or no access to medication or governmental services and are unemployable. Bus stops have been re-routed to pick up children from these “homes” underneath the interstate, so that children can go to school.
One of our last nights in Kiln, affectionately referred to by its residents as “the Kill,” a group of Madison students decided to walk along the highway to a general store. Feeling accomplished from our work the past week, we talked about various ways to stay in touch once we returned to school.
Suddenly, a run-down black Suburban pulled up to us in the parking lot, and a woman in her early-50s poked her head out of the front window. She asked where we were from, and almost before we could answer, three blond haired girls in the back seat of her truck interrupted, squealing at the excitement of meeting us.
With tears in her eyes, the woman said, “I don’t know if ya’ll have heard this or not, but ya’ll don’t know how much ya’ll mean to us down here. … I personally know that I lost my home, my business, and 13 family members in the hurricane, and I cannot thank ya’ll enough for coming down here to help us out.”
We were speechless. We had never met this woman, had not come down her to help her or her specific community, but here she was with such an overwhelming love for us. One of the girls in the back seat poked her head out and screamed, “My name is Madison!” as we all laughed about how we go to Madison.
I did not know the extent of the damage that still remained in New Orleans. I did not realize that so many cities and states in the surrounding area were deeply affected by the storm.
I had no clue how much volunteers continue to be appreciated there. I did not know that so many people had left and might never come back.
Two-and-a-half years later, the glass that was New Orleans remains shattered and nearly everyone in this country has forgotten that it ever broke.
Having been put off so long, the glass has been further broken and is now even more difficult to remove. The job is getting too big for one person; we have to call for help.
When is someone going to take the initiative and finally clean up these damned pieces of glass? When is help going to come?
Roz Koff is a freshmen from Scarsdale, New York, majoring in journalism/mass communications and women’s studies.
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