I pitied the people of New Orleans.
I was 16 when I stepped off the plane at Louis Armstrong
airport, my suitcase filled with work clothes, respiratory masks, heavy-duty
boots, and thick gloves. We were there to try to make a difference and help the
city recover ten months after Hurricane Katrina made landfall. I expected a
ticker-tape parade. Instead, we were greeted by a white 16-passenger van that
transported us to the church where we would be sleeping in a warehouse full of
cots for the week. There were four showers for over a hundred women to share,
and there was no air conditioning despite the late-June humidity.
I spent the week sweating in houses that smelled of mildew
and had warped walls and floors. The residents had packed up and fled so
quickly in late August that there were still magazines, purses, photographs, and children’s
toys strewn about the floors. When the floodwaters from the breached levees
receded, they left homes marked with brown water lines that nearly reached the
ceiling. In one house, the bathtub was filled with murky brown, congealed goo,
which had once been floodwater that never drained. Garbage trucks roamed the
streets picking up old refrigerators, which had to be duct-taped shut because
the contents inside were so vile. You could smell the trucks before you saw or
heard them coming.
I pitied the men, women, and children who had lived in these
homes. Some were living out of stark white FEMA trailers in front of their
property. Some were still in evacuee shelters in Texas, having lived on cots
and shared a few showers 40 times longer than I had. I wondered if they
complained about their back pain and the lack of sleep they got in the mornings
the way I did.
One day, I met a woman who lived down the street from a
house we were working on. She was a Southern Belle 30 years later, the type of
woman who I could imagine singing in the church choir and echoing the pastor’s
words with, “Praise Jesus!” She was loud, friendly, and proud of her New
Orleans heritage. She stood outside her FEMA trailer in a housedress with a
scarf tied around her head and told us about her experience—being evacuated
from her home, then returning to complete and total devastation. The whole
time, she reminded us that it could have been so much worse.
She had survived. She had a roof over her head, even if it
was a tin roof temporarily provided by the government. She was back in her
hometown, helping it recover—thrive, even—after destruction most of us couldn’t
imagine living through. She was helping to rebuild a city that was stronger and
better than before, and she was still proud to live there.
That’s when it hit me—I pitied the residents of New Orleans,
but they didn’t pity themselves.
